Plenary Speaker Patricia
Leavy, Ph.D. “Telling
Gender, Family and Relationship Stories through Arts-Based Research” A
best-selling author, women’s studies expert, and an internationally
recognized leader in arts-based and qualitative research, Leavy is a strong
proponent of arts-based research as a means of making research publicly
accessible. Tenured
Associate Professor of Sociology at Stonehill College from 2002-2012 and
founding director of its Gender Studies Program, she received a 2014 Special
Achievement Award from the American Creativity Association and has appeared
on national news, radio and online media. She has regular blogs in The Huffington Post, The Creativity Post and We Are the Real Deal. http://www.patricialeavy.com/ | Plenary Speaker Marjorie
Jolles, Ph.D. Associate
Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Roosevelt University, Jolles trained
as a philosopher and uses Continental philosophy to explore the cultural life
of women and feminism. Her past research has focused on embodiment,
narrative, theories of style, and the culture of self-help, and appears in Hypatia; Feminist Formations; Critical Matrix; Feminist Teacher; The Oprah
Phenomenon (eds. Watson and Harris, 2007); Gender, Sex, and Politics (ed. Tarrant, 2015); and in her edited
collection Fashion Talks: Undressing
the Power of Style (SUNY, 2012). In
2013, Marjorie was awarded a major grant from the National Endowment for the
Humanities to develop new curriculum on the family. The resulting course, “What is a Family?” provides a
history of the concept of family as theorized by canonical figures in the
Western humanities alongside contemporary feminist and critical race
theorists. Marjorie’s current research project focuses on maternal and
abortion rhetorics in the US, with special emphasis on recent trends in
abortion storytelling, prompted by a growing cultural mandate that pro-choice
politics attend to abortion’s affective and ethical dimensions. http://marjoriejolles.org/ |