News from SUNY Cortland

For more information contact: Jean Palmer, 607-753-2232

Philosopher Ann Ferguson to Discuss Feminist Solidarity on Sept. 11 at SUNY Cortland

CORTLAND, NY (09/05/2008; 1327)(readMedia)-- Ann Ferguson, a feminist philosopher, will speak about a new feminist framework for global justice, on Thursday, Sept. 11, at SUNY Cortland.

Ferguson, an emerita professor of women's studies and philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, will present "Global Gender Solidarity and Feminist Paradigms of Justice" at 4:30 p.m. in Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge.

Presented by the College's Center for Gender and Intercultural Studies Advisory Board, the talk is free and open to the public.

She will concentrate her talk on the particular case of the abortion rights movement in the United States and how some segments of it have moved to a reproductive justice coalition.

Ferguson's lecture will outline the different values and assumptions in the three models she will discuss. She will defend the solidarity paradigm as one that is becoming useful in existing political social movements for justice that include women and demands for gender justice.

"This solidarity paradigm is now able to be applied to some of the radical networks and practices of the anti-globalization economic and political networks coming into existence, such as worker-owned cooperatives, new types of labor unions, fair trade commitments, squatter and other land reform movements," Ferguson writes. "Such movements are creating the material conditions in which North-South women's coalition movements can tackle such issues as reproductive rights, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual rights, environmental injustices and the feminization of poverty."

Ferguson has written two books and numerous articles on feminist theory, ethics and politics. Her books include Sexual Democracy: Women, Oppression and Revolution (1991) and Blood at the Root: Motherhood, Sexuality and Male Dominance (1989). In 1998, she co-edited a book on feminist ethics called Daring to Be Good: Feminist Essays in Ethico-Politics.

Ferguson is an activist working against war and for gender, race and class justice.

For more information, contact Mechthild Nagel, professor of philosophy, at (607) 753-2013 or Caroline Kaltefleiter, coordinator of the Women's Studies Program, at (607) 753-4203 or caroline.kaltefleiter@cortland.edu.

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