Recent csw_rw items

Protecting Maternal and Perinatal Healing Spaces: Proposing and Analyzing Global Support Methods that Increase the Wellbeing and Healing of Black Women and Birthing People

Mon, 4 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The World Health Organization has made Black communities the face of the maternal death narrative without consideration for their various cultural, ethnic, racial, and ancestral histories. There is not a one-size-fits-all support method that encompasses the various cultural, ethnic, racial, and ancestral histories of Black communities. So why do international organizations continue to write global guidance that is not contextualized to specific communities? Critiquing the 1987 Safe Motherhood Initiative and global guidance by the World Health Organization, global maternal health initiatives focus on the maternal death narrative rather than healing. Maternal and perinatal healing spaces are safe spaces where women and birthing people feel supported at all stages of their pregnancy; safe spaces that allow for healing from past birth trauma, ancestral healing, and healing from the global erasure of Black life, birth, and peace.

Birthing support people, like doulas, use holistic...

Maximizing Time, Maximizing Punishment: The Lived Experience of Long-Term Sentences in California Women’s Prisons

Mon, 4 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“Maximizing Time, Maximizing Punishment: The Lived Experience of Long-Term Sentences in California Women’s Prisons” is based on the inaugural study of the University of California Sentencing Project (UCSP). In partnership with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), the UCSP grew out of a demand by people incarcerated at the California Institution for Women (CIW) for research that examines the under-studied conditions and lived ramifications of long-term sentences. In December of 2019, the UCSP launched its first research effort with twenty-two collaborators who had served or faced a long-term sentence in California’s prisons designated for women.

Making Invisible Histories Visible: A Resource Guide to the Collections of the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives

Tue, 23 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This resource guide to the collections of the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives is contains short essays and provides information on all the collections that were processed for the “Making Invisible Histories Visible: Preserving the Legacy of Lesbian Feminist Activism and Writing in Los Angeles” project, which was a three-year project to arrange, describe, digitize, and make physically and electronically accessible two major clusters of Mazer collections related to West Coast lesbian/feminist activism and writing since the 1930s.

Making Invisible Histories Visible: A Resource Guide to the Collections of the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives

Tue, 24 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Edited by Kathleen A. McHugh, Brenda Johnson-Grau,and Ben Raphael Sher, it contains short essays by some of the participants in the project and provides information on all the collections that were processed. Funded in part by an NEH grant and completed through partnership between the Mazer Archives, CSW, and the UCLA Library, “Making Invisible Histories Visible: Preserving the Legacy of Lesbian Feminist Activism and Writing in Los Angeles” is a three-year project to arrange, describe, digitize, and make physically and electronically accessible two major clusters of Mazer collections related to West Coast lesbian/feminist activism and writing since the 1930s. As the project is being completed, we have published this volume to share an overview of the project and materials with researchers, archivists, and the community.

Implications of Commerce and Urbanization for the Learning Environments of Everyday Life: A Zinacantec Maya Family Across Time and Space

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In recent decades, ecocultural environments of the Maya in Chiapas, Mexico have undergone continuous change from more subsistence-based to more commerce-based and from more rural to more urban. Comparing ethnographic observations of one family over a ten-year period and across rural and urban environments, we used activity-setting analysis to investigate changes on the micro level that would reflect these shifts in the macro-environment. The development of commerce between 1997 and 2007 led to increased reliance on technology, increases in individuation and individual choice, specialization for economic tasks, and, for women, more formal education. Other changes in this same period of time were greatly intensified by urban dwelling: contact with strangers and people of different ethnicities, women's economic achievement, and greater freedom for young women to have unchaperoned contact with young men.

Center for the Study of Women 25th Anniversary Video

Wed, 2 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

As part of the CSW 25th anniversary activities, we have created a short movie about the history and current activities of the center.

Countering Ageist Ideology

Mon, 1 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Jennifer Abod’s new award-winning film, Look Us in the Eye: The Old Women’s Project, is a groundbreaking work in women’s studies, a video that links ageism and sexism. It is a topic that is rarely studied and even less likely to be filmed. Abod expertly captures the zest of three old women (they specifically want to be called that) who started the Old Women’s Project in San Diego in 2000, an organization created for old women activists. The film focuses on interviews with the three founders, Cynthia Rich, Janice Keefaber, and Mannie Garza and shows footage of their demonstrations against war, nuclear proliferation, low-income housing, and many other issues of social justice. The Old Women’s Project claims that old women are part of every social justice issue: child care, homelessness, prison reform, violence against women, and war. Too frequently old people are assumed to care only about age-related issues like social security and Medicare. The women’s very exuberance and activism,...