Title: Gender-Based Violence Consortium Visualizing Change, Resisting Violence Symposium Opening Remarks
Presenter: Annie Isabel Fukushima, PhD, Division of Ethnic Studies with the School for Cultural & Social Transformation, University of Utah
Date: 4/16/21
Brief Description: An introduction to the Visualizing Change, Resisting Violence GBVC symposium.
Copyright: copyright Annie Isabel Fukushima ©2021
Transcript
Annie Fukushima: So, I just want to welcome you all to, again this Gender-Based Violence Consortium’s event: Visualizing Change, Resisting Violence. My name is Dr. Annie Isabel Fukushima and I’m an assistant professor in the Ethnic Studies Division. I want to draw your attention to two people that can support you during this event. You can always—many of you are familiar with the chat function, but, if you’re not, you can always directly chat myself and—hey, Diane, do you want to just introduce yourself to folks and say hello really quick?
Diane: Sure, thanks Dr. Fukushima. Hi everybody, my name is Diane. I use she/her pronouns and I am the graduate assistant with the Gender-Based Violence Consortium and I will be helping with technical support. So, feel free to message me whenever it is you need support.
Annie Fukushima: And Diane will be moderating the last panel today, so she’ll also be a part of our programming, but throughout the day, until that moment, she will be able to support you. So, feel free to chat us if you have any questions, technical—you know—issues or what have you. And we’re happy to support you.
Alright, we are the University of Utah and the University of Utah acknowledges that this land, which is named for the Ute tribe, is a traditional ancestral homeland of the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Ute tribes. The University of Utah recognizes and respects the enduring relationship that exists between many Indigenous peoples and their traditional homelands. We respect the sovereign relationship between tribes, states, and the federal government and we affirm the University of Utah’s commitment to a partnership with Native Nations and Urban Indian communities through research, education, and community outreach activities.
And so we also want to remind ourselves that many of us are fed, sustained, on Indigenous or Native American lands, and so we want to acknowledge that. So important, to recognize the land that feeds us and allows us to be here at such an important event.
And so, you’re here joining us for the symposium, which is “Visualizing Change, Resisting Violence.” This is a two-day symposium. For today’s events, you will have an opportunity to join a range of programming. Feel free to come in and out as you see fit for your realities. We recognize that everybody’s capacities and abilities to show up is impacted by the world that we are living in. We are living in a world that’s very complex—complicated by global pandemic, ongoing racisms that impact our communities, heterosexism, sexism, and classism, and the many types of oppression that impact many of our lives. And so we recognize that many folks are showing up here today as the best as they can be and so, we appreciate all of you for your presence, for your participation, and we so appreciate our speakers for taking the time out of their busy day to join us.
So, today’s programming is quite dynamic. We will hear about Visions of Social Change starting at 10 AM. I will introduce those speakers right before that starts as well as we will have another panel on Documenting Violence Knowledge from the Margins. We will then have our third session at 2 PM (Leading Social Change to End Violence) and then the final panel will commence at 3:35 PM, which will focus on healing communities.
We want to acknowledge our sponsors. This event has been made possible by a range of folks. In particular, we are so appreciative of the Women of Color Academics Collective and especially so, so, so appreciative of the Women’s Resource Center at the University of Utah, who has been providing us support for our many events leading up to this that could make our events possible. And we’ll be here as well throughout the day as well as there’s other resources that we’ll share in a bit. We’re also appreciative of the support of Utah Presents.
We’ve had many promotional sponsors and we’re so grateful for folks sharing with our communities about the Gender-Based Violence Consortium events: The School for Cultural and Social Transformation, the Women in Health Medicine and Science, the S.J. Quinney College of Law, the Violence Prevention Center, the McCluskey Center for Violence Prevention, the Utah Women and Leadership Project, as well as a community organization such as Alight, The Healing Center for Complex Trauma, and the Sojourner Group. And so, we appreciate all these promotional sponsors as well as all of you for sharing the events with your local communities.
The GBVC’s commitments are to research innovation collaboration and awareness at the U. We have a vision to increase public recognition of and deepen public knowledge about violence through research innovation, collaboration the creation of research communities, and enhanced educational efforts. The Gender-Based Violence Consortium comprises of multiple individuals who are part of our founding as well as our leadership and so these folks listed here are our folks who are comprised of our executive board. They include myself as well as Doctors Sonia Salari from CSBS Family and Consumer Studies; Dr. Yoshimi Anzai from the School of Medicine; Dr. Leslie Halpern from School of Dentistry; Dr. Antoinette Laskey from the School of Medicine; Dr. Kathleen Francek-Roa from School of Medicine; Dr. Richard Medina from CSBS Geography; Dr. Heather Melton also from CSBS but in Sociology; Dr. Caren Frost from the College of Social Work; and Dr. Jessie Richards from the School of Business.
We also have students who have been a part of our leadership as well as our efforts, our student leaderships, who are also on the executive board includ[ing] PhD student Yifat Levenstein and Master’s student Diane Le Strain and we’ve been supported by undergraduate researchers who have been participating in our research efforts including: Mikaila Barker, Veronica Lukasinski, Sohyun Park, and Taylor Aiko Smith.
Today, I’d like to announce our faculty affiliates. We are so honored to have colleagues joining in our leadership and so, here we’re going to show you (when the screen populates) our colleagues who have joined our faculty affiliates. We had interests from colleagues outside of the University of Utah and in our initial first year, we will start with the University of Utah faculty and, eventually, our goal is to expand to allow other faculty to affiliate from other institutions, but for now it is University of Utah faculty. We had wonderful community members who expressed interest as well and so, we so appreciate those folks, but I do want to introduce our faculty affiliates which include: Dr. Yoshimi Anzai from Medicine and Radiology.
You can check out their bios here and so, we will plop into the chat the here—I’m going to plop in two things into the chat. The first one is going to be the Prezi link for this. I will share in just a second. You will be able to follow along at your own leisure and you can even see what’s ahead. So, this is the Prezi that I’m using for today and then the link to our faculty affiliate, so you can, you know, peruse their different bios and learn more about the researchers that we have here at the University of Utah.
And so we have Dr. Shima Baradaran Baughman, who is Associate Dean of Research and Faculty Development in the College of Law. We also have professor Paul Cassell, who is the Ronald Boyce Presidential Professor of Criminal Law and University Distinguished Professor of Law in the College of Law. Also in our faculty affiliates is Dr. Lisa Diamond, who is a professor of Gender Studies and a professor of Psychology. Also, Dr. Leslie P Francis who is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and the Alfred C. Emory Endowed Professor of the College of Law. Dr. Kathleen Francek-Roa, who is with the School of Medicine Pediatrics; Dr. Caren Frost, who is the Interim Associate Director of the MSW Program and College of Social Work faculty. We also have Johanna Greenberg, who is an Assistant Professor in the Family and Preventative Medicine [Department]; Professor Amos Guiorda, who is a Professor of Law at the University of Utah; Dr. Leslie Halpern, who is a Professor of Dentistry and an adjunct Assistant Professor in Surgery; Dr. Antoinette Laskey who is a professor in the School of Medicine Pediatrics; Dr. Chris Linder, who is an Associate Professor of Education, Educational Leadership and Policy and also runs the McCluskey Center for Violence Prevention. Dr. Richard Medina, associate Professor of Geography; Dr. Heather Melton, Associate Professor of Sociology; Dr. Jessie Richards, who is with the management department. We also have included Sonia Salari with Family and Consumer studies (a professor) and dr Lien Fan Shen, who’s with Film and Media Arts as an Associate Professor.
So, those are our first introduced faculty affiliates. We are super excited to introduce our colleagues into our community of the Gender-Based Violence Consortium faculty affiliates and we hope to in the near future welcome a wider network of scholars who are doing such important work on gender-based violence in Utah as well as work that impacts communities across the United States and globally.
The philosophy of the Gender-Based Violence Consortium is understood, where we understand gender-based violence as a violence that results in physical sexual or psychological harm or suffering based on a person’s gender, where coercion or arbitrary deprivations of freedom occurs in public or private life. Gender is complex and a multi-level cultural construct structured by intersecting identities. Gender-based violence occurs in Utah from the campus to the broader community, taking the form of incidents and patterns of violence that include intimate or ex-partner violence, sexual assault, dating violence, hate crimes, stalking, abuse, and human trafficking. The Gender-Based Violence Consortium engages communities to improve health and quality of life through research, knowledge creation, and information sharing.
Our commitments are also to recognize GBV, or gender-based violence, as racialized, classed, and impacted by national origins. For this month, we want to acknowledge that April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month and that our event intentionally participates in these kinds of programmings. We wanted to make sure that we could include a symposium that would raise visibility around sexual assault. There are historical legacies regarding sexual violence in the United States and there are efforts that have been resisting it and addressing it at different localities. What we know when we visit the NSVRC website is that we learn that the first rape crisis center was founded in San Francisco in 1971 and the first that [the] first Take Back the Night, which is a march addressing sexual violence in our communities, was held in the same city in 1978 and while San Francisco has had a ton of history, we too here in Utah have been participating in a range of activities that address the multiple violences in our lives.
The issues and work to address—I’m sorry—the work to address gender-based violence has also been transnational and folks that you will hear from today include folks who have been doing that transnational work, whether the transnational work is Indigenous communities working with organizations and people that are from the U.S. as well as those who are crossing international boundaries from other countries. And so, we hope that you’ll be—you’ll participate in a range of programming that includes those range of perspectives. We also recognize that the arts and the community of performances have been so central to making visible sexual violence in our communities. In particular, here, I’m thinking with Emma who did this performance called “Carry This Weight,” in which she was making visible on her campus the issue of sexual violence. And so, we know the arts have been integral to making visible different ways that we might talk about issues of violence which is why on our first night of our symposium we started with the Utah Women’s Narratives recognizing that the arts are so central to raising making visible issues of violence.
We have experienced, in our political moment, the complexities when people um speak visibly about their experiences from Anita Hill to Christine Blasey Ford the U.S. has had many public discursive discussions around sexual violence and addressing when violence happens in the workplace. And you know, these conversations in the political sphere have implications for our different localities, but they also impact how we understand when we have conversations around what it means to document violence and to actually turn to state structures or to formal structures to make visible our own experiences.
And so it’s really important to think about our events today as making visible the conversations of what what it means to turn to the state, to actually talk about violence and so we hope that this—today, we hope that you all will join us for the multiple panels that will be inspiring, that will be food for thought, that will help to deepen our own knowledge base around visions of social change, documenting violence, leading social change to end sexual violence, and healing our communities.
