Join us for a lively discussion with Professor Lisa Armstrong, Professor & Director, Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. We'll be talking about intersectionality - what it is, what it means, and how it's used across cultures to affect political change, particularly focusing on social progress.

Elisabeth Armstrong teaches courses on gender and movements for social, economic and environmental change, emancipatory cultural studies, and feminist archives. Many of her courses are community-based research courses linked to basic needs community movements around land, food and self-determination in Springfield, MA. She received her BA from Pomona College, her M.A. and PhD in Modern Culture & Media Studies from Brown University.

Her second book, Gender and Neoliberalism: The All India Democratic Women’s Association and Globalization Politics (Routledge 2014), describes the changing landscape of women’s politics for equality and liberation during the rise of neoliberalism in India between 1991-2006. Based on long-term ethnographic research in two agriculturally rich states in the south and north: Tamil Nadu and Haryana, this book charts the rise of an extraordinary socialist women’s organization: the All India Democratic Women’s Association. Armstrong’s first book, The Retreat from Organization: U.S. Feminism Reconceptualized (SUNY Press 2002), re-examines ideologies of politics and political subjectivity in US feminism from the early 1960s to the 1990s.

Her 2016 article in Signs describes solidarity methods developed in the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) and the anti-imperialist pan-Asian women’s movement from 1942 until the mid 1960s. An ongoing research project explores the daily lives of feminist activists in India called Organizing Nephews and Uncles. Armstrong is an editorial board member of Kohl: Journal for Feminist Research on Gender and the Body in the MENA Region and Executive Board member of Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism.