"Build Feminist Futures Symposium" Speakers
The Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies program is proud to announce the following speakers for the Build Feminist Futures Symposium.
Dr. Jocelyn Olcott - Keynote Speaker
Thursday, March 13th, 4:00pm, Kirkhof Center 2263
Professor of History; International Comparative Studies; and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University
Her second book, International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History considers the history and legacies of the United Nation’s first world conference on women in 1975 in Mexico City (Oxford University Press, 2017). Her current project, a biography of the activist and folksinger Concha Michel, a one-time Communist who became an icon of maternalist feminism and a vocal advocate for recognizing the economic importance of subsistence labors, is under contract with Duke University Press. She has also embarked on an international, interdisciplinary project centered on rethinking the value of care labors broadly speaking, including not only dependent and household care but also, for example, environmental, community, cultural, and sexual care.
Dr. Jallicia Jolly
"Black Feminist Futures: Care, Community, and Transnational Reproductive Justice"
9:00am, Friday, March 14, Kirkhof Center 2266
Dr. Jallicia Jolly is a writer, poet, and reproductive justice organizer who is an Assistant Professor in American Studies and Black Studies at Amherst College.
A 2025 National Academy of Sciences U.S. Kavli Fellow, she merges community-based research on Black women's health, grassroots activism, and political leadership with reproductive justice organizing and practice in the United States and the Caribbean. Dr. Jolly is the founder and director of the Black Feminist Reproductive Justice, Equity, and HIV/AIDS Activism (BREHA) Collective — a new interdisciplinary, medical humanities lab that bridges research, advocacy, student collaborations, and high-impact learning experiences on the health and movement-building of Afro-diasporic girls, women, and gender diverse people. A 2022-2023 Ford Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Jolly’s first book manuscript, Ill Erotics: Black Caribbean Women and Self-Making in the Time of HIV/AIDS, is an ethnography of the reproductive justice organizing of young Black Jamaican women living and loving with HIV that chronicles their everyday confrontations with illness, reproductive violence, and inequality in neocolonial Jamaica. A public scholar invested in research-informed political action, she leads with justice and joy as her core intention while centering new legacies of equity and community care beyond inequality and violence.
Dr. Carmen Diana Deere
"1975 and the Emergence of WID and GAD: Perspectives of a Latinamericanist"
9:00am, Friday March 14, Kirkhof Center 2270
Carmen Diana Deere is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Latin American Studies and Food & Resource Economics at the University of Florida and Distinguished Professor at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), in Quito, Ecuador.
She earned a B.A. in International Affairs at the University of Colorado, Boulder, an M.A. in International Development at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, and a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. A feminist economist, her research has focused on gender in Latin American agricultural development and on issues related to women’s property rights and wealthy inequality. Her latest book is the edited volume ¿Casa Propia? La autonomía económica de las mujeres en Ecuador (A Home of One’s Own? Women’s Economic Autonomy in Ecuador) (FLACSO, 2021).
Dr. Heather Switzer
“Girls in Development: Discovering Girls, Producing Girl Effects”
10:00am, Friday March 14, Kirkhof Center 2270
Dr. Heather Switzer is an Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the School for Social Transformation at Arizona State University.
Professor Switzer's interdisciplinary research combines several fields including critical girlhood studies, critical development and globalization studies (emphasis: East Africa), transnational feminist theory, feminist disability studies, feminist methodologies, and feminist methods (emphasis: ethnography, qualitative interviewing, and visual and textual analysis). Her primary research sites are in Maasai communities of southern Kenya (the intersections of girlhood and development) and U.S. university campuses (the intersections of young womanhood and disability/chronic illness). Her books includes When the Light is Fire: Maasai Schoolgirls in Contemporary Kenya (2018) and an edited collection, Girls in Global Development: Figurations of Gendered Power (2023).
Dr. Durba Mitra
"Third World Feminism and the Paradoxes of the UN Year and Decade for Women"
11:00am, Friday, March 14, Kirkhof Center 2270
Dr. Durba Mitra is Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University.
Mitra’s scholarship brings together feminist studies, sexuality studies, and global intellectual history. Mitra's book, The Future that Was: Third World Feminism and the Crisis of Authoritarianism is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in 2026. The Future That Was analyzes the history of Third World feminist thought and South-South research networks.
As part of her research for The Future That Was, Mitra was the curator of a multimedia exhibit, Solidarity! Transnational Feminisms Then and Now at the Poorvu Gallery at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Mitra’s first book, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020), demonstrates how ideas of deviant female sexuality became foundational to modern social thought.
Anna Gollub
"Becoming UN Women"
12:00pm, March 14, Mary Idema Pew Library Multipurpose Room
Ms. Anna Gollub is the Policy Analyst of Economic Institutions within the Economic Empowerment section of UN Women.
For nine years her focus has been on decent work, entrepreneurship, and gender-responsive procurement. Anna holds a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs and a B.A. in Women’s Studies and International Relations from Tufts University.
Kavita Ramdas
"Feminism Remains Foreign: Ideals vs Practice for Gender Justice"
1:15pm, March 14, Mary Idema Pew Library Multipurpose Room
Kavita Ramdas, Senior Strategic Advisor International Planned Parenthood
Kavita Ramdas is a globally recognized advocate for gender equity and justice. She is an inspirational speaker and thought commentator on the challenges facing philanthropy and civil society as they seek to advance equitable and sustainable development and gender and racial equity. She provides high level consulting advice and guidance on initiatives to defend democracy and protect human rights both within the US and across the globe. From 2023 to 2024 she was the Activist in Residence at the Global Fund for Women. In 2024 she was a Richard von Weisäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy, of the Bosch Foundation in Berlin, Germany. During her tenure as Director of the Women’s Rights Program at the Open Society Foundations (OSF), the foundation made its largest ever investment in gender justice with a $100 million commitment in support of the Generation Equality Forum in July 2021.