News

In this second year of the Alice Paul Center’s “Story Corps” project, we are reimagining open expression, inclusion and argument. In today’s volatile climate, free speech and safe space are often imagined as mutually exclusive—as rigid and reactive binaries. What happens to our world and our willingness to engage it if we work from the premise that public engagement is by definition neither truly free nor truly safe?

A new report produced by Asset Funders Network (ANF), in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice and Closing the Women's Wealth Gap (CWWG), reveals that the economic fragility of single women 45-65 years of age is growing due to systemic barriers which limit their opportunities to build and preserve their wealth. Lead by Amy Castro Baker (APC Executive Board Member and Assistant Professor, SP2), the report explores how the gender wealth gap impacts women, particularly low-income women and women of color, throughout the

Through an APC Working Group Grant, awarded this year, and co-sponsored by the Department of English, the School of Social Policy & Practice, and the Graduate School of Education, six Penn graduate students are hoping to raise the bar for trans literacy—on campus and beyond. The Trans Literacy organizes workshops that facilitate discussions around trans literacy, loosely defined as the promotion of language and practices that affirm the rights of trans and gender non-conforming people, and that enable all people to practice gender-inclusivity in daily life.

Omnia's new series, OMNIA 101, asks to faculty members about how they use critical tools in their research and classrooms, shedding light on what they find useful, compelling, or just plain interesting about the work that they do. In this feature article, English Professors and APC Core Faculty David L. Eng and Melissa Sanchez talk about how they apply queer theory to the study of literature and culture. 
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This week’s midterm elections were record-breaking and historic for female candidates, with at least 100 women elected to the House of Representatives and a wave of victories for women across the country. South Dakota and Maine elected their first female governors, and Tennessee elected its first female Senator. Four women — Madeleine Dean, Mary Gay Scanlon, Chrissy Houlahan, and Susan Wild —were elected to the House in Pennsylvania, a state that previously had an all-male Congressional delegation.

Anne Teitelman, Nursing & APC/GSWS Core Faculty, believes the key to helping women stay healthy is to meet them where they are, to bring the personal, health-related care into their daily lives, not sequester it to a once- or twice-a-year visit to a nurse practitioner, doctor, or another care provider. So, she built two apps.

The APC & GSWS Statement Opposing Federal Attacks on Trans Communities is featured in a Daily Pennsylvanian article outlining the "swift backlash across the nation and at Penn" to the Trump administration's proposal to "narrow the term "gender" to be defined according to biological sex — a move that would dramatically curtail recognition of transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals under federal law."  Erin Cross, the director of Penn's LGBT Center, Brennan Burns of Penn Non-Cis and Julia Pan of the Lambda Alliance are also featured.&n

Statement from the Alice Paul Center and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program, University of Pennsylvania
For immediate release: October 26, 2018
Dear Members of the University of Pennsylvania Community:
On October 21, 2018, The New York Times published an article that describes a leaked memo from the Trump Administration that aims to define “gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth.”

Deborah Thomas embeds herself in communities stricken by violence to chronicle the humanity revealed during the aftermath.
"The most difficult interviews were the children. It was 2012, and the filming of Deborah Thomas’ documentary, Four Days in May, was underway in Tivoli Gardens, the site of one of the most violent events in modern Jamaican history.