April 03, 2008
New York, N.Y. -
St. John’s University and the National Association for Women in
Catholic Higher Education (NAWCHE) will co-sponsor the Making
Connections IX Conference on June 6-7 in New York City. The
conference will take place at St. John’s University’s Manhattan
campus, located at 101 Murray Street and features guest speakers
Dolores C. Huerta and Aishah Shahidah Simmons.
The theme of this year’s conference – the ninth in a series held
biennially by NAWCHE at a Catholic college or university, is
Crossing New Horizons: Envisioning Women’s Studies and Women’s
Issues in a Global Context. The Making Connections IX
Conference will feature poster sessions for students, paper
sessions for individuals to present their research, panel sessions,
roundtable discussions and workshops over two days.
Dolores C. Huerta, Co-Founder and Secretary-Treasurer of the
United Farm Workers of America, is the scheduled keynote speaker
and will deliver her address aboard a luxury dinner cruise sailing
New York Harbor on Friday evening, June 6.
Since her early activist work, Huerta has played a major role in
American civil rights and labor movements. She successfully
negotiated contracts for farm workers and, with the help of Cesar
Chavez, founded the Robert Kennedy Medical Plan, the Juan De La
Cruz Farm Workers Pension Fund and the Farm Workers Credit
Union. She has led several strikes and boycotts which have
led to legislation, including the California Agricultural Labor
Relations Act of 1975.
Huerta was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in
1993 and has received numerous other awards in recognition of her
tireless work to improve the lives of farmers in the United States,
including the United States Presidential Eleanor D. Roosevelt Human
Rights Award, presented by President Clinton in 1998.
Aishah Shahidah Simmons will open the conference with her
lecture on the morning of June 6. An award-winning
documentary filmmaker Shahidah Simmons has used her writing skills
and lectures to advocate for social change. Her documentary
“NO!,” which explores the global reality of rape and other forms of
sexual assault through first person testimonies, scholarship and
the cultural work of African Americans, won an Audience Choice
Award and a Jury Award at the 2006 San Diego Women’s Film
Festival. Additionally, the National Sexual Violence Resource
Center designated “NO!” as the featured event of the 2007 Sexual
Assault Awareness Month Campaign.
NAWCHE, founded in 1992, is an organization made up of faculty,
administrators, staff and students from Catholic colleges and
universities around the country. Its objectives are to
facilitate and support one another; to create, organize and
disseminate work for justice in the academy and to provide a forum
for members to speak out on matters relevant to women’s issues,
especially those concerns unique to Catholic
institutions.
Click here
to download the registration form.
Paper, panel and workshop submissions can be made online at the
NAWCHE web site.
For additional questions, please contact Professor Barbara
Koziak, Director of the Women's Studies Program at St. John’s by
calling (718) 990-5044, or Cathy Lancelloti, Assistant Director of
the Center for Psychological Services, at (718) 990-6331.
For media inquiries, please contact Elizabeth Reilly, Assistant
Director of Media Relations at St. John’s University by calling
(718) 990-5789, or by e-mail to reillye@stjohns.edu.
For additional news about St. John’s University, please visit www.stjohns.edu/news.