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WIFP Associate News
to WIFP Associate News Main Page
Earlier Associate News:
Carolyn LaDelle Bennett, Natalie Hopkinson, Frankie Hutton, Ariel Dougherty, Carolyn M. Byerly, Maurine Beasley, Dorothy Dean, Shere Hite, Dr. Sue Kaufman, Elayne Clift, Haruko Watanabe, Leila Merl, Peg Johnston, Nikki Craft, Frieda Werden, Robin Morgan, Andrea Dworkin, Jo Campbell, Mary Gehman, Anne Braden, Sarah Misailidis.
Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett
Carolyn Bennett has come out with another important book: Missing News and Views In Paranoid Times.
Missing News and Views in Paranoid Times opens minds to new perspectives on current affairs and world events -- people, politics, peace and the press. This anthology features coverage of international issues, events, people and politics -- against the backdrop of Middle East war, and through a lens censored in mainstream news and current affairs coverage. The in-depth stories and analyses comprise three years of Bennett’s hard-hitting, sometimes humorous prose, sometimes a poet’s pain, never manipulative, never inspiring pity or cheap sentiment. Paranoid Times is a magazine of sources never quoted, faces never seen, voices rarely heard, analyses with irony and juxtaposition all tied to current affairs, politics and controversy. A wide audience of readers – including students, journalists, analysts, educators, politicians – will find Missing News and Views In Paranoid Times a deeply informative, compelling and striking read. In Paranoid Times invites readers to shed the paranoia and understand current events with this independently-voiced, thought-provoking exposé.
(www.xlibris.com/INPARANOIDTIMES.html or www.xlibris.com/bookstore)
ISBN: 1-59926-487-0 (Trade Paperback)
Pages: 336
Natalie Hopkinson
Natalie Hopkinson has authored a book published with Cleis Press, along with co-author Natalie Moore. Be sure see her blog: http://deconstructing-tyrone.blogspot.com/
Natalie is a staff writer for the Washington Post (on leave) and a visiting professor of journalism at the University of Maryland–College Park. She had a great article in the Washington Post titled "The Hip-Hop Generation, Raising Up It's Sons," October 18, 2006, on the front page of the Style section.
DECONSTRUCTING TYRONE
In "Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation," (Cleis Press, October, 2006) authors Natalie Hopkinson and Natalie Y. Moore dissect the public and private lives of Detroit’s “Hip-Hop Mayor” NBA poet Etan Thomas, political prisoner Debo Ajabu, and relationships between babydaddy and babymomma, strippers and their dads, and men on the so-called “Down Low,” through the media lens, through stereotype, through the eyes of Black women.
Frankie Hutton, Ph.D.
Dr. Frankie Hutton was faculty in April 2006 a the Salzburg Seminar in Austria for a special International Study Program (ISP) devoted to the topic Global Citizenship. There she joined a cast of international faculty in contrast to having been a fellow at Salzburg in 1999 for an intensive week-long Salzburg Seminar group known as Session 372: Race and Ethnicity: Social Change through Public Awareness.
Frankie recently published a journal article on Evelyn Cunningham's 1940s work as a columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier in ANALES DEL MUSEO NACIONAL DE ANTROPOLOGIA, Numero X 2004, Madrid, Spain.
Ariel Dougherty
"It is so great to 'come home' to wifp.org and learn what sister associates are doing!! And it is A LOT! For many years I have not been active with media, but late Winter with confirmation of Alito to the Supreme Court and passage of a proposed abortion ban in SD, I got angry. So, via the www I have been networking with old friends, and new ones.
"Almost forty years now since the initial roots of launching Women Make Movies (citywide women's liberation meetings in New York City, Fall 1969), and I look at the televisionscape ---- 16,800 [100chx24/7] hours of TV a week, and not one consistent hour devoted to feminist issues! Yet, we are on the cusp of another phenomenal technological change, with more and more moving images becoming accessible to a huge global audience via the web. I linked up with sister associate Frieda Werden. We have had a fast and furious discussion about 'the state of feminist media' and what some next steps might be to build on existing structures. Thenmozhi Soundararajan of Third World Majority (www.cultureisaweapon.org/) is launching a new digital movie teaching program for women in social justice work. After this Summer's initial program in the Bay Area, she is taking it on the road, nationally. In San Diego, an on-going girls media teaching program is run by San Diego Women in Film Foundation. They also hold a great annual Women Film Festival, for women of all ages. In fact, in the past ten years there has been a burst of women's film festivals, still the key entry point for women media makers to reach an audience. My old stomping grounds of Women Make Movies are thriving. The Ex Dir there recently told me they have a record number of films making it to TV. That's great! Me, I just would love to see a feminist weekly version of Democracy Now! A place of our own to check in and learn some of all the great things women are doing across the globe!! Or, something on the web!! Any ideas?? Want to assist?? ArielCamera At gmail.com."
Dr. Carolyn M. Byerly
Dr. Carolyn M. Byerly, an Associate Professor in Howard University’s JHJ School of Communications, has recently been involved in two studies about media ownership of women and minorities. Byerly discusses these studies and posts other recent studies of media ownership on her blog at http://www.wimnonline.org/WIMNsVoicesBlog/?p=302. The studies were planned to be released around Oct. 23, the end of the FCC’s public comment period on media ownership. In one of Byerly’s studies, she analyzed the 2005 media ownership data released by the FCC. Of her results, she found that female and minority ownership is fewer than 5 percent, and that 75 percent of women-owned stations are actually owned by both men and women. In her second study, she and two others interviewed about 200 minority residents of Washington, DC about how they view news content, where they get their news and if the news affects their level of community participation. Byerly writes that the news did not help most participants understand crime, the rising costs of living and other problems they face daily. She will continue to write about updates of media ownership.
Dr. Maurine Beasley
Dr. Beasley has a recent book, First Ladies and the Press: The Unfinished Partnership of the Media Age, published by Northwestern University Press in 2005 (see the review in Voices for Media Democracy).
She was invited to be a participant in the 3rd international conference of women leaders in higher education at the Chinese Communication University in Beijing August 15-24, 2006. She presented a paper on gender and media studies in the U.S.A.
Dorothy Dean
Dorothy Dean recently developed the website for the Milwaukee chapter of the League of Women Voters (lwv.milwaukee.org). She is currently serving as treasurer for Broad Universe, an international organization dedicated to promoting women's writing in the category of science fiction, fantasy and horror. It began in response to the lack of women in the science fiction gnere who receive awards or are published or reviewed. The organization, though small, is active at science fiction conventions all over the globe, with members in the UK, Australia, Spain, Mexico, New Zealand, and the US. For more information, visit broaduniverse.org.
Shere Hite
Shere Hite, best known for her earlier series of Hite Reports, has published several books in Europe where she now lives, and this year has published The Shere Hite Reader: Globalisation and Private Life with Seven Stories Press in New York, appearing on The Colbert Report television program in May 2006 as well as USA Today. She has also published Oedipus Revisited, a book based on her research, about boys with a UK publisher, Arcadia Books, and Cartas de Jovenes Lectores with La Esfera de Los Libros publishing house in Spain. She can be reached at hite2000@hotmail.com.
Dr. Sue Kaufman
I’ve just been re-elected to a 2nd 3-year-term as President of University Professionals of Illinois Local 4100, IFT/AFT/AFL-CIO. We collectively bargain for faculty and staff at seven public universities in Illinois. And, I continue to teach a senior-seminar Fall, Spring and Summer as a member of the journalism faculty at Eastern Illinois University. Sitting on the Higher Education Program and Policy Council of the American Federation of Teachers, and as a Vice President of the Illinois Federation of Teachers keeps me very busy.
Elayne Clift
Elayne Clift recently returned from a year in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where she taught at Payap University. Her book on the experience, Ajahn: A Year of Teaching in Thailand is under consideration by Silkwork Books (Asia).
On September 5, University Press of New England/Tufts U. published Women, Philanthropy, and Social Change: Visions for a Just Society, a work she conceived and edited. Each chapter is authored by a leader of the W&P movement. It has been called the definitive book on the subject.
She is also at work editing her first novel, Hester's Daughters, a contemporary feminist retelling of The Scarlet Letter. She has an agent interested, but currently no publisher.
Elayne Clift continues to act as a Senior Correspondent for Women's Feature Service and as a columnist for the Keene (NH) Sentinel. She also works as a freelance writer and an adjunct professor.
Haruko Watanabe
Haruko Watanabe continues to write articles concerning women in the Japanese media.
Leila Merl
" I am teaching English at Needham High School (in Massachusetts), and although I cannot always engage in the activism that I once had more time for (in my 'youth'), I am dedicated to encouraging and supporting all of my students who are aspiring writers and activists....I also do as much 'online' and letter writing activism as I am able to, especially during the summer, when I am not correcting papers!"
Peg Johnston
"The abortion experience is a highly stigmatized one, and as a result women's voices are frequently silenced. For this reason we are launching a film project of very short videos (less than one minute) on the subject. Contact me for complete details at info@abortionconversation.com."
Nikki Craft
Recently Nikki Craft discovered 300 audio tapes spanning the last 30 years, including Andrea Dworkin?s speeches and her own conversations. Over the next few months she will post these tapes on her website No Status Quo (www.nostatusquo.com). Currently online is a song that she wrote and recorded in 1975 about Inez Garcia and Joan Little, who killed the men that raped them. For more information on Nikki Craft, visit www.nikkicraft.com.
Greetings, WIFP, June 2006
In late 2002, I moved to Vancouver, BC, Canada, and that is the new main HQ of WINGS. WINGS started in 1986, and it's still a joy to work with women's voices and creations. Contributing producers now communicate with each other via listserve, and most submit their audio via ftp uploads. New producers and editors are welcomed.
In 2004, Kim Vaz, chair of the University of South Florida Women's Studies Department, offered to post WINGS on their website (to find that page through www.wings.org , click on archives). You can listen using Windows Media Player. But please continue to ask your local community stations to carry this show -- the sound is much better over the air, and more people can hear. Programs are distributed to stations via ftp or CD, or via satellite in Australia and the US.
Since 2003, I've been Vice President for North America of AMARC (Association Mondiale des Radiodiffuseurs Communautaires -- the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters). I urge community radio women to attend the next conference in November 2006, in Amman, Jordan. This meeting will help the recently emerging community broadcasting sector in the middle east, including women's programs. See www.amarc.org to find out more.
In November 2005, the International Association of Women in Radio and TV elected me President. Women who have a profession in broadcasting or related media may apply to join through www.iawrt.org . We also give awards. IAWRT's next conference will be 2007, likely in Kenya. Mal Johnson is organizing an IAWRT event for New York in early September; email her or me if you'd like to come.
In June 2006, I'm proud to say, I received the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Campus and Community Radio Association of Canada (NCRA). They are a fabulous group. www.ncra.ca
Finally please check out my new blog: http://feministbook.blogspot.com/ --it's a personal way of honouring things I read. If you like it, please put a link on your web page -- that will help it "place" in google searches.
Best wishes to all the associates in our feminist media endeavours. This is really important -- let's do more things together in the years to come.
Frieda Werden, producer
WINGS: Women's International News Gathering Service
Box 95090, Kingsgate
Vancouver BC V5T 4T8, Canada
(604)876-6994 www.wings.org frieda.werden@gmail.com
Robin Morgan
Robin Morgan also has another novel: The Burning Time, published in 2006.
Based on the true story of one woman’s remarkable fight against the Inquisition, this compellingly written saga is set against the vivid tapestry of the 14th century and drawn from court records of the first witchcraft trial in Ireland: the tale of an extraordinary noblewoman, Lady Alyce Kyteler of Kilkenny.
When the Church imports its Inquisition—known as “The Burning Time” to followers of the Old Religion, or the Craft of Wicce—to Ireland, it does so via an ambitious, sophisticated bishop acting as Papal Emissary. But Alyce Kyteler--educated, wealthy, and a Craft Priestess--refuses to cede power to the Church over herself, her lands, her people, or their ancient faith. She and the bishop engage in a personal battle of wits, and when she outmaneuvers him it provokes his obsessive enmity. He pronounces her followers heretics and gambles his Church career on breaking her.
But Kyteler has power, connections, courage, and the loyalty of her people--especially her shy, strange maidservant, Petronilla de Meath. So Lady Alyce persists in defying the Church’s imposition of religion, papal law, and blatant land seizures. Battle plans are laid. Finally, risking death by burning at the stake, Kyteler invokes a mysterious, possibly otherworldly ally in a shocking, dramatic climax. This lush, enthralling story of memorable characters based on actual historical figures is an unforgettable tale of power, guile, bravery--and passions both earthly and spiritual.
---
An award-winning writer, political analyst, journalist, and editor, Robin Morgan has published 20 books, including six of poetry, three of fiction, and the now-classic anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful, Sisterhood Is Global, and Sisterhood Is Forever. Her latest books include A Hot January: Poems, the acclaimed Saturday’s Child: A Memoir, and the best-selling The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism. Her work is translated into 13 languages. A founder and leader of contemporary US and global feminism, she lives in New York City. [For press and appearance info, write Carol Newton: CarolNewton@RobinMorgan.US ]
Andrea Dworkin
Anniversary: Remembering Andrea Dworkin
On April 7, 2006, at Oxford University in England, there will be a conference on the legacy of Andrea's work. Catharine MacKinnon will keynote it and John Stoltenberg, Andreas partner in life, will speak on a panel. Simultaneously Andrea's last completed book, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant, will be published for the first time in the United Kingdom.
In accordance with her wishes, Andrea's ashes will be scattered in Heraklion, Crete. Friends, including Catharine MacKinnon and John Stoltenberg will do that Sunday, April 9, 2006.
Andrea was 19 in 1966 when she lived on Crete. She writes about that time in "First Love," a chapter from an unfinished novel:
"Living on Crete brought me to a new sensitivity, acute and intolerable. I felt the resonances of those dead, all of them, and the lives of those living, all of them, in my own body, and I came to know who I was--that self tied to the past which was ever present in a way that was not melancholy or romantic. In Amerika, each person is new, like hemp before the rope is made. On Crete the rope was used, bloodstained, it smelled of everything that had ever touched it."
The link to "First Love":
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/FirstLoveI.html
The link to the April 7 conference:
http://social-justice.politics.ox.ac.uk/events.asp?action=show&event=22
Jo Campbell
Jo Campbell, retired journalist who edited and published the online Ecotopics International News Service, died March 1. We will miss her and her important work. For more information, please see: http://www.ecotopics.com/index.htm
Mary Gehman
I'd like to share the interesting news from Mary Gehman:
As a survivor of Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath, I wanted to let you know I'm still in New Orleans and still selling my book Women and New Orleans plus subsequent titles. The account of my ordeal during and immediately after Katrina (having stayed on through the storm) with photos and a six-month update are all available on the website of my publishing co. www.margaretmedia.com. It's a slightly diferent perspective than a lot of people have gotten, so you might want to check it out and mention it to friends and associates.
I'm always happy to see WIFP continuing its good work. Anne Braden's voice is stilled but her spirit lives on in all of us she inspired.
Anne Braden
Passing of a Southern Civil Rights Pioneer-- Anne Braden
(March 6, 2006, Louisville, KY) -- Revered white anti-racist southern activist Anne Braden died at the age of 81 on Monday morning, March 6, at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, ending nearly 60 years of unyielding action against segregation, racism, and white supremacy. Braden was hospitalized on Saturday, March 4, and had been treated for pneumonia and dehydration.
Braden catapulted into national headlines in mid-1954 when she and her husband Carl Braden were indicted for sedition for their leadership in desegregating a Louisville, Kentucky, suburb. Their purchase of a house in an all-white neighborhood on behalf of African Americans Andrew and Charlotte Wade violated Louisville’s color line and provoked violence against both families, culminating with the dynamiting of the house in June of 1954. A subsequent grand jury investigation concentrated not on the neighborhood’s harassment of the Wades, but looked to the Bradens’ supposedly communistic intentions in backing the purchase, and they were indicted for sedition that fall. The couple’s sedition case made national news and earned them the ire of segregationists across the South, which was reeling from the U.S. Supreme Court’s condemnation of school segregation in its Brown ruling earlier that spring. Only Carl was convicted, and that conviction was later overturned. The sedition charges left the Bradens pariahs, branded as radicals and “reds” in the Cold-War South, and they became fierce civil libertarians who openly espoused left-wing social critiques but would never either embrace nor disavow the Communist Party publicly because they felt that to do so accepted the terms of the 1950s anticommunist “witch hunts.”
Anne interviewing Rosa Parks in 1960.
Anne Braden’s memoir of the case, The Wall Between, was published in 1958, becoming one of the few accounts of its era to probe the psychology of white southern racism from within. Their case also introduced the Bradens to the civil rights movement blossoming farther south, in which white allies were few and far between. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., meeting Anne Braden in 1957, pronounced her “the most amazing white woman” in her unswerving dedication to civil rights. The Bradens soon joined the staff of a regional civil rights organization, the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), and began traveling the region to solicit greater white support for the movement. As the 1960s dawned, Anne Braden became a mentor and role model to younger southern students who joined the movement—a role she maintained for the rest of her life. Although she was suspect in some circles, Braden publicized and supported the student sit-ins in the pages of SCEF’s Southern Patriot newspaper, which she edited, and she encouraged a broader vision of social change that would include peace and economic justice. She was also instrumental in Louisville’s Open Housing movement in the later sixties, and among the leading white voices who helped to bring peace to the turbulent second generation of school desegregation, in which busing brought open violence to Louisville and other cities in the mid-1970s.
After Carl Braden’s untimely death in 1975, Anne Braden remained a central proponent of racial justice in Louisville and across the South, eventually evolving from pariah to heroine. Braden’s primary message was the centrality of racism in the U.S. social fabric, but she constantly stressed that civil rights activism was as much whites’ responsibility as it was that of people of color. “Hers has been among the most forceful and persistent of white voices for racial equality in modern U.S. history,” according to her biographer, Catherine Fosl, author of Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (2002).
In speeches delivered in the nearly six decades of her activism, Braden would frequently reflect on her odyssey from segregationist youth to anti-racist advocate: a process she called “turning myself inside out.” Reared in a middle-class, pro-segregation family, Braden changed as a young reporter covering the emerging civil rights movement in 1947 Alabama, where she had observed two separate and unequal systems of justice meted out in the Birmingham courthouse. She subsequently left the supposed neutrality of mainstream journalism to apply her considerable journalistic talents to the aid of African Americans in their quest to end segregation. Her efforts against southern racism, her friend and fellow activist Angela Davis reflected, “enabled vast and often spectacular social changes. . . that most of her contemporaries during the 1950s would never have been able to imagine.”
Decades later, Braden was still working against racism and for justice and peace. In the fall of 2005, she joined other Louisville activists on buses bound for the anti-war demonstration in Washington D.C. even though she went in a wheelchair. She was a frequent voice in the Rainbow Coalition nationally and a co-founder of the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, as well as being active in local issues including police brutality, housing-not-bombs, environmental racism, civil liberties, and lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender and other human rights. In the 1990s she became the recipient of many awards, including the first ever Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty, bestowed on her by the American Civil Liberties Union in 1991. She also became a teacher, offering social justice history courses at the University of Louisville and Northern Kentucky University. Braden was still teaching at the time of her death and was still fired by the passion for justice that had guided her adult life. She had completed a proposal for a local activist summer camp only the day before her hospitalization.
Braden was born Anne Gambrell McCarty on July 28, 1924 in Louisville, Kentucky, to Gambrell and Anita McCarty. Most of her childhood was spent in Anniston, Alabama, where she lived through her high school graduation. She graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1945, and held news reporting jobs at the Anniston Star, the Birmingham News, and the Louisville Times in the late 1940s. After Anne’s marriage to Carl Braden in 1948, the couple had three children: James, Anita, and Elizabeth. James and Elizabeth Braden survive their mother, along with two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Braden’s church was St. George’s Episcopal in Louisville.
A community memorial service celebrated the life and work of Anne Braden on April 23rd, 2006, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, at the Memorial Auditorium in downtown Louisville. In lieu of flowers, donations will be received to support the continuation of her work for justice, payable to the Carl Braden Memorial Center, Inc., and sent to P.O. Box 1543, Louisville, KY 40201.
Angela Davis and Anne Braden in Louisville, KY, in the 1990s.
Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and Carl Braden Memorial Center
3208 W. Broadway
Louisville, KY 40211 Contacts: Alice Wade (502) 778-8130; Cate Fosl (502) 291-3824; Carla Wallace (502) 558-7566
http://www.subversivesoutherner.com/
Sarah Misailidis
Sarah Emebet Misailidis now works for Congressman Albert Wynn of the 4th District of Maryland. She will still be on Capitol Hill, but on the House of Representatives side as opposed to the Senate side.
Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press
1940 Calvert Street, NW
Washinton, DC 20009-1502
phone: 202-265-6707
www.wifp.org