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Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas

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Center for New Words

The Center for New Words is committed to a simple mission: use the power and creativity of words to strengthen the voice of progressive and marginalized women in society. To accomplish this mission, our programs support diverse women's engagement with the entire word cycle, from literacy to blogging to literary writing to opinion-making in the media and other domains of influence. Built on the wisdom, commitments, and competencies of 28 years of running New Words Bookstore, CNW is creating spaces and places where women's words matter. break

http://www.centerfornewwords.org

  • Zainab Salbi: Between Two Worlds

    Mon, Oct 17, 2005
    Zainab Salbi reveals the tyrant Saddam Hussein through the eyes of a child, a secretly rebellious teenager, an abused wife, and ultimately a professional woman coming to terms with the horror of her family story. Salbi was 11 when her father was chosen to serve as Saddam Hussein's personal pilot. Her mother eventually sent Zainab to America for an arranged marriage, to spare her from Saddam's growing affection, but the marriage turned out to be another world of tyranny and abuse. Zainab started over. She forged a new identity as a champion of female victims of war, dedicating her life to speaking out on behalf of oppressed women around the world. This event is co-sponsored by Women Waging Peace and the Simmons College Institute for Leadership and Change.
    Forum Network
    Partner:
    Center for New Words

  • Women of the World: Art and Adventure

    Thu, Nov 11, 2004
    Susan Orlean, author of *The Orchid Thief* and *My Kind of Place,* takes readers on an irresistible tour of the world via its subcultures: from Japan's Mt. Fuji, to the heart of the African music scene in Paris, to Midland, Texas, hometown of George W. Bush, a place where "oil time" is the only time that matters. Barbara Sjoholm (formerly Barbara Wilson, author of *Gaudi Afternoon* and, the new book *Pirate Queen*) takes readers along for the four months that she traveled around the North Atlantic, chasing little known biographies of women fishing captains, cross-dressing sailors, and bold Viking explorers.
    Forum Network
    Partner:
    Center for New Words

  • Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America

    Thu, Mar 10, 2005
    Pooja Makhijani, Patricia Goodwin, Judith Chalmer, and Lisa Drostova read from *Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America*, an anthology of essays by women that explore through a child's lens the sometimes savage, sometimes innocent, and always complex ways in which race shapes American lives and families.
    Forum Network
    Partner:
    Center for New Words

  • Taking Our Place in the Public Conversation

    Fri, Mar 18, 2005
    Medea Benjamin, a powerful and charismatic force in human rights activism, talks about her struggles for social justice in Asia, Africa and the Americas for over 20 years. She is the founding director of the human rights organization Global Exchange. **Medea Benjamin** is a leading activist in the peace movement in the United States and helped bring together the groups forming the coalition United for Peace and Justice. She is also the co-founder of Code Pink: Women for Peace, a women's group that has been organizing against the war in Iraq and pushing for a reorientation of budget priorities in the US to focus on heath care, education and housing, not war. In February 2003, Benjamin visited Iraq and met with weapon's inspectors, women's groups and ordinary Iraqi civilians. Benjamin's previous work focused on improving the labor and environmental practices of US multinational corporations, and the policies of international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. She also ran for the US Senate on the Green Party ticket, mobilizing thousands of Californians around platform issues such as living wage, schools-not-prisons, and universal healthcare. She is the author of numerous books. Prior to founding Global Exchange in 1988, Medea worked for 10 years as an economist and nutritionist in Latin America and Africa for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization, the Swedish International Development Agency, and the Institute for Food and Development Policy. This event is co-sponsored with the MIT Program in Women's Studies.
    Forum Network
    Partner:
    Center for New Words

  • Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism

    Tue, Oct 23, 2007
    Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz raises questions about our assumptions about race, identity and justice. She pays close attention the meaning of history as it pertains to Jews and Jewishness, including the immensely complicated issue of Jewish relatedness. The tidy conventions of tribalism and nationalism, with their carefully patrolled borders, are revealed to be defensive and aggressive fantasies, beneath which a marvelously detailed, rich, dynamic complexity is roiling.
    Forum Network
    Partner:
    Center for New Words

  • Fighting Words: Framing the Constitution

    Thu, Oct 5, 2006
    Robin Morgan discusses her book, *Fighting Words: A Toolkit for Combating the Religious Right*, which overturns notions of the Founders as a bunch of dusty, pompous old men in powdered wigs, and resurrects them as the revolutionaries they were: a hodgepodge of freethinkers, deists, agnostics, Christians, atheists, Freemasons, and all of them radicals. Morgan argues that the religious right is gaining enormous power in the United States, thanks to a well-organized, media-savvy movement with powerful friends in high places. Many Americans, both observant and secular, are alarmed by this trend, especially by the religious right's attempts to erase the boundary between church and state and re-make the US into a Christian nation. But most Americans, Morgan contends, lack the tools for arguing with the religious right, especially when fundamentalist conservatives claim their tradition started with the Framers of The Constitution. *Fighting Words* is a a toolkit for arguing, especially for those of us who may not have read the founding documents of this nation since grade school. Morgan has assembled a lively, accessible, eye-opening primer and reference tool, a "verbal karate" guide, revealing what the Framers and many other leading Americans believed in their own words.
    Forum Network
    Partner:
    Center for New Words