Women’s center readjusts Brown-Bag-Lunches

The Women’s Center will resume their Women and Gender Brown Bag Series next semester with a new partner, new topics and a new location. 

After a long break from the bring-your-own-lunch discussion meetings, the Women’s Center is collaborating with the Women’s and Gender Studies Program to bring back the monthly lunch-time discussions.

Next semester, the programs will start at 12:30 p.m. Jan 28, in the Panorama Room in the Idaho Commons and continue on the last Tuesday of every following month.

The idea is to create opportunities for faculty, students and staff to share any projects or research they are working on, and the presentations revolve around topics that affect women and gender issues, said Lysa Salsbury, director of the Women’s Center.

“Maggie Rehm, who is a professor in Women’s Studies, was also really interested in finding ways that the Women’s Studies program could partner with the Women’s Center on sort of a more academically focused program,” Salsbury said. “And so she started working … to identify graduate students and faculty members who were doing research on women’s and gender issues who would be interested in sharing their work with us. So, she found four individuals who are interested in presenting their research next semester and their topics are all listed on our website.”

The Women’s Center has done brown bag events before, said Colleen Kulesza, program coordinator for the Women’s Center. The new lunches will take place in the  Commons, where Salsbury said a room with a large table was purposefully chosen.

“So it’s going to be kind of a round table format where everybody sits around,” Salsbury said. “And you can bring your lunch and actually eat your lunch … sitting in more or less a circular arrangement will allow for discussion.”

Kulesza said the presentations are comparable to TED Talks, and they only last 20 or 30 minutes.

The faculty member presenting on Jan. 28 is Ryanne Pilgrem, an assistant professor in the sociology department. Her presentation is titled “Social Factors in Women’s Land Access among Women Engaged in Sustainable Agriculture.”

“It’s going to be a great opportunity for those faculty members and graduate students to share their work and it’s going to be a great opportunity for people who are interested in more academic programing to come and, you know, hear what their colleagues and fellow students are doing,” Salsbury said.

The second presentation in the series will be by Wendy Silva, an MFA student. Silva will speak about queer issues in Chicano folklore, Kulesza said.

Undergraduates who are doing intensive research projects about a topic that includes women and gender also have an opportunity to present their work at the brown bag lunches, Kulesza said.

“If there’s an undergrad student who’s doing a major project … the way they would get involved is through their faculty adviser,” Kulesza said. “And their faculty adviser would have to basically sponsor them and convince Lysa that this person has need for a venue to present their research or their work. I think it’s the same for a graduate student too. Graduate or undergraduate students will need their faculty adviser kind of supporting them.”

Amber Evans Pinel can be reached at [email protected]

 

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