Gender Evaluation Methodology (GEM): GEM is a guide to integrating a gender analysis into evaluations of initiatives that use Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for social change.  GEM provides a means for determining whether ICTs are really improving women’s lives and gender relations as well as promoting positive change at the individual, institutional, community and broader social levels.  The guide provides users with an overview of the evaluation process (including links to general evaluation resources) and outlines suggested strategies and methodologies for incorporating a gender analysis throughout the evaluation process. GEM does not contain step-by-step instructions to conducting evaluations.

Gender at Work Framework:  The Gender at Work framework is a powerful tool that combines best practices in organizational development with feminist thought to help organizations see their work from new perspectives; i.e. we help them look at/uncover the “deep structure” of culture – the largely unexamined (invisible) values and mindsets that underpin “informal” (everyday) culture – at play in their organizations and in the communities they serve. The analysis that emerges through applying our framework helps organizations undertake more effective gender-equality planning and implementation.

AWID’s Monitoring and Evaluation Wiki: “The aim of this wiki is to stimulate experience sharing and build a body of practical knowledge and experience of M&E in terms of measuring gender equality (or other related human rights issues). To that end, we have two primary sections, the first section is for individuals working on M&E or assessments to share thoughts, struggles, or successes for other members of the community to share. This is a space to pose questions or offer advice and to gain feedback from colleagues around the world. The second section is a compendium (a library of sorts) with descriptions of major M&E frameworks, approaches, and tools used to track social change and justice, along with the link to their original source. We also provide a brief overview and critical analysis of the strengths and weaknesses. The strengths and weaknesses analysis have been written from the perspective of trying to capture the complexity of changes related to women’s rights work, building on the work of Capturing Changes in Women’s Realities. There are also case studies of different techniques for deeper discussion and experience exchange as well.”

“What is Happening to Donor Support for Women’s Rights?” at Contestations (Issue 4), by Rosalind Eyben.

“Women’s Organizations and Global Governance: The Need for Diversity in Global Civil Society,” in the edited volume Global Governance, Global Government (SUNY Press 2011), by Professor Ackerly.

The Global Feminisms Collaborative Research ethics statement is an example of a research ethics.

Download the full report, Breakthrough Evaluation: an External Rights-based Evaluation of Grantmaking for Gender Equality.

See her department web page here for more information -here-.

She works collaboratively on feminist theory and evaluation with feminist colleagues at Vanderbilt and other institutions through the Global Feminisms Collaborative, on environmental justice with Vanderbilt colleagues, Michael Vandenberg, Steve Goodbred, and Jonathan Gilligan, and on methodology with Lyndi Hewitt, Jacqui True, Anna Carella, and Ying Zhang.

Professor Ackerly also contributes to the on-going Human Rights & Human Welfare Roundtable discussions, “a forum for its panelists to express opinions of and insights into pressing international concerns,” by writing on human rights, global justice, “failed states”, and military action in places such as the Ivory Coast and Guatemala.

View and download Professor Ackerly’s CV.

–Professor Ackerly’s Published Books–

	With Jacqui True, Doing Feminist Research in Political & Social Science, Palgrave 2010. View the Companion Website to the book for helpful resources. “A splendid book which provides a clear and careful guide to doing and evaluating feminist research and highlights its crucially transformative role in the social sciences. It should be required reading not just for every social science – and of course feminist – methods course but for all researchers, reviewers and gatekeepers too.” —Sandra Harding, UCLA “Methodologically diverse and theoretically rich, an important and accessible guide for doing feminist research that deserves to be read by scholars from all social scientific traditions.” —J. Ann Tickner, University of Southern California “This timely, accessible and practical guide to doing feminist research will be welcomed by students and researchers across the social sciences.” —Nira Yuval-Davis, University of East London, UK
	Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference, Cambridge University Press 2008 "As an activist I find Ackerly's theorizing of human rights in action so insightful. She gives a name to our approach - curb-cut feminism: by being humble and attentive to those made invisible or 'different' by the mainstream we are better able to realize universal human rights. This book is a very useful map for anyone committed to justice in an often messy terrain." --Joanna Kerr, Former Executive Director of AWID, the Association for Women's Rights in Development "A stunning achievement. Ackerly takes up the daunting - some would say insuperable - challenge of developing a universal theory of human rights that does not entail cultural imperialism. With the concerns of activists and politics of difference as her starting points, she thinks outside the box that has limited our understanding of, and ability to realize, universal human rights. This extremely thoughtful and closely argued text will stimulate debate and, I hope, revitalize activism." --V. Spike Peterson, Department of Political Science, University of Arizona
	With Jacqui True, Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, Cambridge University Press, 2006. "...Feminist Methodologies for International Relations is, overall, a thoroughly satisfying book that manages to integrate a diverse range of feminist IR scholarship without forcing it into a straitjacket. It is an important teaching tool, showing the rigor of feminist methods and providing helpful guideposts to those who venture onto the terrain of feminist international relations." Elisabeth Prugl, Florida International University, International Studies Review "This edited volume is instructive in illuminating feminist methodologies and in highlighting the insights gained from them, and in many ways it provides useful cultural insights into the orientations and practices of feminist IR scholars. It tackles a difficult topic and should serve as a catalyst for further debate. Ackerly, Stern, and True make a sizable contribution in providing insight into feminist methodologies and concerns and encouraging the reader to assess her own biases; to question 'knowledge,' discipline boundaries, and definitions; to identify assumptions and exclusions; and to recognize the necessity of including gender in research-it is tempting to include the phrase 'where relevant,' though the authors do make a solid argument that gender is always relevant." Mary Caprioli, University of Minnesota - Duluth, International Relations
	Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, Cambridge University Press, 2000. “[Ackerly’s] effort to fuse political theory with observation of and reflection on grassroots practice in the global South should be emulated and expanded. Some of the most important claims of justice today come from vital social movements in that part of the world, and it is high time that political theorists interested in issues of democratic process and social criticism incorporate the experience of these movements into their theoretical world.” - Iris Marion Young, University of Chicago in the American Political Science Review In Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, Brooke Ackerly demonstrates the shortcomings of contemporary deliberative democratic theory, relativism and essentialism for guiding the practice of social criticism in the real, imperfect world. Drawing theoretical implications from the activism of Third World feminists who help bring to public audiences the voices of women silenced by coercion, Brooke Ackerly provides a practicable model of social criticism. She argues that feminist critics have managed to achieve in practice what other theorists do only incompletely in theory. Complemented by Third World feminist social criticism, deliberative democratic theory becomes critical theory - actionable, coherent, and self-reflective. While a complement to democratic theory, Third World feminist social criticism also addresses the problem in feminist theory associated with attempts to deal with identity politics. Third World feminist social criticism thus takes feminist theory beyond the critical impasse of the tension between anti-relativist and anti-essentialist feminist theory.

Passersby who look up at the mural will not understand all of the symbolism immediately-and that is just the way the artist planned it. “I want people to take from it whatever they do,” said Sargent. “Each time they look at it, they will see something new.” She added, “I’m trying to get to all women with this mural and the only way you get to all women is slowly.”

Sargent said she decided to approach the Women’s Community Cancer Project (WCCP) with the idea of painting a mural for the project, when one more friend of hers was diagnosed with cancer. She wanted to create a work of art that would draw attention to cancer’s murderous toll on women-not as a picture of doom and gloom, but as a celebration of movers and shakers for political and social justice, both those living and those killed by cancer (find the article -here-).

Please look forward to a Critical Perspectives section on intersectionality for Politics & Gender edited by Professors Ackerly and Rose McDermott (Brown University)

–Readings in Feminism–

Sharon Krause, "Contested Questions, Current Trajectories: Feminism in Political Theory Today" (Politics & Gender, 2011)	[See the full article -here-] I once mentioned to a prominent feminist scholar that I was using one of her books in my course on feminism and political theory. She looked at me blankly for a moment and then replied, “Feminism and political theory? I thought feminism is political theory.” She was right of course; in some sense, everything that is feminist theory is also political theory. Feminism illuminates gendered relations of power in politics and social life, after all, and it contributes (however indirectly) to the larger project of transforming them. Moreover, since the rise of “second wave” feminism in the 1970s, feminist theorists have significantly reshaped political theory as a discipline, moving crucial questions from the margins of the field to its center, questions about gender equity and justice, the constitution of the political subject, the demands of difference, the intersecting dynamics of domination, the differential effects of globalization, and the conditions of freedom, among other things. As a result, much of what we think of as “mainstream” political theory is now also feminist theory. This is often true even of work that does not make women or gender its sole subject matter, as the leading voices in the field increasingly are scholars whose work has been shaped by literatures central to feminism and who think about politics in ways that are informed by a critical consciousness of the gendered quality of power relations.
Ann Towns, "The Status of Women as a Standard of 'Civilization'" (European Journal of International Relations, 2009); Winner of the Okin-Young Award	[See the full article -here-] "This article focuses on the status of women as a standard of civilization by examining its emergence in the 19th-century European ‘society of civilized states.’ More specifically, the article centers on expectations about the proper political role of women and how these operated as a standard to distinguish ‘civilized’ states from other societies. The article shows that the political exclusion of women — not their inclusion — became expected behavior for ‘advanced’ societies at this time. To statesmen and social scientists alike, evidence from ‘savage’ society and an uncivilized European past demonstrated that women could not contribute to human advancement if given a political role. To arrive at this claim, the article examines the understandings that had come into place to make the political exclusion of women possible and reasonable for European and European settler states."
“Global Feminisms: Theory and Ethics for Studying Gendered Injustice” – by Brooke Ackerly and Katy Attanasi (New Political Science, 2009)	[See the full article -here-] Abstract: Global justice needs a form of feminism that holds in relation various strands of feminism. Others have selected from feminisms around the globe a version of feminism to name and criticize as “global.” In this essay we identify within feminist struggle for justice around the world global feminisms that take those ideas that others may hold in critical tension—tension which suggests dichotomous interpretations of injustice or opposites on the static scales of justice (such as concerns with recognition versus redistribution)—and hold them instead in dynamic relationship. Global feminists hold in relation the academic post-modern feminists’ concern with “hegemonic meta-narratives” and the women’s rights activists’ attempts to get global recognition of the violations of women’s rights. Global feminists are concerned about the ways in which research is done and the uses to which it is put. Global feminists hold in relation the idea that contexts matter and the idea that the most powerful forces of injustice are embedded in the normative structures of those contexts everyday. In sum, this article looks at global feminisms as a theoretical trend, an ethical approach to research, and an ontological perspective on the relationship between global and local, social, political, and economic values, practices, and norms. Global feminism is a paradoxical posture toward the world that eschews imperialist definitions. It is at once always aware of global connectedness as well as cognizant of the concern that global connectedness can create opportunities for neo-colonial globalism.
Leslie McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality” (Signs, 2005)	[See the full article -here- and reprinted in Intersectionality and Beyond: law, power, and the politics of location -here-] "Since critics first alleged that feminism claimed to speak universally for all women, feminist researchers have been acutely aware of the limitations of gender as a single analytic category. In fact, feminists are perhaps alone in the academy in the extent to which they have embraced intersectionality-the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relations and subject formations-as itself a central category of analysis. One could even say that intersectionality is the most important theoretical contribution that women's studies, in conjunction with related fields, has made so far. Yet despite the emergence of intersectionality as a major paradigm of research in women's studies and elsewhere, there has been little discussion of how to study intersectionality, that is, of its methodologies..."
Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton University Press, 2005)	[See the book at Princeton University Press -here-] Chapter 7: The Impossibility of Women's Studies "There is today enough retrospective analysis and harangue concerning the field of women’s studies to raise the question of whether dusk on its epoch has arrived, even if nothing approaching Minerva’s wisdom has yet emerged... I want to consider a problem to one side of these questions that might also shed light on them. To what extent is women’s studies still tenable as an institutionalized domain of academic study, as a circumscribed intellectual endeavor appropriate as a basis for undergraduate or graduate degrees?"
“Current Controversies in Feminist Theory” – Mary Dietz (Annual Review of Political Science, 2003)	[See the full article -here-] Abstract: Over the past two decades, academic feminism has differentiated and fragmented substantially in light of a wide range of new approaches in theory. This overview and assessment of the wide, diverse, and changing field of feminist theory gives particular attention to contestations surrounding the political theorizing of gender, identity, and subjectivity. Three divergent and oppositional perspectives—difference feminism, diversity feminism, and deconstruction feminism—frame current discussions regarding the “construction” of the female subject; the nature of sexual difference; the relation between sex and gender; the intersection of gender, race, class, sexuality, etc.; and the significance of “women” as a political category in feminism. The problem of epistemic identification (locating or dislocating the female subject, analyzing gender difference, politicizing identity) is also a central element in the theorizing of feminist politics, multicultural citizenship, justice, power, and the democratic public sphere. Within this domain, we find equally intense debates among feminist theorists concerning the meaning of feminist citizenship and the politics of recognition, as well as the relations between gender equality and cultural rights, feminism and multiculturalism, democracy and difference. Although the field is far from convergence even on the meaning of feminism itself, we might take its current state as a sign of its vitality and significance within the discourses of contemporary social and political theory.

–Feminism on the Web–

The Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID) has a newsreel on women's rights in the news. See also the "Young Feminist Wire," published by AWID which includes news, activist resources, and articles. See particularly, an article on "enlightened sexism" and their "Significant Moments for Women's Rights in 2011." Visit the website of Sister Song, an Atlanta-based organization for leadership on a US rights-based approach to activism for women’s health. Gender Across Borders is a global feminist community and blog with articles on gender and cultural relativism, queer politics, race and ethnicity.

Student Work

Refugees by Judy Wang

Water Rights: an argument against damming the Brahmaputra River by Courtney Anne van Stolk

Water Photostory by Emily Schloss

Education Disparities in the United States by Colleen Cummings

Illegal Immigration as a Symptom of Global Poverty by Emily Hogan

Immigration in America by Elizabeth Knudson

Global Hunger Photo Story by Luis Munoz

Justice in the War on Terror by William Roberts

Undergraduate Initiatives

Vanderbilt Students: Take Action to Combat Climate Change

Housed at the Law School is the Vanderbilt Climate Change Network, which consists in a team of faculty and graduate students who are conducting theoretical and applied research on one of the most important and most widely overlooked sources of greenhouse gases: individual and household behavior. The Climate Change Research Network is affiliated with the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment.

TIES: Transdisciplinary Initiative on Environmental Systems

The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences collaborated to create TIES, a program that involves faculty and students from the natural sciences, engineering, and key social disciplines, including the social sciences, the humanities, law, and education. The centerpiece of this initiative is a unique transdisciplinary course that focuses each year on an environmental issue that is of global significance, and which is embodied in a particular field site to be studied by participants. This capstone course is required of all environmental sciences Ph.D. students and includes a field study at the case site. The course is next offered in 2013-2014 and is open to graduate students in all disciplines. Download the article, "Water Works" which features Professor Ackerly with a team of students and fellow faculty members in Bangladesh working on the relationship between water, culture, and social justice.

–Professor Ackerly’s Former and Current Students–

Anna Carella Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN Anna's graduate student page -here- and blog -here-	Farhana Loonat Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN Winner of the 2011 Best Teaching Assistant Award in the College of Arts and Sciences Farhana's graduate student page -here-	Stacy Clifford Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN Dissertation: "The Disabled Contract: Social Contract Theory and Cognitive Disability" Stacy's graduate student page -here-.	Sonalini Sapra, Political Science '09 At Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, IL Sonalini's faculty page can be found -here-.	Lyndi Hewitt-Corzine, Sociology '09 At University of North Carolina, Ashville Dissertation: "The Politics of Transnational Feminist Discourse: Framing across Differences, Building Solidarities" Lyndi's faculty page can be found -here-.

Katherine Attanasi, Religion '09 At Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA Katy's faculty page can be found -here-.	Sarah Suiter Nashville, TN Nashville NOW Author of the forthcoming Magdalene House, A Place About Mercy	Eleanor Fleming, Political Science '06 Epidemic Intelligence Service Office Centers for Disease Control and Prevention	Darcy Freedman University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC Darcy's faculty page can be found -here-.	...............	...............	...............

–Courses–

The following list is the current graduate course rotation schedule:

• PSCI 301: Human Rights (offered every 2 to 3 years)
• WGS 301: Graduate Seminar for the Gender Certificate, offered annually in rotation with other WGS affiliated faculty.
• PSCI 305: Feminist Theory in Social and Political Thought (offered spring 2013)
• PSCI 308: Human Rights and Religion – a graduate seminar co-taught with Melissa Snarr, Vanderbilt Divinity School (offered Spring 2011)

–Grants–

The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities offers graduate student fellowships.  Each award includes tuition, health insurance, a stipend of $24,250, a research budget of $2,000, and affiliation with the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. The competition is open to those students in the humanities and qualitative social sciences in the College of Arts and Science.  You can find application information -here-.

–Publishing–

Here are some helpful articles and reflections on publishing as a graduate student (or turning your dissertation into a book):

• Professor Ackerly and Jacqui True offer a guide for turning your doctoral dissertation into a book on the companion website for Doing Feminist Research in Political and Social Science (Palgrave 2010).

• Sandy Thatcher has some excellent articles on the state of publishing books in political theory, as well as an excellent reflection on the difficulties and challenges of turning your dissertation into a book, “From the University Presses-Dissertation into Books? The Lack of Logic in the System.”  He has been the director or consultant for many university publishing presses (Penn State University Press, University Press of Florida, University of Rochester Press), and has helped launch the careers of many now renown political theorists and scientists:Hadley Arkes, Charles Beitz, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Nannerl Keohane, Martha Nussbaum, Susan Moller Okin, and Iris Marion Young.

• The Global Feminisms Collaborative:  the website has research resources, including the Global Feminisms Collaborative Research Ethics Statement.

•  ”What is Happening to Donor Support for Women’s Rights?” in Contestations / dialogues on womens’ empowerment: This e-journal is an initiative of the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Research and Communications Programme – a collaborative initiative of BRAC University in Bangladesh, the Centre for Gender and Advocacy Studies at the University of Ghana, the Social Research Center at the American University in Cairo in Egypt, the Institute of Development Studies in the UK, the Nucleus for Interdisciplinary Women’s Studies at the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil and UNIFEM.

• Professor Ackerly’s book, with Jacqui True, Doing Feminist Research in Political and Social Science can be obtained from Palgrave’s website.  Helpful guides and resources, exercises, and examples can be found on the book’s companion website.

• The “Framework for Research Ethics and Evaluation: Justification and Guideline” is an evaluation framework for projects on gender and conflict, disaster, post-conflict, and post-disaster. It provides Institutional Review Board guidelines for boards newly confronting evaluation of research ethics in these contexts.  There is an accompanying institutional guideline not available on the web for those interested in developing an ethical review board and process, email brooke.ackerly@vanderbilt.edu for more information.