Students and speaker activists across the globe will raise their voices during the Ohio University Women’s and Gender Studies Graduate Student Association conference to speak their mind on women’s issues.
For graduate students like Jillian Prusa, a second-year grad student, feminism is a passion that they like to share with others.
“I’m a feminist,” said Prusa. “I think that it’s really important to include women in poverty alleviation because they are the majority of the world that is in poverty, and why would you ignore half of the population of the world.”
Throughout the day there will be workshops on different subject matters. The workshops are mainly focused on women’s and gender issues, but there is a wide range of categories.
Ohio University Women’s and Gender Studies Graduate Student Association Conference is organizing the event coordinated by Kazi Silmi.
“The primary group, the conference organizers, realized that we have similar interests on issues related to communication, gender and social change in general,” Silmi said. “So we thought that it would be great to have a conference because when we talked about this we realized that other people had an interest in this as well.”
Students and speakers submit abstracts, or pieces, about what they would like to speak about during the workshops to the organization such as a paper Prusa wrote for a seminar on women in development.
“We got abstracts from Australia, China and of course other universities in the United States, but mostly from OU students,” Silmi said. “We are very excited that we have so many different speakers from across the world.”
The keynote speaker for this conference is Richa Nagar, professor in the department of Women’s Studies for University of Minnesota. Her lecture is set to focus on issues about gender and developmental and social change around the world and students interested in meeting her will have a chance after the event.
“We would definitely like to have this next year,” Silmi said. “We are overwhelmed by the responses that we’ve gotten. Before we started we were guessing how many abstracts we would get and we said maybe 30 or 40. But no, we got more than 100.”
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