{"id":7720,"date":"2014-11-16T23:51:00","date_gmt":"2014-11-17T05:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/?p=7720"},"modified":"2014-11-17T08:39:30","modified_gmt":"2014-11-17T14:39:30","slug":"insearchofbelugasatsoldierfield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2014\/11\/16\/insearchofbelugasatsoldierfield\/","title":{"rendered":"In Search of Belugas at Soldier Field (Or, Notes for a Panel on Monday!)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Screen<\/a>Here I sit contemplating equality, the topic of a panel<\/a> I\u2019m on tomorrow, surrounded by jubilant Bears fans streaming out from Soldier Field. My partner and twins are busy visiting penguins, dolphins, and whales, while I\u2019m illegally parked, waiting in my car. Who else but a non-jock family (and recent Midwest transplants) would head for the Shedd Aquarium on a day when the Bears were playing on home turf next door? For my New York friends, this is equivalent to shopping at Macy\u2019s during the Thanksgiving Day Parade, hoping for a place to park.\"photo\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Pondering the question, \u201cIs what you do about equality, liberation, or both?\u201d in such an atmosphere feels a bit like being teleported to the 50 yard line and declaring to the crowd, \u201cWhich way to the fish?\u201d<\/p>\n

And in truth, that\u2019s also what it feels like to be concerned about women\u2019s \u201cequal\u201d or even \u201cequitable\u201d representation on the page, in the media, or online at a moment when the media conversation about women is focused on whether Lena Dunham is a child molester,<\/a> whether Kim Kardashian is a feminist icon<\/a>, and whether the word “feminist” itself should be banned<\/a>. The noise from the crowd threatens to drown out everything else.<\/p>\n

And yet. I\u2019ve been caught up with the question of women\u2019s representation for a few decades, and with the question of women’s “equal” representation on the page now for a while, through my work with two initiatives\u2014one focused, for starters, on changing the gender ratio of bylines at the world\u2019s opinion forums (The OpEd Project<\/a>) and the other on disrupting publishing by creating supportive community and, later, \u201ca third way\u201d (She Writes<\/a> \/ She Writes Press<\/a>). Tomorrow’s panel is asking me to interrogate, with precision, what all that effort means<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So allow me, while Bears fans leap over my car and my family enjoys the fish, to think about these and some related ventures together, and out loud.<\/p>\n

The OpEd Project (founded in 2008), She Writes (2009), and VIDA<\/a>, also known as Women in Literary Arts (2009), emerged in the wake of the creation of the Women\u2019s Media Center<\/a> (2005), an organization that \u201cmakes women visible and powerful in the media\u201d and works with the media \u201cto ensure that women\u2019s stories are told and women\u2019s voices are heard,\u201d and in the wake of the earlier Women in Media and News<\/a> (2001). All these initiatives assume that, in VIDA\u2019s phrasing, \u201cvoices change worldviews, and those voices should be multiple and varied.\u201d My OpEd Project sisters and I, in the words of our mission statement and our founder Katie Orenstein<\/a>, \u201cenvision a world in which the best ideas\u2014regardless of where or whom they come from\u2014will have a chance to be heard and shape society and the world.\u201d Kamy Wicoff and I, in our She Writes credo<\/a>, believe in “empower[ing] and amplify[ing] the voices of women and girls who have not otherwise have been heard\u201d and \u201cin building a platform upon which all of us can stand.\u201d<\/p>\n

How do these ventures seek to accomplish these goals? They “increase critical attention to contemporary women\u2019s writing” and “further transparency around gender equality issues in contemporary literary culture” (VIDA<\/a>). They protest the omission of women\u2019s writing from the pages of career-making journals (VIDA) and from the front-door forums that feed other expressions of thought leadership, punditry, and public influence (OEP). They forge relationships with editors and media institutions that share the mission of changing who narrates the world (OEP). They disrupt the very system they believe excludes women (and others more traditionally without \u2018connections\u2019) by creating an alternative press (SWP, led by Kamy and the indomitable Brooke Warner).<\/p>\n

And in this multi-faceted fight for women\u2019s share and shaping of public voice, what constitutes a quest for equality and what constitutes a quest for liberation? Feel free to share thoughts here, if you have them.\u00a0 Join us* at Roosevelt University tomorrow,<\/a> if in Chicago, and tune in later to an NPR station (I\u2019ll post the link here in this space) for more.<\/p>\n

*Fellow panelists are:<\/p>\n

Jill S. Tietjen, President, Board of the National Women\u2019s Hall of Fame; Author \u201cHerStory: A Timeline of Women who Changed America,\u201d electrical engineer and CEO of Technically Speaking; Inductee of Colorado Women\u2019s Hall of Fame<\/p>\n

Carol Adams, PhD, President and CEO, DuSable Museum of African American History; Ebony Magazine\u2019s \u201cPower 100,\u201d Crain\u2019s \u201c2012 List,\u201d the Illinois Arts Council Governor\u2019s Award in the Arts, and the Outstanding Humanitarian Award from the NAACP<\/p>\n

Cecilia A. Conrad, PhD, Vice-President, MacArthur Fellows Program; chairs the Congressionally mandated Committee on Equal Opportunities in Sciences and Engineering, an advisory committee to the National Science Foundation; Author \u201cAfrican Americans in the U.S. Economy”<\/p>\n

Marjorie Jolles, PhD, Associate Professor and Acting Director, Women\u2019s and Gender Studies, Roosevelt University, Author \u201cFashion Talks: Undressing the Power of Style”<\/p>\n

Moderator: Betty M. Bayer, PhD, Senior Fellow, The Martin Marty Center, University of Chicago; Professor, Women\u2019s Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges<\/p>\n

Co-sponsored by Roosevelt University, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Illinois Institute of Technology, Shimer College<\/p>\n

PS. Go Bears!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I invite you to follow me on Facebook<\/a> and Twitter<\/a>, subscribe<\/a> to my occasional newsletter to keep posted, and come visit me at www.deborahsiegelphd.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here I sit contemplating equality, the topic of a panel I\u2019m on tomorrow, surrounded by jubilant Bears fans streaming out from Soldier Field. My partner and twins are busy visiting penguins, dolphins, and whales, while I\u2019m illegally parked, waiting in my car. Who else but a non-jock family (and recent Midwest transplants) would head for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1902,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21107],"tags":[23060,31086,25767,25803,25802,31088],"class_list":["post-7720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mama-w-pen","tag-kim-kardashian","tag-lena-dunham","tag-she-writes","tag-she-writes-press","tag-the-oped-project","tag-vida"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1902"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7720"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7750,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7720\/revisions\/7750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}