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Speaker Series | October 2023

Gender Equality and the Economy: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Levy Institute Research Program of Gender Equality and the Economy: A Speaker Series
The Gender Equality and the Economy Program of the Levy Economics Institute hosts a speaker series with practitioners and scholars across disciplines from around the globe to address the ever-relevant topic of “Gender Equality and the Economy.” Speakers will present their research and discuss differing approaches to economic analyses through a gender lens. The series highlights the importance of taking an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the implications of how gender and economic inequalities intersect in history, policy, and the everyday.

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UPCOMING EVENTS IN THE SERIES:
Discussing Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought

Monday, February 3rd, 5 pm EST
Blithewood Conference Room

REGISTER TO ATTEND ON ZOOM

Join the Levy Institute's Program on Gender Equality and the Economy and Bard's Global and International (GIS) Program as we host Susanna Ferguson to discuss her recent book, Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought, which traces the political power of motherhood and childrearing in Arabic thought. Ferguson will sit down with Levy's Belle Cheves and Bard's Middle Eastern Studies' Ziad Dallal to discuss her work. In Labors of Love, Ferguson reveals how debates around raising children became foundational to feminist, Islamist, and nationalist politics alike—opening up conversations about civilization, society, freedom, temporality, labor, and democracy. While these debates led to expansions in girls' education and women writers' authority, they also attached the fate of nations to women's unwaged labor in the home. Ferguson thus reveals why women and the family have been stumbling blocks for representative regimes around the world. She shows how Arab women's writing speaks to global questions—the devaluation of social reproduction under capitalism, the stubborn maleness of the liberal subject, and why the naturalization of embodied, binary gender difference has proven so difficult to overcome.

Susanna Ferguson is a historian of women, gender, and intellectual life in the Eastern Mediterranean at Smith College. Her research focuses on how questions about gender, sex, and science shaped political imaginaries in the 19th- and 20-century Arab world. Ferguson's first book, Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought was published by Stanford University Press in September 2024. 

PREVIOUS EVENTS IN THE SERIES:
[POSTPONED] Well-Being Costs of Unpaid Care: Gendered Evidence from a Contextualized Time-Use Survey in India

[CANCELED] Racial, Ethnic, and Sex/Gender Disparities in Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias

Press Contact

Mark Primoff
Director of Communications
Phone: 845-758-7412
Fax: 845-758-7411
To request an interview, e-mail: [email protected]