Reflecting on Community: A Vision for the Future

As part of the National Collegiate Honors Council’s (2022) collection of essays about the value of honors to its graduates (1967–2019), the author reflects on the personal and professional impacts of the honors experience. Being asked to reflect on the values I gained from my honors experience has been such a privilege, and I hope that my words can serve as a reminder to all who read them that we should never underestimate the power of reflecting on our practice—whatever that may be, inside of academia or otherwise. Having completed my undergraduate career five years ago and wanting to be very intentional with my response, I sat with this question for a few days and thought deeply about all the rewarding experiences I had through SUNY Brockport’s Honors College. After moving beyond some of the practical skills and values that I gained through the academic rigor of my coursework, there was one word that came to mind which embodies both a core pillar of my experience and a value that stays with me today: community

Transgender Employment Rights, Discrimination & Litigation: Expanding Understandings and Opening Doors

The United States’ legal history shows a record of minorities being disenfranchised simply because of who they are. Humans do not have control over certain features, such as race, nationality, sex, gender, or physical ability. However, those who fall outside the “norm” of all of these things are treated as if they do, as if they choose to inhabit a specific race, sex, or disabled body. Given that lawyers and judges are just as much social beings as everyone else, they are not immune to these prejudices. Therefore, these sentiments often linger in courtrooms and are used in arguments to deny peoples some of their most basic rights. People within the transgender community tend to fall outside of society’s neatly constructed gender binary and, like so many other groups, face marginalization in various areas of social life for being different. From education to employment and marriage to incarceration, the trans community encounters discrimination almost every step of the way. In attempts to remedy these wrongs, many transgendered individuals have begun turning to litigation in recent years. There has been, and continues to be, a particularly high volume of cases filed regarding employment discrimination. While discrimination still runs rampant throughout society, the purpose of this paper is to introduce a brief history of the transgender movement and trace the extent to which four decades of litigation have redefined sex and subsequently improved employment rights for transgendered citizens in the United States of America

Why Women? Gender Mainstreaming in Undergraduate International Relations Discourse

Over the last 30 years, feminist international relations (IR) and gendered approaches to foreign policy and security have been gaining attention in both the academy and in government. However, the systems and institutions that exist in our country are strategically designed to maintain patriarchy and privilege masculinity, so this work isn’t necessarily permeating into what is taught to students in undergraduate classrooms. Using a feminist lens, I analyze if and how women, gender, and feminism are being integrated into undergraduate IR courses at various public higher education institutions upstate New York. I consider the various arguments cited by professors for not teaching feminist IR and the potential consequences of continuing to exclude feminism and gender from undergraduate international relations courses. I conclude that the only way to subvert the patriarchal dominance of both knowledge and practice is to become more curious about what we’re teaching and learning in international relations

Make America Curious Again: Integrating Feminism into Undergraduate International Relations Studies

The systems and institutions that exist in our country are strategically designed to maintain patriarchy and privileged masculinity. Complacency of the majority ensures that these structures remain intact. In this paper, I consider the exclusion of feminism and discussions of gender from undergraduate political science and international studies courses, and why it is critical for us to be paying attention to it now perhaps more than ever before. I suggest that this exclusion only helps to ensure that patriarchal dominance continues into the future. We have the potential to change by adopting a more curious mindset

Disrupting the Lean: Performing a 2016 Declaration of Sentiments

Inspired by the spirit of disruption, this article narrates the making of a “2016 Declaration of Sentiments,” invented in a roundtable, “Disrupting the Lean: Performing a 2016 Declaration of Sentiments,” at the fifth Biennial Seneca Falls Dialogues (SFD). We open the essay with a brief theoretical overview that informs manifestos written in a feminist theory or senior seminar course that take up questions of gender equity, labor, and acts of resistance. We follow with excerpts from these manifestos as read in the roundtable, closing the essay with a “2016 Declaration of Sentiments,” collaboratively authored and recited by roundtable participants. Looking back but thinking forward, we give you our words and our voice as we seek to bring activism and agency back to Seneca Falls

Our Voices

Our voices are about rediscovering our curiosity and exposing that capitalism is the tragedy in society that distances women from equality

Disrupting the Lean: Performing a 2016 Declaration of Sentiments

Inspired by the spirit of disruption, this article narrates the making of a “2016 Declaration of Sentiments,” invented in a roundtable, “Disrupting the Lean: Performing a 2016 Declaration of Sentiments,” at the fifth Biennial Seneca Falls Dialogues (SFD). We open the essay with a brief theoretical overview that informs manifestos written in a feminist theory or senior seminar course that take up questions of gender equity, labor, and acts of resistance. We follow with excerpts from these manifestos as read in the roundtable, closing the essay with a “2016 Declaration of Sentiments,” collaboratively authored and recited by roundtable participants. Looking back but thinking forward, we give you our words and our voice as we seek to bring activism and agency back to Seneca Falls