Ithaca College

Women's and Gender Studies (WGST)and the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) announce the fifth event of an on-going collaboration, F2F:  Faculty to Faculty Salons, on Thursday, April 22, at 7:30 p.m.  

The sixth F2F salon features an interview with Dr. Sumru Atuk, Assistant Professor, Department of Politics at Ithaca College.  Dr. Alicia Swords, Department of Sociology conducts the interview.  Register in advance for this meeting: 

https://ithaca.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAkdOCorD4iHNwoHN7d5b-_VqFxkYIc2ECh 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. 

Dr. Sumru Atuk is Assistant Professor of Politics and affiliated with Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Ithaca College. Her research interests include feminist political theory, modern and contemporary political theory, gender-based violence, femicide/feminicide, and digital political participation.  

She uses theory to understand and to transform the field while acknowledging that contextual knowledges morph theories and lead to new ones. Currently, she is working on a book project on femicide in Turkey, focusing on the state actors’ roles in enabling the killing of women due to institutionalized gendered power relations.   

Dr. Alicia Swords is Associate Professor of Sociology and affiliated with Women and Gender Studies and Latin American Studies at Ithaca College. Her research and teaching use political-economic, ethnographic, and engaged approaches to social change and social movements in the United States and Latin America. She has recently published about organizational change, food justice, and neo-Zapatista network politics.  

She is currently working on a book that brings a social movement approach to social change in the United States. Building on twenty years of engagement with efforts to build a movement to end poverty led by the poor, her work is dedicated to advancing and exploring the ideas that transformative change requires historical study, overcoming interlocking oppressions, and feminist, revolutionary politics. 

Employing the master class model, these engaging participatory salons feature senior faculty members interviewing early and mid-career WGST-affiliated faculty members about their research and their journeys to becoming scholars. Each semester will feature salons with different faculty interviewers and interviewees. 

The purpose of the salons is to showcase our feminist, anti-racist, decolonialist faculty on the Ithaca College campus, with a focus on their scholarship.  We are inviting students to enter into the discipline of Women's and Gender Studies by listening to the faculty discussing their work and current debates and controversies in their disciplines. 

The 75-minute salons will employ a master class model of guided conversation and then engagement with questions from attendees. They will wrap up with takeaways from participants both live and in the chat. 

During the pandemic, “F2F” has emerged as an acronym for face-to-face or embodied instruction or meetings.  Our salons will expand “F2F” to unfold other meanings and possibilities, such as Feminist to Feminist, Field to Field, Festival to Festival, Friend to Friend. 

Please join us immediately after the F2F interview for a brief (15 minutes) celebration of the new Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies interdisciplinary major, approved this spring by NYSED and to be launched in the fall of 2021.  This will be the first time in Ithaca College's history that students have been able to major in women's, gender and sexuality studies. It is a moment to be marked, and we hope you will join us as we do so. 

For further information, contact Dr. Claire Gleitman, gleitman@ithaca.edu or Dr. Patricia Zimmermann, patty@ithaca.edu