BY ANNE SISSON RUNYAN
The author was one of three 2020 recipients of the AAUP’s Georgina M. Smith award, which is given to those who have provided exceptional leadership in a given year in improving the status of academic women or in academic collective bargaining and, through that work, improved the profession in general. Because award winners will not be able to receive their awards in person this year, we have invited them to make remarks on Academe Blog. See the announcement about the award.
It was wonderful to learn that I was a corecipient of the 2020 Georgina M. Smith Award for my recent and career-long contributions to advancing women in the academy through my union, scholarly, curricular, pedagogical, and organizational work, and I thank the University of Cincinnati AAUP collective bargaining chapter and its director Eric Palmer for nominating me as well as the AAUP Georgina M. Smith Award selection committee for choosing me. It was also wonderful to learn that I would share this award with my longtime colleague and friend Rabab Abdulhadi, with whom I have served on international and gender studies panels and whom I have hosted at my various institutions many times since the 1980s to speak on her courageous work, often in collaboration with Simona Sharoni, against the occupation of Palestine and for Arab and transnational feminisms. The award also came just after the shift in the name of the AAUP Committee on the Status of Women in the Academic Profession, which I led for several years, to the Committee on Gender and Sexuality in the Academic Profession. I had begun conversations on taking a more intersectional approach to the work of this committee in view of the intellectual shifts in what is now more typically called women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and was pleased to see this approach reflected in the change of the committee’s name and focus.
The award also came when I and my co-editor Marianne Marchand had signed our contract with Routledge to produce the third edition of Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites and Resistances. With the pandemic’s stark exposure of world racial, gendered, and economic inequalities and injustices as well as the failings of the neoliberal academy and neoliberalism more generally, we and our contributors are mapping and analyzing the intersections of multiple pandemics—the crises caused by inequitable health care and neoliberal capitalism, right-wing extremism, militarism, racism, heterosexism, and environmental devastation. At the same time, progressive resistances to these interlinked pandemics are on the upswing around the globe, telling us that there are alternatives and that they are being created on the ground by feminist-informed social and labor movement forces.
Among such alternatives is another effort I led that had just been completed by the time of the award—a gender and race study of the Cincinnati city government by an interdisciplinary research team at the University of Cincinnati as part of the Cities for CEDAW national campaign to get municipalities across the US to observe the principles of the 1979 UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women that the US, among only a handful of other countries, has failed to ratify. In it, we observed before the recent uprisings for racial justice that far too much of the city budget went to reactive public safety in comparison to proactive social welfare spending. Among many other recommendations, we urged the city to create a permanent body for monitoring progress on gender and race equity and to conduct continuous analysis of how the city budget can be more responsive to gender and race equity.
This award came at a time when our universities, research, and pedagogies are being further strained by the pandemic, producing even more inequities and the need for greater struggles on the part of unionized and nonunionized workers to protect faculty, staff, students, and the academic mission. At the same time, many of us have been engaged in producing statements on anti-racism for our professional associations and departments. As a vice president of the International Studies Association a member of the executive board of its Status of Women Committee, I proposed that such a statement denouncing racism in all its forms across the globe be made by that body, which was collectively drafted and subsequently posted in early June 2020.
During these extraordinary times that call for an extraordinary level of organizing, scholarly attention, and care about injustice—and for those differentially impacted by it—receiving the Georgina M. Smith award this year is particularly meaningful and uplifting to me. Such awards, even in ordinary times, buoy faculty in their organizing, scholarly, and pedagogical work for social justice and make the statement that such work is greatly valued and needed in the academy. Although the award could not be given in person this year at the biennial meeting—a task I enjoyed performing several times for earlier recipients when I led what was then Committee W and served on the selection committee—it is no less important, and I am so grateful for it.
Guest blogger Anne Sisson Runyan is a professor of political science and a former head of women’s studies at the University of Cincinnati.
