Planning Meeting Notes

On Friday, Sept. 8th, the newly formed Feminist Solidarity Group Planning Committee met to discuss possible activities for the 2006-2007 school year. The following is a brief summary of the ideas we as a committee were most interested in for this year. Members are already working on putting these events together, so look out for us to contact you to help and/or attend. Definitely comment here or get in touch with a Planning Committee member if you'd like to be involved with planning one of these events. We'll announce upcoming events in more detail at the potluck Sept. 22nd and as they get closer.
Planning committee, if I've forgotten anything, please leave it in the comments here!

For the Fall 2006 Semester:
Diversity and Sensitivity Workshop from the Gender and Sexuality Center:
We are working on scheduling a Diversity and Sensitivity Training Workshop for the English/Comp Lit Departments through the GSC and Safe Space. Here is a link that gives more information about this GSC service for UT students, faculty, and staff who want to find out more about being allies to LGBTQ students and community members. This will take place at the end of September, and we'll be working to get the word out about it to as many people as possible.
Panel on Feminism in Our Disciplines:
This is one of the earliest ideas we talked about when we formed this group. We'd like to get a group of graduate students together to talk about their experiences talking about feminism and sexuality issues in different disciplines in the English and Comp Lit departments. We're looking for volunteers to speak from the perspective of students and instructors in as many areas of study as we can. This event will be held in October.
Panel for Parents, Expecting Parents, and Potential Future Parents:
The number of parents in our department is growing! This panel will feature grad student and possibly faculty speakers discussing their experiences and challenges as parents and expecting parents in academia. They will also answer questions from students who are considering having children in grad school and will discuss the parent/non-parent divide among academics (I made that last part up, but I hope they'll do all that!). This event will be held in November.

For the Spring 2007 semester:
Panel on mentoring:
Our new mentor program generated a lot of enthusiasm in the department. This panel will give mentors and mentees a chance to discuss their experiences, and will feature faculty and advanced graduate student speakers addressing the benefits of mentoring and being mentored throughout their academic careers.
Female Faculty Symposium:
We'd like to ask female members of our faculty to come and talk to us about their experiences with feminism, sexism, family challenges, male colleagues, and all those career issues that we as feminists worry about but don't usually get to discuss in an academic setting. If you have a faculty member you'd particularly like to have speak, or who you think would be interested in talking about her career with us, please let her and us know.
Grad Student Round Table on Having a Social Life in Graduate School:
Continuing our series on things we don't usually talk about at school, the Planning Committee would like to gauge you guys' interest in a grad-students-only round table about dating, relationships, and the social struggles of being in a PhD program.

On the Blog:
We had several ideas for soliciting blog entries that are a little more content-focused that meeting announcements and minutes. First, we'd like to work this year on a comprehensive set of tips for incoming students, covering some of the details of financial aid, our insurance, department administration, and other things that we wish we'd known earlier! Kate is setting up blog entries for this project already, so please contribute your tips here, and we'll compile them next summer to give to incoming students next fally.
We also have some ideas for sharing our lives as grad students with each other on the blog, just doing some writing about our schedules and the ways we study and work. We'll be asking you guys to volunteer to write these entries, and we'll talk more about the project at the pot luck.

Finally, we will also talk at the potluck about whether we should go through the process of becoming an official student group, and the implications (particularly the financial implications) of that decision for us.