'Centering' a Trans* Episteme: A Strategy for Advancing Women's and Gender Centers' Liberatory Praxis

• In Event: Thinking Trans*: Emergent Trans* Epistemologies in the Academy and Educational Space

Abstract

For the last four decades, feminist praxis in higher education has located the ongoing work of gender empowerment in college and university women's and gender centers (Cottledge, et al. forthcming; Davie, 2002). Nicolazzo's (2017) trans* epistemology expands upon this praxis: Centering of an historically invisible subject, conscious commitment to naming and destabilizing relations of dominance, and drawing on lived experience as data. This paper explores application of Nicolazzo's theory to the optimal functioning of women's and gender centers in higher education, inviting "thinking beyond and across bodies, positionalities, subjects, and affects" (Nicolazzo, 2017, p. 21) to advance greater human flourishing.

Presenter

• Susan Marine, Merrimack College