Institute scholars share research at academic conferences
Crossley and Nichols
At academic gatherings across the globe, Clayman Institute affiliates have been sharing research with their peers and gaining valuable feedback on work in development. The topics and disciplines reflect the great diversity within gender research, from scholars at all stages of their careers. Below, learn more about the researchers and their work.
Zaith Lopez
Lopez, a recent graduate dissertation fellow at the Institute, presented to the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) conference in Poznań, Poland. He appeared on a panel titled, "Making bodies, making masculinities," and presented the paper, "Rajarse: The body, masculinity, and the therapeutic in anexos in Tijuana, Mexico." Lopez explains: "Drug addicts in Mexico have established mutual-aid, residential drug recovery centers otherwise known as 'anexos.' Influenced by 12-step philosophy, these institutions are highly popular and a response to the absence of large-scale public health initiatives. In this paper, I examine therapeutic processes as gendered, specifically how in three male-only drug recovery centers in Tijuana, Mexico, masculinity mediates their therapeutic practices."
Alison Dahl Crossley
Alison Dahl Crossley, Institute executive director, presented at the American Sociological Association annual conference in New York City. Her talk, “The Offline Impact of #MeToo: Christine Blasey Ford’s Letter Archive and Survivors’ Responses,” focused on one of the Institute’s ongoing in-house research projects, which is led by Crossley, Research Director Bethany Nichols, and Director Adrian Daub. Crossley describes the research: "In this paper, we argue that public disclosures of sexual assault serve a powerful purpose. Not only do public testimonies and resulting media attention such as by Christine Blasey Ford allow individuals to disclose experiences that previously were shameful and stigmatized, but such testimonies also motivated political engagement."
Bethany Nichols
Also at the ASA conference, Institute Research Director Nichols presented “Intimate Partner Violence and Covid-19,” featuring the Institute’s research examining experiences of intimate partner violence for individuals and service providers. Nichols, Crossley, and Daub also share authorship on this work. For this initiative, the research team investigated how the Covid-19 pandemic impacted intimate partner violence survivors’ abilities to receive help and service providers’ capacities to provide care. Some questions that were considered included: In extreme circumstances, like a pandemic, how do survivors’ help-seeking behaviors change? How do support services and communities respond in the face of these extreme circumstances?
Genevieve Smith
Postdoctoral Fellow Genevieve Smith offered three presentations at the recent ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) in Montreal, a leading conference on AI and ethics. The three presentations subsequently were published in the proceedings as peer-reviewed papers, for all of which Smith served as lead author. Smith says all of the papers align with her research agenda of investigating algorithmic biases and harms and examining alternative, more responsible and equitable, paradigms for AI technologies. The papers are:
- Reimagining Open Source and Openness in AI: Co-Creating Responsible Technological Futures
- Guardrails versus Gatekeepers: Understanding Product Managers' Ethical Decision-Making in Generative AI
- Standard Language Ideology in AI-Generated Language
In addition, Smith delivered a keynote address titled "Reaching the Promise of AI and Equitable Financial Inclusion" at a conference on “The Future of Productive Credit.” Smith presented her research concerning the implications of AI in financial inclusion, and how credit can be more responsible and equitable, at the invitation-only conference in London hosted by the World Bank and the Gates Foundation.
Karen Offen
The work and impact of historian and Institute Senior Scholar Karen Offen was featured by the Western Society for French History with a conference session honoring her books. Material from the 2024 conference in San Francisco is now available online in both written and video form. The conference addressed Offen’s two pathbreaking books, The Woman Question in France, 1400-1870, and Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870-1920, both published by Cambridge University Press.
The video appears on the Society’s YouTube channel as “Roundtable: Gendering French History: The Significance of Karen Offen’s Books on the Woman Question.” The edited transcript can be viewed in the Journal of the Western Society for French History (vol. 51 (2025), 4, pp. 28-48). An extended, comprehensive review of Offen’s two books is available online; additional downloadable material is available from Cambridge University Press.
