Spring 2025
Greetings from your DFC Co-Chairs!
Thank you for your support of the DFC, its people, and its mission to support feminist pedagogy, research, and action. We are inspired to lead such a dynamic group of scholars, teachers, and practitioners as your 2024-25 Co-Chairs.
Ongoing events in Washington, D.C. and some individual states, have left many of us with questions about the future of higher education. Many institutions feel they are on unsteady ground with faculty and students targeted and budgets in peril. One may ask: where to turn? The answer is– to each other and our networks of support within the DFC.
With this in mind, our priorities for the division center around:
- Providing a supportive space for members as we navigate the current social and political realities;
- Advocating for feminist-based pedagogy, research, and activism;
- Increasing transparency as to the Division’s undertakings;
- Having a visible presence at the ASC annual meeting;
- Collaborating with other divisions in the ASC; and
- Focusing on the long-term financial stewardship of the division.
Activities and initiatives around these goals will unfold as our term continues. Already we have supported the work of the Diversity and Inclusivity (D&I) committee to host the online forum we had on March 28, 2025 when members discussed the recent challenges to feminism, DEI, higher education, and academic research. We are also co-sponsoring a panel at the upcoming ASC annual meeting (2025) on “Critical Scholarship in the Current Times” with the Division on People of Color and Crime (DPCC) and the Division on Queer Criminology (DQC). This will be added to our regular array of DFC-sponsored panels and workshops.
Further, the Division’s journal, Feminist Criminology, continues under the leadership of two excellent co-editors, Vera Lopez, and Lisa Pasko, and has several exciting pieces of research in the pipeline that speak to our times. We are also working with the Division of International Criminology (DIC) on a proposal for a special issue of the Journal International Criminology about global feminist criminology.
However, our membership has declined somewhat in the last few years. We would like to remind everyone to make sure they have paid their dues for 2025 and to consider inviting colleagues, particularly junior faculty and graduate students, who may benefit from our networking opportunities and conference events.
We are grateful for our board’s and committees’ work as the division facilitates events and opportunities for our members. (We are looking for additional committee members in a couple of key areas, so do consider letting us know you would like to volunteer!).
Finally, thank you to all our members–long-standing and new!–for your engagement with, service to, and support of the division.
Please drop us a line with any thoughts, comments, or to volunteer for a committee:
- Staci Strobl (sstrobl@su.edu)
- Sarah Fischer (sfischer@marymount.edu)
Best regards,
Sarah Fischer and Staci Strobl
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