Using case studies from universities throughout the nation, Doing Diversity in Higher Education examines the role faculty play in improving diversity on their campuses. The power of professors to enhance diversity has long been underestimated, their initiatives often hidden from view. Winnifred Brown-Glaude and her contributors uncover major themes and offer faculty and administrators a blueprint for conquering issues facing campuses across the country. Topics include how to dismantle hostile microclimates, sustain and enhance accomplishments, deal with incomplete institutionalization, and collaborate with administrators. The contributors' essays portray working on behalf of diversity as a genuine intellectual project rather than a faculty "service."

The rich variety of colleges and universities included provides a wide array of models that faculty can draw upon to inspire institutional change.

Rutgers University’s Douglass Residential College is the only college for women that is nested within a major public research university in the United States. Although the number of women’s colleges has plummeted from a high of 268 in 1960 to 38 in 2016, Douglass is flourishing as it approaches its centennial in 2018. To explore its rich history, Kayo Denda, Mary Hawkesworth, Fernanda H. Perrone examine the strategic transformation of Douglass over the past century in relation to continuing debates about women’s higher education.

The Douglass Century celebrates the college’s longevity and diversity as distinctive accomplishments, and analyzes the contributions of Douglass administrators, alumnae, and students to its survival, while also investigating multiple challenges that threatened its existence.  This book demonstrates how changing historical circumstances altered the possibilities for women and the content of higher education, comparing the Jazz Age, American the Great Depression, the Second World War, the post-war Civil Rights era, and the resurgence of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. Concluding in the present day, the authors highlight the college’s ongoing commitment to Mabel Smith Douglass’ founding vision, “to bring about an intellectual quickening, a cultural broadening in connection with specific training so that women may go out into the world fitted…for leadership…in the economic, political, and intellectual life of this nation.” In addition to providing a comprehensive history of the college, the book brings its subjects to life with eighty full-color images from the Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries.  
 

Over the past three decades, feminist scholars have rocked the foundation of academia by challenging long-established beliefs, contesting dominant research paradigms, and identifying new strategies of analysis. How are we to understand these feminist interventions? Do they capture a truth about race and gender that mainstream scholarship has missed? Do they provide important insights into the politics of knowledge? How do feminist uses of traditional research methods differ from their deployment by nonfeminist scholars? What is distinctive and innovative about feminist research?

Feminist Inquiry provides scholars and students with a comprehensive guide to methodological issues within feminist scholarship. Mary Hawkesworth presents lucid introductions to key philosophical debates about the nature of knowledge, an original account of feminist scholarship’s contributions to these debates, and a sophisticated assessment of the analytical tools that feminist scholars have created to improve understandings of the world. Drawing upon contentious debates concerning the incidence of rape, public support for reproductive rights, affirmative action, and welfare reform, Hawkesworth demonstrates how seemingly abstract questions about the nature of knowledge have palpable effects on the lives of contemporary women and men.

Feminist Inquiry makes epistemological debates—previously the exclusive preserve of philosophers—accessible to a wider audience, and demonstrates the practical and academic importance of these issues.

Traditional academic investigations of war seldom link armed conflict to practices of racialization or gendering. War and Terror: Feminist Perspectives provides a deeper understanding of the raced-gendered logics, practices, and effects of war.  Consisting of essays originally published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, this volume offers new insights into the complex dynamics of violent conflict and terror by investigating changing racial and gender formations within war zones and the collateral effects of war on race and gender dynamics in the context of two dozen armed struggles. Seldom-studied subjects such as the experiences of girl soldiers in Sierra Leone, female suicide bombers, and Pakistani mothers who recruit their sons for death missions are examined; women’s agency even under conditions of dire constraint is highlighted; and  the complex interplay of gender, race, nation, culture, and religion is illuminated in this wide-ranging collection.