On Tuesday, Sept. 27, the Intercollegiate Feminist Center held its first open house of the year. The IFC, located at the foot of Scripps in Vita Nova Hall, offers programs, resources, and support to students and faculty at the 7Cs who are concerned with gender issues across the campuses. The Center’s services are oriented toward building community involvement, especially around issues of social justice. At the event, the Center distributed information about the resources it offers, including a course list of Women’s Studies courses at the Colleges, its own library, a website and mailing list with information about events and internship opportunities, and periodic “student activist networking lunches” for students involved with social justice organizations.
Susan Castagnetto, the coordinator of the IFC and a current Scripps professor says that the Center is “definitely underutilized, especially the library.” The library–a casual lending library located within the Center–is open daily, and offers a variety of resources, including literature, films, senior theses, and magazines, all geared towards feminism. Susan described how she feels like people are bombarded with information throughout the day, so effective communication can become difficult. Fundamentally, the Center is just a nice place where anyone can come and hang out.
This year, the IFC has a visiting scholar, Deborah Mindry, a research anthropologist at the UCLA Center for Culture and Health. At the IFC, she is working to complete her book, I am HIV: Ordinary People Daring to Live and Make Change in South Africa, which “challenges conceptions of Africans as victims of HIV and examines the complex realities of people living with HIV, their determination to survive and to make change in their communities.” Mindry is also working to organize a symposium on Women’s Health and Empowerment, which will be held by the IFC in spring 2017.
The IFC is open from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday.