Center for the Arts

Public Art, Public Policy

Art, Public Policy: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue on Title IX and the Clery Act

Across the country, the safety of women on university and college campuses is receiving renewed attention. This panel discussion will examine how different academic, professional, and creative disciplines are responding to the issue. Panelists from the fields of art, law, communications, and rape crisis counseling will also explore where interdisciplinary collaborations can contribute to making college campuses safe and welcoming for women.

Panelists

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh – Artist in Residence, Northeastern Center for the Arts
Martha F. Davis – Moderator and Professor of Law
Aziza Ahmed – Associate Professor of Law
Greg Goodale – Associate Professor of Communication Studies

Partners: Northeastern Center for the Arts, NuLawLab, Communication Studies

Topics: Artists in Residence

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is an African-American and Iranian artist perhaps best known for the “Stop Telling Women to Smile” public art series. This series addresses gender-based street harassment, a serious issue that affects women world-wide, including on college campuses. “Stop Telling Women to Smile” is a series of portraits of women who have talked with Fazlalizadeh about their own experiences with street harassment. Fazlalizadeh adds statements to the portraits, such as “Stop telling women to smile,” “My name is not baby, shorty, sexy, sweetie, honey, pretty” or “My outfit is not an invitation.” The artist’s goal is two-fold: to create a bold presence for women in an environment where they are often made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe and to stop men from harassing women by helping them to realize their actions and comments are not okay.

Martha F. Davis

Professor Davis teaches Women’s Rights Lawyering, Constitutional Law and Professional Responsibility. She is also a faculty director for the law school’s Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy. Professor Davis has written widely on women’s rights, poverty and human rights. In addition to her numerous articles, she recently co-edited Bringing Human Rights Home, a three-volume work chronicling the US human rights movement. In 2008,Bringing Human Rights Home was named one of the “best books in the field of human rights” by the US Human Rights Network; an abridged version was published in 2009 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Professor Davis’s book, Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, received the Reginald Heber Smith Award for distinguished scholarship on the subject of equal access to justice, and was also honored by the American Bar Association in its annual Silver Gavel competition. Recently, she filed anamicus brief arguing for the relevance of international law in a domestic force feeding case. Prior to joining the law faculty in 2002, Professor Davis was vice president and legal director for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. As a women’s rights practitioner, she was counsel in a number of cases before the US Supreme Court, including Nguyen v. INS, a challenge to sex-based citizenship laws that Professor Davis argued before the court. Professor Davis has also served as a fellow at the Bunting Institute, as the first Kate Stoneman Visiting Professor of Law and Democracy at Albany Law School and as a Soros Reproductive Rights Fellow. During 2008-2009, Professor Davis was a visiting fellow at the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, and a non-resident fellow of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Professor Davis chairs the board of directors of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative and serves on the editorial board of the Harvard School of Public Health’s publication Health and Human Rights. She is also an appointed member of the Massachusetts State Advisory Committee of the US Commission on Civil Rights.

Aziza Ahmed

Professor Ahmed is an expert in health law, human rights, property law, international law, and development. Her interdisciplinary scholarship focuses on issues of both domestic and international law. She teaches Property Law, Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights, and International Health Law: Governance, Development, and Rights. In addition to this work, Professor Ahmed also examines challenges facing Muslim minority communities post 9/11. Professor Ahmed holds a J.D. from the University of California Berkeley, an MS in Population and International Health from the Harvard School of Public Health, and a BA from Emory University. Prior to joining the Northeastern faculty, Professor Ahmed was a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health Program on International Health and Human Rights. She came to that position after a Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship with the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS (ICW). At ICW Professor Ahmed engaged in numerous human rights projects pertaining to law and health. Professor Ahmed has worked on legal issues in a variety of country contexts including South Africa, Namibia, India, the United States and the Caribbean, and has worked with various United Nations agencies and international and domestic non-governmental organizations. Professor Ahmed served as an expert member of the Technical Advisory Group on HIV and the Law convened by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and as an expert for the American Bar Association. She is on the board of the Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE) and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). Professor Ahmed has been a peer referee for numerous publications including the Lancet, the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Global Public Health, the Journal of the International AIDS Society, American Journal of Public Health, and the Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She has also served as a grants referee for several funding institutions. Professor Ahmed has received grants from the Ford Foundation and the Northeastern University School of Law Health Law and Policy Seed Grant Initiative.

Greg Goodale

Dr. Greg Goodale is the 2011 winner of Northeastern University’s Excellence-in-Teaching Award. He currently serves as one of eight Teaching Excellence Mentors, which means that he helps other Northeastern University instructors to become better at teaching through the Center for Innovation and Excellence in Teaching and Learning. Inspired by 14 teachers in his family and the extraordinary students he has taught at the University of Illinois and Northeastern University, he has recently completed his newest book, A Professor’s Advice to his Students, which is being considered for publication. Dr. Goodale is a graduate of George Mason University (BA and MA), the University of Virginia School of Law (JD), and the University of Illinois (PhD) where he performed research in Rhetoric and American History. A former lawyer, lobbyist, and congressional aide, he continues his interest in democracy and in particular how American citizenship intersects with race, gender, species and disability. As a public advocate (mostly for people with disabilities), Dr. Goodale brings his Washington, DC experience into the classroom and into his scholarship. That experience is now used to lead classes that advocate on behalf of foster children (Advocacy Workshop), victims of human trafficking and disabled children (Advocacy Writing) and at-risk girls (Public Speaking). Dr. Goodale’s research lies at the intersection of three key themes in an emerging philosophy called Post-Humanism. This intersection undermines the dominance of vision as a way of organizing the world into categories and classes in favor of rethinking concepts like sex, race, species and ability. His books, Arguments About Animal Ethics and Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age, and his journal articles like “Black and White: Vestiges of Biracialism in American Discourse” and “The Presidential Sound” are examples of Post-Humanist scholarship. Dr. Goodale has completed his next monograph, The Invention of “Man,” and has begun to work on a new book project tentatively titled “Against Truth.” His scholarship on sound has been quoted in political magazines like The New Republic and Influences l’officiel des idees and news radio programs.