Community Associates Welcomed to Five College Women's Studies Research Center

Since its founding in 1991, the Five College Women's Studies Research Center has broadened the base of women's studies by welcoming nonacademics as well as college professors among its resident researchers. And this month, the center is starting a new program designed specifically for nonfaculty community members who want to research women's issues.

The Community Associates Program will bring six community-based researchers to the center in Dickinson House to work on self-designed projects. For up to one year, the community associates will join some fifteen other scholars in women's studies, drawn largely from college and university faculties around the world. The combination brings together activists and academics, theorists and "practitioners" of women's issues.

The first community associates are: Susan Clarke of South Hadley High School (whose topic is "Midlife Women High School Teachers: Models of Transition for Adolescent Students"); Judith C. Harper of DIAL/SELF in Greenfield ("The Impact of Welfare Reform on Teen Parents in Rural Communities"); Linda Meccouri of Holyoke Community College ("Making It: Resilient Women Overcoming Adversity"); Dana Tracy of Springfield's Family Planning Council ("Barriers to Breast-Feeding among Low-Income Women"); Karen O'Meara Pullen of Wilbraham and Monson Academy ("Gender Equity Network: Creating Advocacy for the Education of Young Women"); and Tanagra Melgarejo of Holyoke's Housing Discrimination Project ("Latinas in Their Own Voices: Living with Housing Segregation in the Pioneer Valley").

Each associate will work with a faculty partner, be part of work-in-progress critiques and monthly seminars, have access to the center's research resources and to the Valley's vast community of other women's studies scholars, and give a public talk about her work. The new program allows associates to work at the center part time as their job schedules permit. This arrangement is far more flexible than those at other women's studies centers, which accept only academics and require a full-time, year-long commitment from researchers.

Gail Hornstein, director of the center, says, "We see the Community Associates Program as a collaborative undertaking where academics will learn from activists about how things work in the real world, and community-based researchers will have an opportunity to reflect on their work, consider new directions, and benefit from interdisciplinary interchange." In addition to vast library and computer-based research resources, the center offers a wealth of human resources. "We have what is perhaps the largest concentration of women's studies scholars and researchers in the country--and maybe the world--here in the Valley," Hornstein explains. "There are more than 300 faculty with a primary research or teaching interest in women's studies, and we have a very large activist community as well. People would come from almost anywhere to be part of such a vibrant and diverse feminist community."