Julie Shayne (she/her/hers)

Teaching Professor

Julie Shayne

B.A. and M.A. Women Studies, San Francisco State University
Ph.D. Sociology, University of California Santa Barbara

Adjunct Teaching Professor
Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies
Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Faculty Associate, Center for Human Rights
University of Washington Seattle

Recipient of the University of Washington Bothell Distinguished Teaching Award, 2019

Office: UW1-142
Phone: 425-352-3182
Email: jshayne@uw.edu
Mailing Box: 358530, 18115 Campus Way NE, Bothell, WA 98011-8246

Teaching

I knew I wanted to become a professor a couple of weeks into my first Women’s Studies class. Teaching is my absolute favorite part of my job and I was truly honored to be the UW Bothell recipient of the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award in 2019. In general, my classes focus on politics, poverty, and resistance in the Global South, typically through the lenses of gender and feminism.  I passionately believe that as residents of the most powerful country in the world we are in part responsible for global policies implemented in our name and with our money.  It is therefore my goal to enable students to understand the historical and contemporary record regarding transnational policies and empower them to envision and create alternatives at all levels.  

My courses expose students to small and large-scale examples of grassroots resistance to political, economic, and social injustice.  In my classes I try and center the voices of marginalized communities. I want BIPOC students to see themselves represented in the assigned texts and in the histories studied in class. I want women and LGBTQ folks to feel connected to and not alienated by the course content. I consider myself an ally to marginalized students; “an unafraid educator with and for undocumented students and families.” I want students to leave my classes inspired to keep asking whose voices are we not hearing and why? Ultimately, I hope that students are empowered to translate personal political frustration into mobilization for social justice.

In all of my classes I center feminist knowledge, student led learning, and research. For example, I co-created the Feminist Community Archive of Washington (FCA-WA) when I developed my GWSS class “Histories and Movements of Gender and Sexuality” (BISGWS 302). UWB librarians Denise Hattwig and Dave Ellenwood, Kara Adams, Director of the CBLR office, and I created the FCA-WA and students do community-based research about local organizations to populate it. (We have published a paper about the assignment and archive in the Feminist Teacher. 27(1): 47-65. 2016 [2018]). Another feminist class project, also co-facilitated with Denise Hattwig, GWSS librarian Penelope Wood, and student peer facilitator & GWSS student Nicole Carter, is a zine called Badass Womxn in the Pacific Northwest. The entire class collectively produced an open-access, online and hard copy version which included 41 biographies of badass womxn in the PNW, original multilingual poetry and art, and more! This assignment happens in “Rad Womxn in the Global South” (BIS 227).

Recent blog posts by Julie Shayne on teaching and social justice are linked below:

Recent Courses Taught

BCORE 104 Revolution and Feminism in the Americas
BCORE 104/107 Place and Displacement in the Americas (co-taught with Professor Yolanda Padilla; co-taught with Jennifer Atkinson)
BCORE 115 Doing Gender Justice
BIS 227 Rad Womxn in the Global South
BIS 300 Interdisciplinary Inquiry: Social Movements
BISGST 303 History and Globalization
BISGWS 302 Histories and Movements of Gender and Sexuality
BIS 310 Women, Culture, and Development
BIS 490/BCULST 589 Culture and Resistance in the Americas
BIS 490 The Power of Feminist Writing (Read about Dr. Shayne’s Spring 2022 section)

Research/Scholarship

Current research

My most recent project is an open access book titled Persistence is Resistance: Celebrating 50 Years of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies. It is a collection with essays by a diverse group of  30+ contributors from 20+ institutions, representing GWSS programs at all types of schools, from HBCUs, to women’s colleges, to community colleges, to public universities. Authors are as early career as undergraduate students, alongside emeritus faculty. The book is divided into three sections: the history of GWSS, the praxis of GWSS, and doing GWSS. In addition to essays about everything from what to do with a GWSS degree, to Indigenous feminisms and GWSS, to the continued struggles of women of color in the academy, to the history of the first and only Africana Women’s Studies program, the book is punctuated by art and answers to “why GWSS?” by GWSS students and alumni from around the country, including several UW Bothell students.

The book captures many things I value in my scholarship and teaching: The collection is based on collaboration with students and centers their voices and art throughout, starting with the cover; it tells the story of GWSS from Black feminist and Women of Color feminist perspectives, through both the topics highlighted and the authors included; it keeps the Global South central to the GWSS project; it is open-access and thus available to anyone with access to a device, a hotspot, and an interest in GWSS, and most important, it advances the larger GWSS project, a goal that feels increasingly more urgent as time passes.     

Past Research

To date, my research has focused on gender, culture, resistance, revolution, and feminism in the Americas. I am also interested in the role knowledge production, the university, and academy writ-large play in resistance movements and vice versa, and more recently the history of Gender, Women, and Sexuality studies as both a social movement and scholarly interdiscipline. My last book is an edited collection titled Taking Risks: Feminist Activism and Research in the Americas (SUNY Press, 2014). Taking Risks is an interdisciplinary edited collection where contributors narrate stories of activism and activist scholarship. The essays are based on our textual analysis of interviews, oral histories, ethnography, video storytelling, and theater. We discuss many activist projects: the underground library movement in Cuba, theater exposing the femicide in Juárez, community radio in Venezuela, video archives in Colombia, exiled feminists in Canada, memory activism in Argentina, sex worker activists in Brazil, rural feminists in Nicaragua, and domestic violence organizations for Latina immigrants in Texas. In addition to sharing the social movements centered in each chapter, as editor, I asked the contributors to speak to two themes: telling stories and taking risks. The contributors – scholars/activists/artists – come from many disciplinary backgrounds, and several different nations in the Americas: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, and the US.

In 2009, They Used to Call Us Witches: Chilean Exiles, Culture, and Feminism was published by Lexington Books. They Used to Call Us Witches is a socio-political history which focuses on how leftist Chilean women exiles organized and articulated resistance in the anti-Pinochet solidarity movement of the 1970s and ‘80s with specific attention to culture, emotions, and gender. It also addresses the development of exile feminism in the diaspora in the post-dictatorship period. The book focuses on the case of Chileans in Vancouver, British Columbia. They Used to Call Us Witches was awarded the Pacific Sociological Association’s Distinguished Scholarship Award in 2011.

My first book is entitled The Revolution Question: Feminisms in El Salvador, Chile, and Cuba (Rutgers University Press, 2004.)  In it I discuss the ways that women participated in revolutionary movements in all three countries. I argue that women used traditional gender norms and all of the attendant assumptions about passivity to maneuver in hostile territory in ways distinct from that of men. As a result, women strengthened revolutionary movements in ways that men could not.  However, often their contributions were overlooked or even stifled which led to a frustration that in some cases was translated into feminism in the wake of the revolutionary movements.

Selected Publications