The 50th Anniversary celebrations of the Center for the Study of Women and Society committed to supporting research and creative practice that envisioned Feminist Futures. This charge has become ever more urgent this past year as we seem to be living now in a fight or flight mode, where each day a new crisis hijacks our attention and energies. In 2023, for instance, the wage gap for women widened after two decades. The fight to reverse this loss shrinks our capacity to work towards closing that gap, or to address how women of color make substantially less than 84 cents to the dollar. Yet, we must resist this temporality of crisis that mires us in a regressive present and forecloses our abilities to imagine a future. Thanks to your continued support, CSWS is uniquely privileged in offering space, time, and resources that enable faculty and students to attend to the unfinished projects of feminism. I hope you will enjoy the articles and interviews featured in this issue that provide a window into the field-changing work undertaken by our associates as they shape just and egalitarian feminist futures. 

Since our current undergraduate students will go into the world and shape the time to come, one of my strategic initiatives as director has been to expand the scope of CSWS to support undergraduate research, writing, creative practice, and professionalization. We launched a robust internship program in 2023 to help students gain on-the-job training in managing a non-profit. Our interns gain experience in marketing, communication, videography, event management, research, and writing. This year, fundraising and a grant from the Calderwood Foundation allowed us to launch two undergraduate initiatives—the CSWS Calderwood Seminars in Public Writing and the CSWS Summer STEAM Fellowships. Jack Evans, a doctoral student in history, taught our first Calderwood seminar in Spring 2025, titled, On Women’s Land: Public Writing on Women’s Writing and the Environment, to an enthusiastic group of students. We had a terrific response to the STEAM Fellowships, and with additional support from the Office of Research and Innovation we welcomed our first cohort of fellows and faculty mentors for Summer 2025. They worked on projects that engaged the CSWS commitment to intersectional research through the analytics of gender in fields ranging from biology and psychology to anthropology and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. We currently have three years of funding for these initiatives, but I do hope we can sustain CSWS’s support for undergraduate research and public-facing writing beyond this time frame. 
As funding sources shrink within the University and beyond and certain fields of inquiry are challenged and delegitimized by our current political dispensation, CSWS felt it was more important than ever to sponsor feminist research in an interdisciplinary and intersectional frame. Faculty grants now include a course buyout option so that associates can dedicate time to research and creative practice. We also strengthened our commitment to the Research Interest Groups (RIGs) and were able to fund a larger number of RIGs. Some of our most active RIGs are spearheaded by doctoral students, and we hope this expansion will provide some support as resources available for graduate education continue to dwindle. We have witnessed a dramatic increase in applications for graduate grants, and many worthy projects are not receiving the support they deserve. As the Center prepares its next Strategic Plan, we will make graduate funding a priority.  

Being in community is a critical need during these unsettling times and so we were excited to host several Open Houses where associates came together to strengthen existing ties and build new connections. These events were energizing and productive and allowed us to learn in an informal setting how we might better serve the needs of faculty, students, and community members at the University and beyond. In the same spirit, we initiated video projects to introduce our community to the exciting work being done by our faculty, students, and alumni. Featured on our website and archived on our YouTube channel, these interactions throw a spotlight on the impact our associates are making in academia and beyond. I urge you to go to our re-designed website and explore the cutting-edge research, innovative creative practices, and transformative community service that CSWS has been privileged to sponsor, support, and disseminate. In our effort to communicate with you more effectively, we always appreciate hearing from you as to how we might do better. Please reach out and tell us what you want to see! 

I would like to thank our Advisory Board for their advice, ideas, and guidance. This past year, the Board spent countless hours updating our governance documents and putting in place efficient, transparent, and thoughtful policies that reflected the Center’s mission and clarified our relationship to the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation. My gratitude as well to Professor A. R. Razdan and his team at OVPRI for supporting us with resources, signing on to our vision, generating ideas for funding new programming, and highlighting our contributions. My heartfelt appreciation to the CSWS team—our business manager Angie Hopkins and dissemination specialist Jenée Wilde, as well as a crack team of student workers who do so much with so little. 

Another election cycle came and went, and the US failed—once again—to elect a woman president. More significantly, the gender gap widened, especially among younger voters. Gender lies at the beating heart of our fraught political climate as the goals of liberty, equality, and justice feel unachievable for vast swathes of the population. Our current theme is Gender and Politics, and at a CSWS panel discussion processing the 2024 US Elections entitled “Gender as Target,” I witnessed despair, anger, and cynicism among colleagues, students, and community members in the audience, and yet people showed up and kept talking to one another. This is what feminists have always done well: Amidst disagreements and disappointments and while inhabiting vastly unequal structures, we have assumed the right to talk. At universities and cafes, at street protests and around kitchen tables, we keep talking. In so doing, perhaps we achieve what Danielle Allen has called “difference without domination” and renew our democracy. 

Thank you for all you do for CSWS, and with my warmest regards.

—Sangita Gopal is an associate professor of cinema studies and director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society.