Reflections of a Politically Engaged Scholar

Abstract

I was delighted to be invited to participate in this symposium in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Women and Politics program at Rutgers because, to put it bluntly, I do not believe I could do the work that I do within the discipline of political science—interdisciplinary and normative research informed by feminist scholarship, democratic theory, and sexuality studies with an eye to practice—if not for the program, which played a key role in legitimizing feminist scholarship within the discipline of political science. When I entered the Rutgers Ph.D. program in 1988, as part of the third cohort, it was an exciting time. We were very much aware of being among the first students in the country able to make feminist scholarship a central part of our doctoral studies in political science, particularly those of us pursuing political theory. My entry into graduate school came on the heels of four years of political activism in the feminist, peace, and social justice movements, so the question of practice was pressing to me at the time and has always hovered around my academic work. The Women and Politics program was a perfect home for me because of the way in which it linked the theoretical and empirical questions of academic political science with the politically engaged concerns of women's and gender studies and nurtured in me an interdisciplinary way of thinking that always strives for creative connections.