Indiana University East Women and Gender Studies Unit and the Indiana University East Diversity Committee invites the community to the Spring Diversity lecture at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 9, in Vivian Auditorium.

This year’s featured speaker is Jane Collins, professor of Community & Environmental Sociology and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She will present “Economic Citizenship in the Age of Inequality.”

This talk is free and open to the public.

Collins’ work focuses on the relationship between gender and labor in the Americas. Her research on gender and labor in the Americas has focused on family farms in Peru, the commercial agricultural sector in Brazil, the apparel industry in the U.S. and Mexico and the low wage service sector in the U.S. Her most recent work “Both Hands Tied” examines the working poor in the United States, focusing in particular on the relation between welfare and low-wage earnings among working mothers.

Wazir Mohamed, associate professor of sociology and member of the IU East Diversity Committee, said Collins is a specialist who is able to address the structural changes currently underway – wherein many young women can now only access part-time, 25-29 hour work per week.

“This do not only interfere with women’s ability to earn a living wage in order to participate equally with men and hence seize their equal place in society. Young women are being socialized into this new emergent structure to believe and hence accept part-time work as being normal. In her presentation Jane Collins is expected to address these concerns for young women, and women’s inequality in the workplace,” Mohamed said.

Collins is also providing the keynote address during the 27th Annual Indiana University Women’s and Gender Studies Undergraduate Conference being held on the IU East campus on Friday, April 10.

This conference offers students an opportunity to share research presentations, artwork, performances, and posters that reflect their work in Women’s, Sexuality and Gender Studies with students and faculty across the IU system. The theme for this year’s event is, “Women and the New Economy: Challenging Stereotypes of Work, Family, and Gender in the 21st Century.”

For more information about the conference, contact Stephanie Whitehead, assistant professor of criminal justice and political science, at snwhiteh@iue.edu.