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Elvia
R. Arriola is a Latina, feminist critical legal theorist. Her
J.D. is from the University of California at Berkeley (Boalt Hall) and she has an M.A. in American History from New
York University.
She is a former ACLU Karpatkin Fellow as well an Assistant Attorney
General working on civil rights issues for the New York State Department of Law.
Arriola began her law teaching career in 1991 at UT Austin, teaching civil rights litigation, employment and family law and a scholarship course on gender, sexuality and the law. She remains proud of a teaching project she conducted with her students in 1997-1998 as a response to the controversies surrounding affirmative action in law school admissions testing. The Austin Schools Project responded to Hopwood v. Texas (5th Cir, 1996.) by demonstrating credible evidence in a series of research papers that showed how unequal distribution of educational resources plays a distinct role in later poor performance on standardized tests like the SAT or LSAT.
Arriola's interest on the subject of working women in the global economy as seen at the U.S.-Mexico Border grew out of her involvement in the Latina/Latino Critical Legal Theory conferences ("LatCrit").
Arriola is currently a Professor of Law at Northern
Illinois University (NIU),* DeKalb, Illinois. At NIU she teaches constitutional law, gender and the law, civil rights litigation and a scholarship seminar that grew out of her work with women on the Mexican border -- Women, Law and the Global Economy. Contact her at earriola@niu.edu
Publications
by Elvia R. Arriola
*Essay: "Moving Forward with PTSD" (following the NIU campus shootings of February 2008.)
Blogs: Poems and Reflections
Dr. Josefina
Castillo
As a sociologist and as a woman, I’ve always been concerned with issues that address social and gender equality. Also my faith has always influenced my personal stance and beliefs in non-violent conflict transformation. These factors have shaped the work that I’ve carried out throughout twenty years, in academic and non-academic spaces mainly around educational issues. I believe it is through critical thinking that people can best learn how to perceive oppressive conditions that call for social justice actions in order to improve their lives. It is through education that people are able to increase awareness of the world around us, and transform our personal lives and those of our community. I refer particularly to specific oppressions that as women we endure not only as life givers, but also as reproducers of culture.
I worked as Adjunct Faculty of the Universidad Nacional Autonóma de México(UNAM) for 7 years, and later on, my enthusiasm for popular education was encouraged through the work with Mujeres para el Diálogo, a non-governmental organization based in Mexico City. This job offered an opportunity to learn how to design and implement workshops, seminars and similar events with various groups of women on projects such as literacy campaigns, health, popular education methodology and improvement of self-esteem. This experience was most rewarding since I worked for nine years with urban grassroots women in Mexico City and peasant women in Chiapas and Oaxaca, two of the poorest states of Mexico.
At the present time I work as Program Coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee-Austin office, as Board member of Women on the Border and of Inmigrantes Latinos en Acción, and as facilitator for Colectivo Flatlander, mainly on issues dealing with economic justice, migration and peace building, using a popular education model.
More
Contact Josefina Castillo at jcastillo@afsc.org
Dr. Judith
(Hoodeet) Rosenberg
Coordinator, Austin Tan Cerca de la Frontera (ATCF)
Board
Member, Women on the Border
Judith
has lived most of her life in New York City and upstate New York.
Throughout the seventies she worked for the Olivetti corporation.
a multinational corporation that was headquartered in Milan, Italy. In that work she learned how multinational corporations work
the international angle to their profit. In that decade at Olivetti,
the angle was manufacturing, and the targets of the exploitable
labor were women. In the eighties, Judith also worked in an adult
literacy program in Brooklyn with minority women in a program connected
to welfare and welfare reform.
Judith returned to school for her Master’s at SUNY-Albany
and obtained her M.A. in English in 1997, focusing her work on 19th
century U.S. women writers.
Dr. Rosenberg was awarded a Ph.D. in English by the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. Her dissertation examines the rhetoric of globalization with the central question being,
“can the maquiladora worker speak?”
Her intimate work with workers in the maquiladoras as an ally and researcher/writer have been invaluable to the cause of education on the impact of globalization on workers' lives.
Contact Judy Rosenberg
Phone: 512-494-8377
DONNA J. BLEVINS, ESQ.
Board Member, WOB and Of Counsel
Phone: 512-351-2206
Donna Blevins is a long time resident of Austin and former lobbyist on issues of equity in public education in the State of Texas. She earned her law degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1997. After working on disability rights law with Robert Provan and Associates, she joined the law firm of Baron and Budd, P.C. where she gained her first experiences in the specialized field of asbestos litigation, representing individuals who were exposed to the deadly substance in their work sites in compensation claims against former corporate employers. Contact Donna Blevins.
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