The Platform for Action of the Fourth World Conference on Women called for "removing all the obstacles to women's active participation in all spheres of public and private life through a full and equal share in economic, social, cultural and political decision-making."

That daunting goal still motivates N'dri Assie-Lumumba, an assistant professor of Africana and women's studies at Cornell University and director of Cornell's Program on Gender and Global Change (GGC), who participated in the historic 1995 gathering in Beijing. At the conference's African Tent in Huairuo, she organized sessions as a representative of the Association of African Women for Research and Development and was a translator for such speakers as Winnie Mandela, UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy and Salim Ahned Salim, secretary general of the Organization of African Unity.

"The Beijing conference highlighted the differences among women around the world, and yet it also illustrated that we share so many of the same experiences, challenges and hopes," Assie-Lumumba said.

Today, that message guides her work in GGC, an interdisciplinary program operated jointly by the Women's Studies Program and Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

According to its mission statement, GGC focuses on "comparative historical analyses of changing patterns of gender relations within the broad framework of feminist scholarship and analyses of global change." In particular, said its director, the program works to expand women's studies beyond its traditionally Western orientation.

"All the paradigms for gender studies have tended to be in terms of Western perspectives," she said. "A major challenge is to accept that there are other ways of looking at gender relations. We must look at the world not just through women's eyes, but through very different women's eyes."

GGC evolved from the Program on International Development and Women, founded in 1987. It was renamed the Program on Gender and Global Change in 1993 to more accurately reflect its philosophy and a changing world, Assie-Lumumba said.

"The word 'development' has a limited, even negative, connotation," she said. "Every nation is about development. And, as the Beijing conference showed, gender issues must be addressed in all countries, not just 'developing' ones."

"Gender" replaced "women," she added, "because we are not studying women in isolation; we are studying them in a dynamic context -- in terms of their relation to men."

This year, for the first time, the program is offering Gender and Global Change Awards to undergraduates and graduates for summer research. It also will cosponsor the following lectures and discussions:

• Friday, Feb. 21: Assie-Lumumba will give a talk titled "Forum for African Women Educationalists: A Case of 'Femocracy,'" 2 p.m. in 280 Ives Hall.;
• Thursday, Feb. 27: Huguette Dagenais of the Universite Laval in Quebec, one of Canada's five Chairs of Women's Studies, will discuss feminist studies in Quebec, 4:30 p.m. in 153 Uris Hall;
• Saturday, March 8: Roundtable discussion on violence against women in the war-torn countries of Afghanistan, Burundi, Rwanda and Bosnia; noon, location to be announced;
• Thursday, March 27: Marina Tserkovnitska, the first Gender and Global Change Fellow, will discuss women's participation in government decision-making in Ukraine, 4:30 p.m. in 153 Uris Hall.
• Friday, April 18: Cornelia Al Khaled of the University of Damascus and a fellow at Harvard University will discuss contemporary Arab women writers, 4:30 p.m., 153 Uris Hall.

For Assie-Lumumba, learning and teaching have always been global pursuits. She studied sociology, history and education in her native C™te d'Ivoire and in France, Canada and the United States before teaching in Togo and at several U.S. colleges. She came to Cornell in 1991 as a Fulbright and Ford Foundation/Africana Studies and Research Center fellow. When not teaching, she has been a policy analyst and adviser for many African organizations and units of the United Nations and World Bank. She is the author of numerous articles and reports and two books, the recently published Les Africaines dans la Politique and the upcoming Africana Women and Power: From Centrality to Marginality.

"As the first African woman to direct GGC, N'dri is very concerned with broadening its programs to address issues for women from Africa as well as from the Caribbean and Latin America," said Professor James Turner, founder and director of the Africana Studies and Research Center. "She is looking closely at the roles that women from these regions play -- and the roles from which they are excluded. She is concerned that these women be heard but more so that they be empowered in a way that enables them to articulate policy direction."

Assie-Lumumba views her work at Cornell and abroad as a means of reciprocating the good fortune that she and other prominent African women scholars have enjoyed.

"There are still relatively few African women who have been able to achieve a secondary level of education," she said. "Since much of our education has been supported by the African people, I feel we should give something back. The challenge for me is to balance my obligations at the university with my desire to promote social change in Africa."