The oppression experienced by women of color will be explored during a law symposium at the University of California, Davis, on Friday, April 1.

"The Future of Critical Race Feminism," presented by the UC Davis Law Review, will look at the future of feminism and the role of critical race feminism in the movement. It is free and open to the public.

Participants will delve into issues as diverse as the unique role of immigrant women in community economic development, how society fails to deal with domestic violence from a multicultural perspective and the recent ban on the headscarves worn by Islamic women in France.

Critical race feminism brought attention to the legal status of women of color when it surfaced as a new legal genre in the late 1990s. It studies the intersection of race and gender and how, together, they give rise to forms of oppression beyond racism and sexism.

"Race and sex can work in ways that purely race alone or sex alone doesn't," says Angela Onwuachi-Willig, a UC Davis law professor and an authority on the roles of race and gender in the law.

"You can't undo 'isms' without understanding how they intersect," adds Onwuachi-Willig, who is faculty adviser to the symposium. "It's impossible to create any real change without understanding the different oppressions people suffer."

The symposium will draw together speakers distinguished for their scholarship in the fields of critical race theory and critical feminist theory. They include Adrien Wing of the University of Iowa, editor of "Critical Race Feminism: A Reader," a leading anthology in the discipline.

Margaret Montoya, another speaker, was the first Latina to enroll at Harvard Law School and today is a law professor at the University of New Mexico and the interim director of the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute. And Sumi Cho, a law professor at DePaul University, has done groundbreaking research on affirmative action and the ways in which Asian American women experience discrimination and harassment in the workplace.

The symposium begins at 9 a.m., and panels are scheduled as follows:

• 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. -- Race, Sex and Working Identities
• 11 a.m. to 12:20 p.m. -- Color, Feminism and the State
• 1:30 p.m. to 2:50 p.m. -- Deconstructing the Image Repertoire of Women of Color
• 3 p.m. to 4:20 p.m. -- Defining the Voices of Critical Race Feminism

All sessions will be held in the Moot Courtroom of King Hall.

For more information, including a complete list of panels and speakers, please visit the symposium's Web site at: http://www.law.ucdavis.edu/symposium.