Services
Consulting & Services
Consulting & Services
With over twenty years’ experience as both a lawyer and an academic working on issues of gender, race, and Indigeneity, Dr. Foster has experience providing a number of consulting and training services to government entities, nongovernmental organizations, law agencies, academic professional associations, higher education departments, and interdisciplinary research teams on the following:
Intellectual Property Rights
I can help you understand the basics of intellectual property rights and the difference between copyrights, trademarks, and patents. I can help you develop policies, grant agreements, and research contracts that ensure the protection of your intellectual property rights or those of your partners, including Indigenous peoples’ rights to intellectual property.
Indigenous Data Sovereignty
I can assist you in grasping Indigenous Data Sovereignty principles, emphasizing the relational nature of data for Indigenous peoples, and contrasting it with settler colonial perspectives that view data transactionally. I’ll also help you differentiate data protection under Indigenous Data Sovereignty from the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and support you in creating data privacy policies, storage protocols, sharing agreements, and research contracts to safeguard Indigenous Peoples’ data.
Gender Transformative Programming and Policy-making
I can help your organization better understand and navigate the intersections of gender-related concepts (sex, cisgender, transgender, gender nonbinary, sexuality, race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, and colonialism), enabling a more inclusive approach to programming and policy-making. Through training, I’ll ensure you adopt intersectional gender-sensitive language and refine data collection. I’ll equip you with techniques for promoting gender responsiveness and inclusivity, as well as provide insights to enhance grant agreements, gender mainstreaming policies, and your monitoring and evaluation plans.
Intersectional Feminist Research Methodologies
I offer training on intersectional feminist research methodologies, distinguishing between methodologies and methods. I’ll help you enhance your research with an intersectional perspective, integrating reflexivity to mitigate bias while maintaining objectivity. I support the integration of these methodologies into collaborative research projects and offer technical assistance for grant funding applications, research design proposals, and human subjects research (IRB) applications.
Laura has experience working with the following groups
Additional Services
Public Narrative: Leadership, Storytelling, Policy-Making
Formally trained by Marshall Ganz at Harvard University’s Kennedy School in public narrative, leadership, and storytelling, I’m well-equipped to assist your organization in crafting and executing a project to amplify the intersectional voices of your members, partners, and collaborators, enhancing the impact of your initiatives. Additionally, I offer individual consulting to public leaders, community organizers, students, and other leaders on developing their own public narratives to drive transformative change.
Academic Publishing and Writing
As a co-lead editor with Catalyst, the leading feminist science and technology studies journal, I have extensive experience to help you learn to navigate the academic publishing process. I conduct publishing and writing workshops that teach you how to pick a journal that is the best fit for your research, prepare your manuscript for peer review, communicate with editors, respond to editorial/peer review feedback, and how turn rejection into a new direction for your scholarly work.
Legislation Review and Drafting
I also have experience with reviewing relevant legislation, drafting public comments, and writing policy briefs related to any and all of the above-mentioned topics.