News and Events

Events

Untangling the Knots: Revisioning Feminist Engagement with Development

Tuesday 5 February 11am- 4pm

The Friends Meeting House, Euston Road

The drive to mainstream gender and make it acceptable to the bureaucracies of aid has ripped the heart of the commitment to promote women’s rights and enable women to change their position in society that led feminists to engage with development. The political project of women mobilizing for change and empowering themselves seems to have got lost along the way. “Gender” became a password, then a catchword, and – some would say – it’s now become a hollow buzzword, robbed of its political and analytical bite. And “feminism” fell out of view, a term considered too harsh and too confrontational by some, and too much of a throwback by others. So where are we now? Is it time to revive the F-word and rehabilitate the G-word and find a way to put both to use to further the struggle for justice and equality for all in an ever more unequal and violent world? What would it take to untangle the knots and revitalise a gender agenda that’s run adrift?

This exciting discussion about future directions for feminist engagement with development was held on Tuesday 5 February in London. More soon...

Politicising Masculinities: Beyond the Personal

Andrea Cornwall, Tessa Lewin and Samia Rahim (BRAC) attended the Politicising Masculinities symposium in Dakar, Senegal from 15-18 October. This symposium was organised by IDS and co-hosted by the International HIV/AIDS Alliance and the Alliance National Contre le Sida, ANCS.

See Tessa's Blog on the symposium as part of Open Democracy's coverage of '16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence at: Open Democracy 50:50 Initiative.

The symposium brought together activists, practitioners and academics to revisit theories of masculinity through the analysis of practices that are changing men’s gender identities and relations.

Symposium Rationale
Much of the most innovative work on men and masculinities has worked at the level of the personal - seeking to transform men’s sexual behaviour, violence against women and relations of fatherhood. The HIV epidemic has forced open space for greater acknowledgement of the fluidity and diversity of men’s sexual and social identities. But relatively little of the innovative thinking and practice that has taken place in relation to these issues has been carried into other areas of development work. Masculine privilege remains unproblematised in mainstream development, while within gender and development, the ‘men as problem, women as victim’ discourse continues to hold sway. Both rest on essentialisms that are rarely brought into question.

At the same time, work on men and masculinities in development has arguably failed to engage sufficiently with efforts to change the institutions that sustain inequitable gender and sex orders. It is time to move the debate beyond the personal to address questions of structure, power and politics.

This symposium hopes to generate new thinking, new alliances and new possibilities for informing and inspiring a greater engagement by men in the struggle for gender justice and broader social change.

Guiding Questions
Some of the questions that will be debated include:

what does it mean to target the heterogeneous category of ‘men’ as a constituency for gender change? In what ways can this constituency be programmatically and politically effective without reinforcing a binary understanding of gender?
what lessons can be drawn from advances and failures in work with men on HIV/AIDS, violence against women and broader issues of SRHR? What has changed - and how have these changes come about?
what kind of ‘gender myths’ about men are in circulation in these and other areas of development work and what shape do they take in practice? To what extent does work on and with men challenge, contest or affirm ideas and beliefs about men?
what are the political implications of current masculinities discourses, in different policy/programme areas and academic fields, including relationships between domestic and communal violence and armed conflict/civil war? How do they conceptualise gender and power - and how does this relate to understandings emerging from practice in different contexts?
what does it take to break away from binary concepts of gender and essentialist understandings of women and men without losing sight of structural inequities and inequalities? What implications does evidence from social science and natural science have for how we conceptualise gender differences and their representations, as well as for efforts to transform gender identities and relations?
where and how are connections being made between working on the personal dimensions of change and broader struggles for social and gender justice? How do these connections inform work with men around their accountability for gender privilege and their experience of other forms of oppression? What lessons emerge from this that can be used to build new alliances and mobilise men to address structural gender inequities?
what does all this mean in terms of the work that is needed to challenge ideologies, practices and institutions that maintain inequitable gender and sex orders?

See: Papers and Summary from the Symposium on Siyanda

Gender, Work and Life in the New Global Economy - ESRC Seminar Series - 1 February 2006 - 9 November 2007.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/globalWorklife/

Marie Stopes International Global Conference on Abortion, London, 23-24 October 2007

http://www.mariestopes.org.uk/ww/press/press-ww-271106.htm

The Pathways of Women's Empowerment RPC and the Realising Rights RPC teamed up to co-organise a panel on 'Experiences of Abortion Law Reform' at this event. Panel presenters were:

Sarah Onyango on behalf of Reproductive Health and Rights Alliance, Nairobi, Kenya
Gilberta Soares, Brazilian Campaign for Safe Abortion
Patience Aniteye (Ghana), LSHTM UK
Susannah Mayhew, LSHTM UK (Co-organiser)

With the chair as Hilary Standing (IDS and Realising Rights RPC).

Further details of panel (pdf file 23KB)

See openDemocracy Marie Stopes Global Safe Abortion Conference Blog and Cecilia Sardenberg's article for openDemocracy on The Right to Abortion: Briefing from Brazil.

See also RPC Feminisms and the Struggle for Reproductive Rights in Latin America project details

See also Realising Rights RPC website

The annual DSA conference was held at IDS from 18-20 September and Stephanie Barrientos (IDS) - a member of the Pathways of Women's Empowerment RPC - chaired a panel on 'Gender, Work and Globalization' on 19 September.

See the conference homepage for more details.

Summary of Session:

Globalisation is leading to significant changes in the lives of women in paid work. It is opening up new opportunities for women to enter paid work, but much of that work is highly mobile, insecure and without adequate access to labour rights or protection. Women are becoming more integrated into an increasingly commercial and technical global economy, but face challenges in combining paid and unpaid activities or realising the benefits of greater economic activity. Accessing paid work is contributing to women’s changing socio-economic position and potential empowerment, but they also face difficulties in organising within the context of existing social structures and regulatory domains. This panel examines diverse examples of women’s integration into work in a global economy, and explores some of the complexities of enhancing women’s social and economic rights in a more liberalised global economic environment.

Panellists and Papers:

Nitya Rao UEA, School of Development Studies	Reconstructing Gender and Class: Globalisation and Women’s Work in Bangladesh
Kyoko Kusuabe, AIT Bangkok & Ruth Pearson, University of Leeds	Globalisation, Gender and Labour mobility: A Case Study of Burmese Women Workers in Thailand’s Border Factories
Kathrin Forstner, UEA, School of Development Studies	Craftswomen in a Globalised World: Joint Craft Production and Marketing in Southern Peru
Mariagrazia Leone, Dept of Sociology and Political Science, University of Calabria	Alternatives Coffee Production: Gender Empowerment in Peru
Meena Gopal, Research Centre for Women's Studies, SNDT Women's University	Mutations in the Home Based Beedi Industry with New Economic Changes in India

City University Department of Sociology ESRC Seminars Series 2007-2008

Richer or Poorer? Globalisation, international trade and the challenges of organising and defending women workers' rights, jobs and livelihoods

http://www.city.ac.uk/sociology/ESRC_Series.html

Pedagogy and Power: the Purposes and Provision of Gender Studies in the UK

This one-day conference, to be held at the University of Birmingham on Friday 25 April 2008, will explore key issues faced by those involved in the provision of Gender Studies programmes in the UK

For further information please contact Dr Charlotte Ross at c.e.ross@bham.ac.uk

Waged Domestic Work and the Making of the Modern World Conference, May 2008 at the University of Warwick, UK. Email: Kate.E.Smith@warwick.ac.uk or C.K.Steedman@warwick.ac.uk for details.

Reproductive Health in Emergencies Conference 2008, Speke Conference Centre in Kampala, Uganda, 18-20 June 2008.

All abstracts must be received by January 31, 2008. For more information: http://www.rhinemergenciesconference.org/2008

LOVA International Conference - 'Ethnographies of Gender and Globalization', 3-4 July 2008, Amsterdam. See website for details - www.lovanetwerk.nl. Deadline for papers: 1 February 2008

Mundos de Mujeres/ Women’s Worlds 2008 - University Complutense of Madrid - Women’s Worlds is an international congress on academic research on gender, women and feminist social movements to be held on 3-9 July 2008, is open to proposals in all fields and themes related to women, gender and sexuality in contemporary societies, as well as historically, with emphasis on two central themes: violence and migration. Deadline for proposals is 28 February 2008. See website for details: http://www.mmww08.org/

Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies (CSBR) - CSBR Sexuality Institute 2008, 16-23 August 2008, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

The Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies (CSBR) is pleased to announce the CSBR Sexuality Institute 2008 to be held between August 16th and 23rd 2008 in Malaysia. The Institute will bring together leading NGO representatives, researchers, practitioners and policymakers for a holistic interdisciplinary program combining history, theory and politics of sexuality with applications of advocacy, and fieldwork. The CSBR Sexuality Institute is designed as a comprehensive curriculum on sexuality and sexual rights in Muslim societies with an in depth discussion of sexual and reproductive health and rights at the global level. Full announcement and application form is available at http://www.wwhr.org/files/CSBRSexualityInst_Application.doc

RC32 Women in Society - First ISA World Forum of Sociology, 5-8 September 2008, Barcelona . For more information email the ISA office at isa@isa-sociology.org

The Third Global Conference of Women in Politics and Governance, 19-22 October 2008, Metro Manila, Philippines. For more information email globalcongress2008@gmail.com; globalcongress2008@capwip.org; capwip@capwip.org or Web: www.capwip.org; www.onlinewomeninpolitics.org

The Future of Asian Feminisms: Confronting Fundamentalisms, Conflict and Neoliberalism - 2nd Conference Kartini Network in Bali, Indonesia, 2-5 November 2008. For more information email kartiniasia@gmail.com or kartiniasia@yahoo.com

11th AWID International Forum on Women’s Rights and Development -
14-17 November 14-17 2008, Cape Town, South Africa. The objective of the forum is to debate and strategise about how to build stronger women’s movements globally. For more information: forum08@awid.org or http://www.awid.org/forum08