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| Gender and the Global Locations of Liberalism |
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Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy joins IRWAG in Sponsoring New Faculty WorkshopA new interdisciplinary faculty workshop on "Gender and the Global Locations of Liberalism" began in spring 2005, convened by Lila Abu-Lughod (Director, IRWAG) and Anupama Rao (History, Barnard). The workshop will explore critically the global locations and applications of discourses of women's rights and/as human rights. Our focus will be on the challenges scholars and theorists have been developing to the liberal underpinnings and transnational institutional circuits of this form of politics and policy-making. While acknowledging the emancipatory intent of humanitarian and women's rights discourse and the useful legal gains it makes possible, scholars with deep knowledge of particular regions and cultural traditions now question both the universalism of the concepts of “the human” and "woman" and the self-representations of liberalism (e.g. examining how and when it comes to be applied to disadvantaged groups, what talk of “rights” and even “tolerance” might hide in terms of systemic inequality, structural violence, and imperial relations; and what a serious study of “illiberal” religious traditions can contribute to relativizing liberalism and locating it historically and culturally). What would deep historical and social scientific study and an interrogation of the uneven geopolitical distribution of liberalism contribute to understanding the dilemmas faced by those working for women's rights transnationally, or in national settings outside the West?
Spring 2007 speakers:
Neferti Tadiar,
Associate Professor, Women's Studies, Barnard College, on "Metropolitan Debris: Forces and Fallout of Human Redemption," Tuesday, March 6, 12:15-2pm, 754 Schermerhorn Extension. Her work on the Phillipines concerns migration, sexual commodification and globalization. Cosponsored by the
Middle East Studies Workshop.
Nadia Guessous, Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology Department, Columbia University, on "Modernity and Tradition in Left-Liberal Feminist Thought in Morocco," Wednesday,
May 2, 12:15-2pm, 754 Schermerhorn Extension. This paper explores how tradition and modernity get conceptualized and discursively invoked at different moments in left-liberal feminist thought in contemporary Morocco. Juxtaposing the figure of the “traditional, pious and egalitarian father”, whose enabling influence figures prominently in feminist narratives, with that of the figure of the disappointing and failed “leftist husband who claims to be modern but is in fact traditional”, this paper suggests that feminist thought and criticism cannot be apprehended outside of the modern terms and conditions that constitute it. Through a discussion of how tradition gets invoked as both enabling and constraining in feminist narratives, and how modernity gets imagined and discursively constructed as that which has not yet been fully realized, this paper explores how feminist subjects are conscripted into the project and idea of modernity and are obliged to couch their arguments in its teleological terms.
Spring 2006 speakers:
Therese Taylor, Professor of History, Charles Stuart University, Australia, on "On the Trail of Honor Killings: Is "Burned Alive" Real History or Fake Memoir?", Thursday, February 2, 4:30-6pm, Fred Murphy Lounge, 465 Schermerhorn Extension. Cosponsored by the Middle East Studies Workshop.
Dr Taylor has been conducting research into a best-selling memoir, Burned Alive, which is a memoir by a Palestinian woman from the West Bank who survived an honor killing. Her research has shown that this book, although hailed by critics, has serious flaws. The marketing and reception of this book raise many serious issues about popular understandings of the Middle East, and representations of Arab women. Join Therese Taylor to discuss her findings. She teaches modern history at Charles Sturt University Australia and works in the field of life writing. She is the author of a biography of a French saint, Bernadette of Lourdes.
Chris Walley, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on "What We Women Want: An Ethnography of Transnational Feminism," Thursday, February 17, 10:30am-12pm, 801 IAB, Refreshments Served.
Isabella Bakker, Chair and Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, York University, Canada, on "When Globalizations Collide: Macroeconomic Policy Rules, Gender Agreements, and Human Insecurity," Thursday, March 2, 6pm, 754 Schermerhorn Extension, Refreshments Served.
Fall 2005 speakers:
Antoinette Burton, Professor of History, University of Illinois, on "Cold War Cosmopolitanism: The Education of Santha Rama Rau in the Age of Bandung, 1945-1954," Friday September 16, noon, 754 Schermerhorn Extension, Refreshments served.
Luise White, Professor of History and Africana Studies, University of Florida, on "Creepy Sources and Rhetorics of Inclusion: White Soldiers in Rhodesia’s Bush War," Friday, October 7, 10:30am, Refreshments served.
Sally Engle Merry, Professor of Anthropology, New York University and Institute for Law and Society, NYU, on "Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle," November 3, 4:30 p.m. 801 IAB.
Discussant: Elizabeth Povinelli, Professor of Anthropology and IRWAG, Columbia University.
To read the paper, please visit the ISERP website - http://www.iserp.columbia.edu/downloads/merry.pdf
For further information and in order to participate, please contact the coordinator, Shahla Talebi: st561@columbia.edu.
For the full schedule and to download the papers to read before the workshop sessions, go to the ISERP website, http://www.iserp.columbia.edu/news/workshops/gender.html
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