Gender Justice and Body Politics

The Gender and Development Network of gender researchers in Sweden is organizing a conference in cooperation with AGI, University of Cape Town, in Cape Town from 4th - 6th February 2009. Based on its enduring theme of gender justice, GADNET and AGI have crafted the theme for this conference as, Gender Justice and Body Politics.

More information

Upcoming GADNET/African Gender Institute (AGI)

This is a conference of invited participants only

The Gender and Development Network of gender researchers in Sweden is organizing a conference in cooperation with AGI, University of Cape Town, in Cape Town from 4th – 6th February 2009. Based on its enduring theme of gender justice, GADNET and AGI have crafted the theme for this conference as, Gender Justice and Body Politics.

In our contemporary neoliberal and globalised world, the challenge of promoting gender justice persists. In Southern contexts, the crafting of citizenship is evermore fraught with, played out across nations, cities and in the micro, everyday politics of gendered bodies.

Drawing from a wide spectrum of scholars and activists, the conference seeks to explore the material and socio-cultural dimensions of the multiple spaces that make up Southern cities and the contestations about their social and cultural meanings. Increasing class differences and widespread persisting poverty are experienced in a globalised information society. Negotiations for gender justice take many forms as part of struggles for democracy in social movements and state responses, setting the scene for individual efforts. Gender-based violence is not always criminalised and when it is law enactment depends on the police and other actors.

Through the examination of the micro politics of space and access, the conference will examine body politics as the interplay between constrained access to material resources and negotiating relationships within households, communities in the context of rapidly changing city and national cultural and political economies. Through textured and grounded conceptual research, we frame citizenship as built through material and cultural practices and therefore as gendered and reproduced through the interplay of multiple scales. We wish to build analysis of gendered agency to negotiate body politics and to shape and find meaning in citizenship as contextual, relational, and contingent, individually and collectively negotiated.

Although the emphasis of the conference is Africa, the participants hauled in from a wider scholastic net from India to USA, and from Sweden to South Africa. Further, participants are drawn from across the Humanities, the Arts and the Social Sciences. The sub-themes of the conference are reflected in the programme. Centring on the body, the sessions range from issues of citizenship, knowledge production to the nitty-gritty of livelihoods, Ascetics, and many more. The full detail is in, http://www.egs.uct.ac.za/EGSwebpages/Sophie/programme.html .

Among the participants are Richa Nagar, a Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota (USA) and a founding member of Sangtin Kisaan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS), in Sitapur district of Uttar Pradesh. Antonádia Borges is a PhD in Anthropology and teaches at University of Brasilia. She is also researcher of the Brazilian National Council of Research. Her research is focused on contemporary anthropology and the building of an ethnographic theory. Mulela Margaret Munalula is an active researcher in issues of gender equality, discrimination and the Law in Zambia. She has worked in development banking, as a magistrate and finally as a law teacher. In July 2007 she was elected Dean of the School of Law becoming the first woman to hold the position. Another participant is Patricia McFadden, a Radical African Feminist scholar-activist who lives and works mainly in southern Africa. She is currently a Visiting Professor in Women's Studies and African American Studies at Syracuse University

Twelve members of GADNET are also participating in the conference among them, renowned researchers such as Karin Sporre, an Associate Professor in Educational work with a focus on values, gender and diversity at Umeå University and Ann Schlyter, also an associate professor and director of the Centre for Global Gender Studies at the University of Gothenburg, and head of the SIDA supported GADNET project. More details of participants can be accessed at: http://www.egs.uct.ac.za/EGSwebpages/Sophie/participants.html

Submitted papers are also published on the University of Cape Town homepage but are accessible only to conference participants.

Hauwa Mahdi
2009-01-24