Abstracts and Biographies

Amina Mama

This lecture will explore what a feminist perspective on militarism offers the theorisation of development and underdevelopment. It will highlight some of the ways in which the heavily gendered and hierarchical technologies of power that are the defining features of militarism and military rule have sabotaged longstanding struggles for democratisation and development. It is argued that where contemporary conflicts have been characterised by high levels of civilian casualties and abuse of women, so provoking new levels of gender consciousness and women's more visible involvement in peace activism. The challenges of strengthening women's peace activism into more concerted feminist anti-militarist activism are considered in the context of current policy discourses.

Amina Mama is currently at Mills College from 2008, California for three years as the first Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership.

Prior to this appointment she spent almost a decade as the first Chair in Gender Studies at the African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town, South Africa, where she lectured, initiated the transdisciplinary graduate programme in Gender Studies, and carried out a series of regional intellectual capacity development and publication projects in the field of gender studies. Notable among these are continental networking and capacity development initiative 'Strengthening Gender Studies for Africa's Transformation', which supports the growing feminist scholarly network and hosts the Gender and Women's Studies in Africa website. She is a founding editor of the first continental academic gender studies journal 'Feminist Africa', established in 2002 www.feministafrica.org|

In the last decade she has carried out several collaborative research projects in the area of gender and politics, sexuality and higher education. These include Mapping African Sexualities (in collaboration with Takyiwaa Manuh, University of Ghana and supported by Ford Foundation) and Gender and Institutional Culture in African Universities (in collaboration with Teresa Barnes, University of the Western Cape, supported by the Association of African Universities). She is currently developing new work on the gender politics of militarism, conflict and peace-building and transnational feminism.

Kalpana Wilson

Policies promoting the use of 'positive, active' images of women in the global South have been adopted by international NGOs, donor governments, the World Bank and others partly in response to critiques of earlier constructions of 'Third World women' as 'passive victims', and the process of 'othering' inherent in this. In this seminar we will explore the ways in which neoliberal notions of agency and empowerment have shaped these 'new' representations of poverty by development institutions and consider how these representations are both racialised and gendered. Through discussion of specific images and accompanying text, we will explore parallels between colonial discourses of the 'work ethic' and 'self-improvement' in the context of 'benevolent' colonialism, with today's constructions of individual enterprise within the framework of neoliberal globalisation.

Kalpana Wilson is a Fellow in Transnational Gender Studies at the Gender Institute. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and include the relationships between neo-liberalism, gender and concepts of agency, the experiences of women in rural labour movements in India, and the ways in which 'notions of 'race' are inscribed within discourses of development. She is currently working on a book provisionally titled 'Race', Racism and Development - Interrogating History, Discourse and Practice, to be published by Zed Press in 2010.

Robyn Wiegman

This lecture explores the production of critical value and competency in contemporary feminist theory.

Robyn Wiegman is Professor of Women's Studies and Literature and former Director of the Women's Studies Program at Duke from 2001-2007. Her publications include American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (1995), Who Can Speak: Identity and Critical Authority (1995), Feminism Beside Itself (1995), AIDS and the National Body (1997), The Futures of American Studies (2002), and Women's Studies on Its Own (2002). Professor Wiegman's research interests include feminist theory, queer theory, American Studies, critical race theory, and film and media studies. She is currently working on two manuscripts: Being in Time With Feminism focuses on the institutionalization of feminism in the U.S. academy; Object Lessons: The U.S. Knowledge Politics of Identity pays attention to relations of identification and affect in the constitution of identity as an academic object of study.

Mary Evans

The Imagination of Evil

I took to crime because ( having read hundreds of crime novels ) I began to be interested in the ways in which crime writing both re-inforces and challenges conventional definitions of 'evil'. Although we have come to talk about 'evil' as if we all know what it is, many crime writers, including those of the 'golden years' such as Agatha Christie, do not accept naturalising explanations of evil. This refusal of accepted wisdom , together with the place that this form of fiction gives to women and , increasingly, the view that 'real' crime is committed by the state and institutions rather than individuals makes crime writing particularly valuable as a form of social engagement and critique.

Mary Evans is Visiting Fellow in Gender and Sociology at LSE. Her main research interests have been in feminist theory and literature. She was the editor of the European Journal of Women's Studies and her recent publications include Missing Persons: The Impossibility of Auto/Biography (Routledge, 1999), Love: an Unromantic Discussion (Polity, 2003), Gender and Social Theory (Open Univ. Press, 2003) and Killing Thinking (Compendium Books, 2004).

Nicola Lacey

'Women, Crime and Character: From Moll Flanders to Tess of the d'Urbervilles'

In the early 18th Century, Daniel Defoe found it natural to write a novel whose heroine was a sexually adventurous, socially marginal property offender. Only half a century later, this would have been next to unthinkable. I shall suggest that the disappearance of Moll Flanders, and her supercession in the annals of literary female offenders in the realist tradition by heroines like Tess of the d'Urbervilles, is a useful metaphor for fundamental changes in ideas of selfhood, gender and social order in 18th and 19th Century England. Drawing on law, literature, philosophy and social and economic history, I argue that these broad changes underpinned a radical shift in mechanisms of responsibility-attribution, with decisive implications for the criminalisation of women.

Nicola Lacey is Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the London School of Economics. She is also a member of the Global Law School Faculty, New York University. Her other recent visiting positions include a Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1999-2000) and a visiting Professorship at the Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics and Department of Political Science, Yale University (Spring Semester 2004). She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2001 and has recently been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, to run for three years from October 2006. Her recent biography, A Life of H.L.A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream (OUP 2004) was awarded the Swiney Prize and was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography and for the British Academy Book Prize. In 2007 she was elected an Honorary Fellow of New College, Oxford.

Interdisciplinarity: Desire and Dilemma in Contemporary European Gender Studies

Abstract: As one of the key concepts in Women's, Gender, Feminist Studies (WGFS) since its inception, "interdisciplinarity" is a familiar, but elusive term in the contemporary European WGFS landscape. What exactly is interdisciplinarity? How does one "do" it - intellectually, institutionally, methodologically? What insights does it enable? What challenges does it create? And how might we make sense of the current role of interdisciplinarity as a buzzword in WGFS and in academic practices partly shaped by neoliberal orientations? This panel will bring together three researchers who have analysed and taught the practices of interdisciplinarity in European WGFS for a lively discussion of these and other questions.

Sabine Grenz holds a PhD in Gender Studies. Her thesis is a study about the reproduction of male heterosexuality in prostitution. Currently she is working at Göteborgs Universitet. Based on diaries from 1945, she is conducting research on the re-construction of feminine identity in relation to nationality at the end of World War II. She is also concerned with feminist criticism of science, the history of sexuality, prostitution and research on masculinity. Previously, she was a post-doctoral fellow in the research training group "Gender as a Category of Knowledge" (2005-2006) at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and organized the "5th European Conference on Gender Equality" (2007). Furthermore, she has been an active member of the Athena Network (a European network for Gender Studies) since 2002. Recent English publications include: "German Women Writing about the End of the Second World War - A Feminist Analysis" Graduate Journal for Social Sciences GJSS, 2007 (4) 2, pp105-115 (http://www.gjss.org/); "Intersections of Sex and Power in Research on Prostitution: A Female Researcher Interviewing Male Heterosexual Clients" Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2005 (30) 4, pp.2091-2113.

Mia Liinason is a PhD-student and junior teacher at the Centre for Gender Studies, Lund University, Sweden. Her research areas are feminist epistemologies and methodologies and she works in the field of trans/national gender studies. Her recent publications include: "Why Interdisciplinarity? Interdisciplinarity and Women's/Gender studies in Europe", (2009) in The Making of Women's Studies, vol. IX, eds. Berteke Waaldijk et al . Athena, Utrecht University; "'This Is Not Therapy!' Un/Expected Encounters in Memory Work. Notes from the Field of Feminist Teaching" (2009), in "Teaching with the Third Wave. New Feminists' Explorations of Teaching and Institutional Contexts", eds. Daniela Gronold, Brigitte Hipfl and Linda Lund Pedersen, Stockholm University press, Stockholm, and "Intersectionality: some reflections on the puzzlings of an ambiguous analytical tool ", (2009) in "Gender Delight. Science, Knowledge, Culture and Writing... for Nina Lykke", eds. Cecilia Åsberg et al. The Tema Genus Series of Interdisciplinary Gender Research in Progress and Transformation, no. 1, Linköping.

Maria do Mar Pereira is a doctoral student and seminar leader at the Gender Institute (LSE). She holds an MSc in Sociology from the Lisbon University Institute (ISCTE-IUL), for which she undertook an ethnographic study of the negotiation of gender among teenagers in a school in Lisbon. Her current work analyses the epistemic status of women's, gender, feminist studies in Portugal. She has also published on, and presented conference papers about, feminist epistemologies and methodologies, masculinities and fatherhood, young women's participation in social and political decision-making, and issues of language difference and translation in social science research. She has guest lectured at undergraduate and graduate level at several universities in Portugal and the UK, and was also a lecturer for "Practising Interdisciplinarity in European Gender Studies", a team-taught intensive graduate summer school co-organised by six European universities.
She maintains an active involvement in feminist movements at local and international, grassroots and policy levels, having coordinated a number of awareness raising projects aimed at young people and been a member of the executive committee of various Portuguese and European non-governmental organisations.

Nadje Al-Ali

This talk is based on a recent publication, co-edited with Nicola Pratt, in which we examine the relationship between gender and transnationalism in the context of war, peace-building and (post-) conflict reconstruction with respect to the Middle East, particularly Palestine and Iraq. In my talk I will explore critically the ways in which a variety of actors, including women's movements, diaspora communities, national governments, non-governmental actors and multilateral bodies act transnationally to shape - either intentionally or unintentionally - the experiences of women in conflict situations, the possibilities for women's participation in peace-building and (post-)conflict reconstruction, as well as long-term prospects for peace and security. Focusing on Iraq and Palestine, I will also address the tension between an anti-national, feminist approach that fails to address the significance of the nation state for securing women's rights and human rights, on the one hand, and a feminist politics embedded within nationalist movements that fails to address the subordination of women within nationalist projects, on the other hand. Finally my talk will reflect on the potential for a transnational feminist politics with reference to the Middle East

Nadje Al-Ali is Reader (Associate Professor) in Gender Studies and Chair of the Centre for Gender Studies, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her main research interests revolve around gender theory; feminist activism; women and gender in the Middle East; transnational migration and diaspora moblization; war, conflict and reconstruction. Her publications include What kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (2009, University of California Press, co-authored with Nicola Pratt); Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (2007, Zed Books); New Approaches to Migration (ed., Routledge, 2002, with Khalid Koser); Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2000) and Gender Writing - Writing Gender (The American University in Cairo Press, 1994) as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles. Her most recent book (co-edited with Nicola Pratt) is entitled Women and War in the Middle East: Transnational Perspectives (Zed Books, 2009).
Nadje has been an elected board member of AMEWS since 2008 and has been an active MESA member since 1995. She is a founding member of Act Together: Women's Action for Iraq. (www.acttogether.org) and a member of Women in Black UK.

Minoo Moallem

This paper elaborates on the significance of visual images and their circulation in the formation and transformation of citizenship in a transnational and postcolonial context. By focusing on the example of Iran and the Iranian diaspora, I interrogate new forms of governmentality that have emerged in mass mediated spaces linking notions of political citizenship and cultural citizenship. I argue that the circulation of visual images in, what I call, the spectacle of citizenship, has not only played an important role in the formation of modern citizen-subjects in Iran, but also continues to be an important site of cultural and political negotiations, pushing notions of nation, identity, religion, secularism, belonging, and citizenship beyond their limits. The Iranian example further illustrates the expansion of the public sphere to the transnational realm through the extension of nationalism beyond its territorial boundaries, opening up space for an interrogation of regional negotiations, national transgressions and transnational transactions.

Minoo Moallem is Professor and Chair of Gender & Women's Studies at UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Montreal and completed her postdoctoral studies at University of California Berkeley. She is the author of Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (UC Press). She is also the co-editor (with Caren Kaplan and Norma Alarcon) of Between Woman and Nation. Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms and The State (Duke University Press, 1999), and the guest editor of a special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East on "Iranian Immigrants, Exiles and Refugees." She has recently ventured in digital media. Her on line project "Nation-on-the Move"(design by Eric Loyer) was recently published in Vectors. Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular (Special issue on Difference, Fall 2007). Professor Moallem's areas of research include women in modern and contemporary Iran, transnational approaches to Muslims, fundamentalisms, and feminism. Her current work on immigrants, exiles and refugees from Iran focuses on the question of belonging and citizenship for Muslim women in the contemporary west as well as in Iran. Much of this work is interested in transnational conceptions of citizenship and global neoliberal forms of governmentality. She is currently working on a book manuscript on the commodification of the nation through consumptive production and circulation of such commodity as the Persian carpet and a project on Iran-Iraq war movies and masculinity.

Paul Higate

Photographs, video footage and written accounts of hazing rituals involving private security contractors from ArmorGroup North America (ANGA) responsible for the security of the American embassy in Kabul have recently come to light. These have culminated in the authoring of a letter by the US based Project on Government Oversight (POGO) to the Secretary for State Hilary Clinton. The letter describes a 'Lord of the Flies' environment of 'deviancy' and 'bizarre', 'lewd' sexualised practices between contractors. These activities are argued to have been used to 'bully' and 'intimidate' subordinate employees fuelling a high turnover of contractors, a threat to unit cohesion, a weakening of the chain of command and ultimately an undermining of the security of the Embassy and its staff. In this article, I argue that rather than being seen as aberrations outside of the militarised and racialised context of certain elements of the Private Military Security Company (PMSC) sphere, these social practices are - to greater or lesser extents - actually integral to contractor culture and 'enforcement masculinities'. They follow from the ex-military/police, male dominated context of these occupational cultures where these ritualised power practices (1) are productive of subordinate masculinities amongst men from the Global South, (2) reassert a and police heteronormative boundaries through homoerotic activity and (3) may be intuitively believed to bolster rather than undermine operational effectiveness with chains of command being reasserted in a sub-cultural rather than formal sense. In summary I argue that the surprise expressed by POGO and others at these activities tends to reflect the continued inability in the wider civilian population to recognise the deeply masculinised dimensions of these firms and their employees.

Paul Higate is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Bristol. He has recently been made a Fellow of the ESRC/AHRC Global Uncertainties Programme and for the next 3 years will be carrying out a project under the title: 'MERCENARY MASCULINITIES IMAGINE SECURITY: THE CASE OF THE PRIVATE MILITARY SECURITY CONTRACTOR'

Achille Mbembe

Prof. Mbembe will reflect on contemporary South Africa. After ten years of living there, Prof. Mbembe proposes a critical appraisal of this experiment. How might it still speak to our world, and what could its possible meanings be in these precarious times? This essential inquiry concerns matters of race and justice, as well as of critique and (re)constitution.

Prof. Mbembe obtained his Ph.D in History at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989 and a D.E.A. in Political Science at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Paris). He was Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, New York, from 1988-1991, a Senior Research Fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., from 1991 to 1992, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania from 1992 to 1996, Executive Director of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria) in Dakar, Senegal, from 1996 to 2000. Achille was also a visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001, and a visiting Professor at Yale University in 2003. He has written extensively in African history and politics, including La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris, Karthala, 1996). His latest work On the Postcolony was published in Paris in 2000 in French and the English translation has been published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, in 2001.