Events

Anti-Imperial Epistemic Justice and Rights Politics in Most of the World

Wednesday 20 November 5-6:30pm, Canada Room and Council Chamber, Queen’s University Belfast.

Delivered by the most outstanding academics in the UK and beyond, the British Academy’s flagship Lecture Programme showcases the very best scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

This lecture will introduce the concept of “anti-imperial epistemic justice”, an essential framework for understanding the politics of rights and human rights in the majority of societies worldwide. This framework is not only crucial for understanding rights politics, but also for promoting ethical and democratic approaches to knowledge production more broadly. Drawing on ethnographically informed theoretical research on rights politics, this lecture will highlight key intellectual tools for considering anti-imperial epistemic justice. These include critical interventions, shaped by non-idealist and pluralistic approaches to thinking.

Speaker: Professor Sumi Madhok

Free, booking required.

This event includes a reception for all attendees after the lecture.

This event will take place in person in partnership with Queen's University Belfast. If you have any questions about this event please email events@thebritishacademy.ac.uk.

Feminist and Queer Interventions for Justice, Autonomy, and Sovereignty: LSE Gender Studies Fellows in conversation

Wednesday 13 November 2024 5.30pm-7pm, MAR.1.10, Marshall Building.

Speakers: Dr Emrah Karakuş, Dr Zeynep Kilicoglu, Dr Gloria Novović

Chair: Dr Rohit K Dasgupta

This panel brings together three LSE Fellows in Gender Studies to engage in a critical conversation about feminist and queer struggles for autonomy, belonging, and border crossings, drawing on interdisciplinary and multi-scalar approaches. By weaving together the lived experiences of queer Kurds in Northern Kurdistan, migrant women navigating European metropoles, and global movements for feminist and planetary justice, the panel will explore how these seemingly disparate experiences are deeply interconnected.

Find out more and book a free ticket here.

Fixing Gender: The Paradoxical Politics of Training Peacekeepers

Wednesday 30 October 2024, 5.30-7pm, Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House.

Speakers: Dr Aiko Holvikivi, Dr Jasmine Gani, Dr Olivia Rutazibwa, Dr Hakan Sandal-Wilson

Chair: Dr Katharine Millar

Join us for the launch of Aiko Holvikivi’s Fixing Gender: The Paradoxical Politics of Training Peacekeepers. This new book examines how gender is conceptualised, taught, and learned in peacekeeping situations, and with what political effects.  

Find out more and book a free ticket here.

Watch the recording of this event here. 

Read our Student Event Blogger report here.

Women's Budget Group Autumn Budget Watch-Along 

Wednesday 30 October 2024, 11.30am-5pm, LSE Lecture Theatre, Centre Building (CBG.G.01).

The Women's Budget Group and expert Policy Advisers get together to watch the Autumn Budget and work collectively to develop our live reaction to the measures and policies announced. Join us for the chance to witness the behind-the-scenes WBG discussion and engage with the concepts and practice of feminist economics!

No tickets needed for this event. Find out more here.

Technology 'Buffs' and 'Night Owls': A feminist hauntological approach to work-from-home

Thursday 24 October 2024 5-7pm, SG1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, CB3 9DP, Cambridge

Much of the research on the implications of work-from-home for gender inequalities is based on the experiences of women with childcare responsibilities in dual-career households. In this lecture, Asiya Islam departs from this trend to consider the temporalities of working-from-home and how these shape worker subjectivities, based on research with women workers in Delhi, India. This ‘temporal turn’, she argues, is needed for disrupting the modernisation thesis that informs the conceptualisation of the relationship between work and technology, particularly in the Global South. Through feminist hauntological analysis of women’s narratives about work-from-home, Dr Islam understands emerging worker subjectivities as ‘a/synchronous subjectivities’, which make visible the discrepancy between rapid advancement of digitalisation and workers’ embrace of digital cultures on the one hand, and infrastructural ‘lag’ and inequalities, and gender norms on the other hand.

With Dr Asiya Islam. Find out more here.

Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring

Wednesday 2 October 2024, 5.30-7pm, MAR.2.04, Marshall Building.

Speakers: Prof Shirin M Rai, Prof Juanita Elias, Prof Diane Elson, Dr Ania Plomien, Christopher Choong Weng Wai

Chair: Prof Sumi Madhok

Join us to celebrate the launch of Shirin M. Rai’s Depletion. The book examines the human costs of caring, how these are reproduced across the boundaries of class, race, gender, and generation and how might they be reversed. 

Watch the recording of this event here.

Mainstream or incendiary? Doing gender work in the contemporary world

Wednesday 25 September 2024, 3.30-5pm, Sheikh Zayed Theatre, Cheng Kin Ku Building.

Speaker: Dr Aiko Holvikivi 

Chair: Prof Sumi Madhok 

Watch the recording of this event here.

Social Reproduction: struggles for and visions of justice

Wednesday 20 September 2023, 3.30-5pm, CKK.LG.08. Followed by a drinks reception.

Speaker: Dr Ania Plomien (LSE Gender)

Chair: Prof Sumi Madhok (LSE Gender)

This event is the 2023 Annual Welcome Lecture for incoming and continuing LSE Gender students and affiliated faculty ONLY. Please do not attend if you are not one of the above as there is limited space.

Watch the recording here.

Navigating ethical issues in participatory research

Wednesday 11 October, 12 noon to 1.30pm, Kingsway 3.02

Dr Sharmila Parmanand (Department of Gender Studies) introduces ethical and methodological issues in Participatory Action Research across various stages of the research process, from developing and designing the research until after the research formally ends. The session invites reflection on ways to build more reciprocity between academics and our research partners, especially in relation to research directions, recruitment of participants, ownership of the research, and power and representation. Sign up for the session. 

If you would like to find out more, please contact Louise Jones and Rosemary Deller at research.kei@lse.ac.uk. 

This is an internal event for LSE staff, students and faculty hosted by the LSE Knowledge Exchange and Impact office as a part of their Participatory Research workshop series.

Rethinking 'Radicality' in Queer Theory: Symposium and Networking Day

Monday 16 October 2023, 10-5pm BST, Univesity of Sussex

This 1-day event at the University of Sussex will invite all attendees to explore the changing contexts of ‘radicality’ in queer studies, analysing the losses and gains of such changes.

The invited speakers include: Sita Balani (QMUL), Dhiren Borisa (Sheffield/Jindal Global Law School), Oliver Davis (Warwick), Mijke van der Drift (RCA, London), Zeena Feldman (KCL), Clare Hemmings (LSE), Olu Jenzen (Brighton), Ben Nichols (Manchester), SM Rodriguez (LSE), Sam Solomon (Sussex), Alex Stoffel (QMUL/LSE)

This event is hosted at the University of Sussex by the research consortium 'Beyond Radical', for more information see here.

Twelve Feminist Lessons of War with Cynthia Enloe

Wednesday 18 October 2023, 6-8:30pm, Shaw Library, Old Building

Speakers: Professor Cynthia Enloe (Clark University) & Dr Amanda Chisholm (King's College)

Chair: Dr Marsha Henry (LSE Gender)

Twelve Feminist Lessons of War draws on firsthand experiences of war from women in places as diverse as Ukraine, Myanmar, Somalia, Vietnam, Rwanda, Algeria, Syria, and Northern Ireland to show how women's wars are not men's wars. With her engaging trademark style, Cynthia Enloe demonstrates how patriarchy and militarism have embedded themselves in our institutions and our personal lives.

This event is open to the public and free, but registration is required. See event listing for more information.

Watch the recording here.

Black feminism in Europe

Monday 30 October 2023, 6.30pm to 8.00pm BST

Speakers: Dr Mame-Fatou Niang, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Carnegie Mellon University; Dr SM Rodriguez, Assistant Professor, Department of Gender Studies, LSE.

Chair: Professor Joanna Lewis, Director, LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security.

Hosted by the LSE European Institute and the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security

Venue: In-person and online public event (LSE campus venue TBA)

Find out more.

LSE PhD in Demography Showcase

Thursday 9 Nov 2023 6.00-7:30pm GMT - hybrid

The demography research group at LSE (Pop@LSE) offers PhD degrees in demography/population studies within the Department of Methodology and is holding a showcase event to give students an idea of what demography is, the diversity of paths that researchers have taken to studying it and funding opportunities. The showcase features four researchers at LSE who will share their story of how they chose to do a PhD in Demography and give a taste of what topics they are currently researching.

Professor Wendy Sigle will be one of the presenters at this showcase.

The presentations will take place from 6-7pm and will be followed by a short reception. Please register your attendance on Eventbrite using the link above.

The Politics and Possibilities of Feminist Knowledge Production

Friday 10 November 2023, 2-4:30pm, Stewart House, Royal Holloway University of London

Speakers: Dr Kat Gupta (RH), Dr Kavita Maya (RH), Dr Aiko Holvikivi (LSE Gender), Dr Sadie Wearing (LSE Gender)

Chair: Laura Sjoberg (RH)

This event brings together a panel of speakers from the LSE Department of Gender Studies and the Gender Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London, in conversation about the contours of feminist knowledge production and representation in different social, political, material and institutional contexts.

This event is open to the public and free, but registration is required. See event page for more information and registration details.

Film Screening and Panel Discussion on Contested Belonging and Citizenship in Pakistan

Wednesday 22 November 4.00-6.15pm

Speakers: Dr Humera Iqbal (UCL), Jawad Sharif (Film Director), Dr Mahvish Ahmad (LSE Sociology)

Chair: Dr Maria Rashid (LSE Gender)

LSE Gender and LSESU Pakistan Development Society in collaboration with the Partition of Identity (POI) Project (UCL) invite you to a film screening of Bhashaili (Adrift). Directed by Jawad Sharif, the film tells the story of Pakistani Bengalis living in Karachi (Pakistan) many of whom face issues around citizenship and statelessness. A panel discussion on contested belonging and identity-making in Pakistan, as a legacy of war and violence will follow, including a Q&A with the film’s director.

This event is open to the public and free, but registration is required here. 

The Question of Enforcement: Anti- Homosexuality Legislation in Uganda and the Problem of Panoptic Policing

Tuesday 30 January 5-7pm, CG3- Main building (SOAS campus)

Speaker: Dr SM Rodriguez

This event is hosted by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Centre for Gender Studies. 

Oxford Abolitionist Imaginaries and Praxis Discussion Series: Abolition and the Black Feminist Imagination 

Tuesday 6 February 4.15-5.30pm, Criminology Seminar Room at the Centre for Criminology, Oxford

Please join us for our first discussion of the term with S.M. Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of Gender, Rights, and Human Rights at the London School of Economics. Rodriguez’s research joins anti-carceral, Black, and trans feminist approaches to interrogate sex as a political projection unto the body and as an action, especially as related to criminal law and “correctional” practices. Centring African Diasporic people and places, they question global and transnational structures of racialisation, punishment, and movement-making.

This event is hosted by the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford.

Ready to Start a Revolution: Radical women in the Black Liberation Struggle

Wednesday 14 February 5.30-7.00pm, Yangtze Theatre 2.01, Centre Building and Zoom

Speaker: Dr Jasmin A Young (UC Riverside)

Chair: Dr SM Rodriguez (LSE Gender)

This presentation centers on the Black Women’s Liberation Committee (BWLC), an SNCC caucus established in 1968 that evolved into the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA). Dr Young traces and analyzes how the TWWA organized, trained, and developed Third World women to fight capitalism and start a revolution. TWWA directly challenged the discourse of masculinity that permeated much of the Black Power movement. While some groups designated men as warriors for the revolution and formed all-male cadres, TWWA members believed women could play a significant role in armed struggle. They identified Black and Third World women as one of the most revolutionary forces confronting the U.S. ruling class. The TWWA assumed that women were capable and valuable members of the Black liberation struggle—and central to the fight for freedom. Drawing on Triple Jeopardy, the TWWA newspaper, archival materials and oral histories Dr Young discusses the group’s revolutionary feminist vision.

This is a featured event of our alumni series, demonstrating the reach of LSE Gender MSc's who go on to do their PhDs.

This event is free and open to the public but registration is required. 

Transnational 'Anti-Gender' Politics and Resistance

Thursday 22 Feb 5.30-7.30pm: Judith Butler and Tooba Syed

Friday 23 Feb 5.30-7.30pm: zethu Matebeni and Alyosxa Tudor

Transnational 'Anti-Gender' Movements and Resistance: Narratives and Interventions is a project led by Professors Clare Hemmings and Sumi Madhok of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). It is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and LSE Knowledge Exchange and Impact. This research network maps the narrative building blocks – the political grammars, conceptual vocabularies, rhetoric, figures, and temporalities – of both ‘anti-gender ideology’ interventions and the political struggles and solidarities engendered in resistance. 

This 2-Day Conference is the final event for the network, and is organised by Clare Hemmings, Sumi Madhok, Alyosxa Tudor and Senel Wanniarchchi. For more information about previous workshops, network members, and aims of the project, please visit the dedicated webpage here. 

Sense of an Ending: Bringing participatory research projects to a close

Wednesday 6 March, 12.30-2pm, location given to attendees

Speaker: Dr Sharmila Parmanand (LSE Gender) 

As part of a participatory research workshop series running through Autumn Term 2023 and Winter Term 2024, this panel discussion reflects on the challenges of ‘‘ending’’ a participatory project in ways that are compatible with the commitments of participatory research. The panel will discuss the ethical uses and outcomes of participatory research, ways of achieving temporary closures rather than endings, navigating relational challenges, and the value of continuing rather than ending. The panel discussion will open into a Q&A for collective conversation. 

The session will include lunch and the opportunity to network with other researchers doing or interested in participatory research.

If you would like to find out more, please contact Louise Jones and Rosemary Deller at research.kei@lse.ac.uk. 

This is an internal event for LSE staff, students and faculty hosted by the LSE Knowledge Exchange and Impact office as a part of their Participatory Research workshop series.

LSE Gender 30th Anniversary Alumni Panel

Wednesday 6 March, 4-5.30pm GMT - Zoom (registration required)

Speakers: Prof Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen (UiS, Norway); Dr Carolina Alonso Bejarano, (Warwick); Dr Cynthia Citlallin Delgado Huitrón (Pace University); Dr Chloe Alexander (Birmingham)

Chair: Dr Ania Plomien

This event highlights the brilliant work of former MSc students that can both serve as inspiration to our current and recent cohorts, as well as feature the distinct quality of scholarship that our MSc alumni have generated years after completing their programmes and gone on to complete PhDs elsewhere. 

This is an LSE internal event and is not open to the public.

Ethics of care in sex work research: reflecting on scholar-activist collaborations

Thursday 7 March 3-5pm Khalili Lecture Theatre (KLT), Russell Square: College Buildings, SOAS

Speakers: Dr Sharmila Parmanand (LSE Gender); Yukiko Kaname (SWASH); Gaymakimaki (SWASH); Lily Miyata; Chihiro Toya (SOAS)

This event will rethink difficult ethical questions in sex work research, including how research can benefit sex workers, what the significance of research by non-sex workers is, and how to think about the representation of sex workers in research/activism. Researchers and SWASH (Sex Worker and Sexual Health) members will discuss the challenges and joys of collaborative research by reflecting on their experiences in the Philippines and Japan. SWASH is a Japanese sex worker rights organisation that aims to improve the health and safety of sex workers. Its members give lectures at universities and symposiums. SWASH co-authored the book Sex Work Studies (Nippon Hyron sha, 2018).

This event is being hosted by SOAS, registration is required.

Legacies of the Brixton Black Women's Group

Wednesday 13 March, 6.30-8.00pm, Marshall Building 2.04. followed by a reception

Speakers: Lola Olufemi (Westminster), Jade Bentil (Oxford), Oumou Longley, Dr Milo Miller (LSE Gender)

Chair: Dr SM Rodriguez (LSE Gender)

Established in response to the lack of interest in women’s issues in male-dominated Black organisations in Britain, the trail-blazing Brixton Black Women’s Group was founded to create a distinct Black socialist feminist space where women of African and Asian descent could meet to focus on and organise around political, social and cultural issues as they affected Black women.

Following on from the publication of Speak Out!, a landmark collection edited by Dr Milo Miller (LSE Gender) which brings together the writings of the Brixton Black Women’s Group for the first time, this panel reflects on the legacies of the group 50 years after its founding

This event is free and open to the public but requires registration. 

International Women's Day Lecture: Anti-imperial epistemic justice: Building solidaristic coalitions in a time of global crises

Friday 8 March, 12:15 PM - 1:00 PM Darwin Room, The Pitt Building, Cambridge University

In this International Women’s Day talk, I want to insist on the importance of building solidaristic coalitions for justice to counter the extreme imperial violence of our present. These solidaristic coalitions must be transnational and they must be premised on anti-imperial epistemic justice. Drawing on my current work on transnational anti-gender movements and resistance, and on rights politics in most of the world, I will outline some key elements of my thinking on the anti-imperial epistemic justice and what it means for building solidaristic gender politics in a time of global crises.

This event is being hosted by the Centre for Governance and Human Rights at Cambridge University. Please get in contact with them with any queries.

Who's Afraid of Gender? 

Wednesday 20 March 7-8.30pm in-person and online

Speaker: Professor Judith Butler (UC Berkeley)

Chair: Professor Sumi Madhok (LSE Gender)

In this vital, courageous book, Butler carefully examines how ‘gender’ has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations and trans-exclusionary feminists, and the concrete ways in which this phantasm works. An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Who's Afraid of Gender? is a bold call to make a broad coalition with all those who struggle for equality and fight injustice.

This event is free and open to the public but will require registration.

Archive of Tongues: An Intimate History of Brownness

Wednesday 27 March 6.00-7.30pm, Marshall Building 1.04 

Speaker: Dr Moon Charania (Spelman College)

Chair: Dr Emrah Karakus (LSE Gender)

In Archive of Tongues, Moon Charania explores feminine dispossession and the brown diaspora through a reflection on the life of her mother. Drawing on her mother’s memories and stories of migration, violence, sexuality, queerness, domesticity, and the intimate economies of everyday life, Charania conceptualizes her mother’s tongue as an object of theory and an archive of brown intimate life. By presenting a mode of storytelling that is sensual and melancholic, piercing and sharp, Charania recovers otherwise silenced modes of brown mothers’ survival, disobedience, and meaning making that are often only lived out in invisible, intimate spaces, and too often disappear into them. In narrating her mother’s tongue as both metaphor for and material reservoir of other ways of knowing, Charania gestures to the afflictions, limits, and failures of feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholarly interrogations and the consequences of closing the archive of the brown mother.

This event is free and open to the public but will require registration. 

International Women's Day - Exploring Gender & Philippine Labour Migration

Thursday 27 March 6-9pm Khalili Lecture Theatre (KLT), Russell Square: College Buildings, SOAS

Speakers: Dr Sharmila Parmanand (LSE Gender); Louie Horne; Dr Joyce Jiang

Delve into the complex intersection of gender and Philippine labour migration, as we explore the experiences, challenges, and triumphs of Filipino women working abroad. This event aims to shed light on the unique perspectives and contributions of these women to the global workforce. Through engaging discussions, personal stories, and expert insights, we will deepen our understanding of the social, economic, and cultural dimensions of this important issue. Hear from inspiring speakers, connect with fellow attendees, and be part of a meaningful dialogue on gender equality and migration.

This event is being hosted by SOAS, registration is required.

Inheritance: A Memory Archive

Thursday 2 May 5-7pm SG1 Alison Richard Building, Cambridge

Speaker: Professor Clare Hemmings (LSE Gender)

Hemmings is currently working in the project 'Inheritance: a Memory Archive', where she "engages questions of gender, sexuality, class-transition and nation through a series of short stories drawing on stories of family histories". Combining fiction and memoir, the project seeks to foreground the moments in family dynamics that challenge what we think we know about gender roles, sexuality and citizenship. Working from the multiple stories told about key characters, she dramatises the unevenness of (queer feminist) history, the power of affect to shape lives, and to critique teleologies of progress or loss from another angle. Hemmings has reflected on the process of these interventions in a series of articles, most recently for Memory Studies.

This event is being hosted by the Ambivalent Archives Network at Cambridge. Please get in touch with them if you have any questions.

Extractivism as a Model for Modern Epistemology

Tuesday 7 May 4-7pm Sir Ambrose Fleming Lecture Theatre G06, Roberts Building, UCL

Speaker: Professor Linda Martín Alcoff (Hunter College, CUNY)

Respondent: Professor Sumi Madhok (LSE Gender)

Extractivist epistemologies work analogously to extractivist capitalism by extracting something of value, transferring it to another location, and then making use of its value. Sometimes, the item being extracted is knowledge, or an object that is thought to contain knowledge. Thus, in this case extractivists seek an epistemic resource of some sort—such as a piece of pharmacological knowledge held by an indigenous community or a rural healer concerning the medicinal potential of a given plant, or an artifact from an indigenous funeral site that can help them understand the nature of that particular culture. This paper will also offer corrective epistemic norms to address the problems I have identified in extractivist epistemologies.

This event is being hosted by The Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London as a part of the 5th Goldsmiths Annual Philosophy Lectures 2024. Please get in touch with them if you have any questions.

Geographies of Counter Archiving

Tuesday 7 May 2024 5.00 to 7.30, Bush House South East Wing, Strand Campus, KCL

Speakers: Manu Luksch, Mukul Patel, Mahvish Ahmad, Hana Morgenstern, Senel Wanniarachchi

Chairs: Raktim Ray, Srilata Sircar

This is a closing event for the project Archiving Resistance. The project curated artefacts from two contemporary protests in India namely, the movement against Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens, 2019 (across India) and Farmers Protests near Singhu border in Delhi against the Indian Agriculture Acts of 2020. It builds on oral historical accounts of the protesters and creates an autonomous archive of various forms of artefacts (posters, banners, badges, poetry and performances). In the closing event we showcase our project outputs while being in conversation with colleagues from other counter-archiving projects from across South Asia and beyond.

The End of Peacekeeping 

Wednesday 1 May, 5.30-7pm The Marshall Building 1.04

Speakers: Professor Marsha Henry (Queen's Belfast/LSE); Professor Clare Hemmings (LSE Gender); Professor Armine Ishkanian (LSE AFSEE); Dr Denisa Kotsovicova (LSE European Inst)

Chair: Professor Sumi Madhok (LSE Gender)

The End of Peacekeeping makes use of feminist, postcolonial, and anti-militarist frameworks to expose peacekeeping as an epistemic power project in need of abolition. Drawing on critical concepts from Black feminist thought, and from postcolonial and critical race theories, Professor Henry shows how contemporary peacekeeping produces gender and racial inequalities through increasingly militarized strategies. She uses an intersectional analysis of peacekeeping based on more than fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork in peacekeeping missions and training centres around the world, including interviews with UN peacekeepers, humanitarian aid personnel, and local populations. Revealing that peacekeeping is not the benign, apolitical project it is often purported to be, the book encourages readers to imagine and enact alternative futures to peacekeeping.

This event is being co-hosted with the LSE Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE). It is free and open to the public but will require registration. 

Breaking Silos: building solidarities in gender research

Friday, 3 May 2024 at the LSE Campus 

As critical scholars and feminist researchers working on issues of gender and sexuality across the universities in London, we have often struggled to organize concerted, collective responses to the many interlocking crises we–and ever more disproportionately, the world–face: rising inequalities, ecological collapse, global desensitization to genocide, racism and xenophobia, forced displacement, right-wing nationalist upsurges, and “anti-gender” backlash. As scholars, we often produce knowledge that is disciplinarily and institutionally confined, which limits our connections to one another as well as our contributions to broader, sustainable social transformation. 

The Breaking Silos Conference, celebrated as part of LSE Gender’s 30th Anniversary, proposes to create a space of solidarity and collaborative, localized, interdisciplinary knowledge-production that reaches beyond disciplinary and academic boundaries, and creates opportunities for collective learning and collaboration, as we address these mounting challenges.

LSE Gender Studies: 30 years and beyond

Friday 10 May 9.30am-7.30pm, Sheikh Zayed Theatre (CKK)

The Department of Gender Studies symposium will celebrate 30 years of interdisciplinary, critical, transnational and intersectional gender research and teaching at the LSE. Departmental faculty will participate in panel discussions with gender scholars from around the world on themes ranging from 'Archives and contemporary gender politics', 'Care and reproductive justice', 'Identity, sexuality and rights', and 'Humanitarianism, peace and security'. For a full list of speakers, please see the registration webpage.

For more information about the department's 30th anniversary, please take a look at our dedicated mini-site.

3rd Year PhD Presentation: 'The Untold Stories of Women in the Armed Forces during the Bosnian War (1992-1995)'

Monday 10 June 12.30-2.00pm, Yangtze Theatre CBG.2.01

Speaker: Aynura Akbaš (LSE)

Discussant: Dr Maria Rashid (LSE)

With the end of the war in Bosnia in 1995, women who joined the army ranks, enlisting in thousands and occupying diverse roles, were first in line for demobilization, and their stories remain undocumented. The erasure of their experiences from the historiography of the war has had profound epistemological ramifications in shaping the post-war, post-genocidal memorialization landscape in Bosnia. In this wider project, I set out to document and analyse their life histories to co-construct with them a critical feminist historiography of the war. While the wider research focuses on the various intersections of gender and militarism during the war, the focus of this paper is the methodological and epistemological framework behind my project. I discuss how and why a combination of methods, which include archival research, oral history, and collage-making, enables me to render visible the complexity of war veterans’ experiences, explore the factors that led them to become combatants in ethnonational conflict, their experiences within military structures, and the images and conceptualization of gender that are being constructed, reproduced, and/or resisted in this context. I reflect on some of the main challenges and dilemmas that emerged from fieldwork and discuss ways to move forward.

My work builds on the emerging field of Bosnian studies and critical feminist scholarship in the Balkans to argue that situated knowledges of women veterans, who have been largely overlooked in feminist literature on Bosnia, are critical tools for further theorizing and developing interdisciplinary frameworks for conversations about gender, militarism, and war, and for reimagining Bosnian past/present/futures.

Workshop: Methodologies for Imagining an Alternative Politics of (Human) Rights

The Call for Papers submissions were due on 1 February 2023.

The event took place on 12 June 2023 at LSE and included a keynote lecture by Professor Nikita Dhawan (TU Dresden), which can be watched on the LSE Gender YouTube channel.

Access the full programme here, and the book of presentation abstracts here.

For more information about the research project please see our dedicated page 'Re-making Human Rights: Gender and Self-fashioning in the Political Imaginary of Rojava'.

Academic Freedom and the Scholarship of Justice and Transformation 

Wednesday 18th January 2023, 5.30-7pm. 

There will be no event recording available, but please see Mary Evans' LSE Impact blog, The Possibilities of Nostalgia for Academic Freedom. 

This LSE Conversation brought together leading scholars who research and teach on questions of social and political transformation in contemporary times.

Speakers: Clare Hemmings (LSE), Niraja Gopal Jayal (LSE & King's College) and Mary Evans (LSE). Chair: Sumi Madhok (LSE)

African Feminisms for Abolitionist Futures: the speculative geography of African women’s political dissent

Speaker: SM Rodriguez (LSE)

Chair: Aiko Holvikivi (LSE)

Watch a recording of the event on YouTube

Transnational ‘Anti-Gender’ Movements and Resistance: narratives and interventions

Speakers: Judith Butler (University of California, Berkeley - online), Sonia Corrêa (Sexuality Policy Watch), Françoise Vergès (antiracist decolonial theorist and writer - online)
Chairs: Clare Hemmings (LSE) and Sumi Madhok (LSE)

Watch a recording of the event on YouTube - View 1 and View 2