Consortium Speaker Series
The Consortium's Speaker Series brings an international roster of frontline practitioners, reflective activists and engaged scholars to University of Massachusetts Boston's campus. Their talks address the complex realities of women’s and men’s lives and livelihoods in conflict-affected areas, the challenges of trying to bring feminist commitments into security policy and humanitarian practice, and the ways in which gender analysis can and must transform resolutely “gender-blind” paradigms of conflict resolution and peacebuilding. Information about Upcoming Speaker Events, Events Earlier This Year, and Past Speaker Events is available here. You can find videos or transcripts of these events, when available, under Consortium Lectures.
Upcoming Speaker Events
How Much Land Does A Woman Need? Women, Land Rights and Rural Development
Esther Kingston-Mann
Professor Emerita of History, University of Massachusetts Boston
April 18, 2019
Credit: Georgina Smith / CIAT
Video coming soon.
The failure to include gender in the economic history of rural development has severely limited our understanding of the colonial, privatizing and collectivist economic policies that disrupted and transformed the lives of rural women and men in the modern world. This talk will rewrite a piece of that history, exploring rural development in 20th-century Kenya through the lens of women’s labor and land claims. In the course of the 20th-century, Kikuyu women resisted efforts by husbands, fathers, brothers, tribal authorities and the state to control women-cultivated lands. Were these women seeking private land of their own, or were they advancing claims that didn't fit neatly into preconceived capitalist or pre-capitalist categories?
This event is being cosponsored by the UMass Boston CLA Dean's Office; Anthropology Dept; Economics Dept; History Dept; Political Science Dept; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Dept and Human Rights Minor; the Honors College; the Sociology Club; and the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy.
“Crippled for Cassava”?: Gender, History, and Violence in a Mozambique Development Scheme
Heidi Gengenbach
Assistant Professor of History, College of Liberal Arts, University of Massachusetts Boston
April 2, 2019
Video coming soon.
In this talk, Gengenbach draws on interviews, survey data, and archives to understand women’s responses to a controversial development project in Mozambique. The project, supported by USAID and the Gates Foundation, purchases women’s staple food crop for the manufacture of Impala, the world’s first cassava-based commercial beer. Modeled on the “New Green Revolution for Africa” approach to hunger-reduction, the project claims that women’s adoption of high-yield varieties and chemical inputs will enable them to earn income and improve food security through the sale of “surplus” cassava. Yet in coastal southern Mozambique, where women have grown, cooked, and traded this American root crop for 250 years, project implementers have faced angry opposition—including charges of extortion and assault—from the very farmers they purport to help. Gengenbach analyzes these charges historically, linking women’s conversion of a foreign cultigen into an edible commodity with the gendered violence of competing slave trades, and a precolonial “indigenous agricultural revolution” (Richards 1985) with women’s fight to preserve a cassava-centered food system ever since.
This event is being cosponsored by the UMass Boston CLA Dean's Office; Anthropology Dept; Economics Dept; History Dept; Political Science Dept; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Dept and Human Rights Minor; the Honors College; the Sociology Club; and the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy.
Gender, Generations, and Guns Where the State Does Not Govern: The Political Economy of Justice and Rights in Rural South Africa
Sindiso Mnisi Weeks
Assistant Professor, Public Policy of Excluded Populations, School for Global Inclusion and Social Development, University of Massachusetts Boston; and Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Public Law, University of Cape Town
March 18, 2019
Video coming soon.
Dr. Mnisi Weeks will discuss the political economy of rural South Africa, drawing from the ethnographic research she conducted for her book Access to Justice and Human Security: Cultural Contradictions in Rural South Africa. Her research reveals how historical conditions and contemporary pressures grounded in severe neglect and harm by the state have resulted in a toxic mix of gender dynamics, intergenerational tensions, and easy accessibility and reliance on firearms as a means of conflict management that has strained traditional justice mechanisms’ ability to deliver the high normative ideals with which they are notionally linked. This prompts her to question what forms of justice are accessible in insecure contexts and what solutions are viable under such volatile human conditions.
This event is being cosponsored by the UMass Boston CLA Dean's Office; Anthropology Dept; Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance Dept; History Dept; Political Science Dept; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Dept and Human Rights Minor; the Honors College; the Sociology Club; the William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences; the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy; and the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development.
Gender, Patronage and Race in Modernist Agribusiness
Caitlin Ryan
Consortium Fellow 2018-2019; Assistant Professor of International Security, University of Groningen
November 26, 2018
The overwhelming gender-blindness of the early literature on large-scale land deals in the Global South is slowly being filled by research that examines the impacts of land deals for women (Arndt, et al. 2011). However, this still leaves open the question of what kinds of gendered and racialized relations of power make these deals possible in the first place and how these power relations are then augmented, or transformed, by the deals' implementation. In this talk, Ryan outlines the 'landlord'/'stranger' relations that govern land use and ownership in Northern Sierra Leone and uses community-based research to analyze how these pre-existing relations play a gendered and racialized role both in facilitating the entrance of investing companies, as 'strangers,' into communities and in shaping ensuing perceptions and negotiations.
This event is being cosponsored by the UMass Boston CLA Dean's Office; Department of Africana Studies; Department of Anthropology; Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance; Department of Economics; Department of History; Department of Political Science; Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies; the Honors College; the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies; and the Africa Scholars Forum.
(Re)colonizing Agriculture in the Name of 'Development'
Caitlin Ryan
Consortium Fellow 2018-2019; Assistant Professor of International Security, University of Groningen
October 30, 2018
Drawing from ethnographic research in Sierra Leone, Ryan considers how the language used to encourage and justify large-scale land deals reflects coloniality in its assertion of what counts as ‘good agriculture’ and desirable ‘development.’ While most attention to the “new global land rush” focuses on explaining its relation to historical trends in using land for capital transformation, and its situatedness in global economic processes, Ryan takes a different approach. She analyzes the ways that investing companies, the World Bank, and target countries frame large-scale land deals as having potential to ‘modernize backwards agricultural practices’ and thereby to make agriculture a means of economic development. In this talk Ryan argues that these framings are situated in wider discourses and practices of coloniality, and understanding the conditions that make these investments possible necessitates critical engagement with how the global land rush is both racialized and dependent on vague references to (under)development.
This event is being cosponsored by the UMass Boston CLA Dean's Office; Department of Africana Studies; Department of Anthropology; Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance; Department of Economics; Department of History; Department of Political Science; the Honors College; the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies; and the Africa Scholars Forum.
Syrian Refugees in Germany: Gendered Narratives of Border Crossings
Isis Nusair
Associate Professor of Women's Studies and International Studies, Denison University
September 27, 2018
Based on her extensive ethnographic research, Isis Nusair analyzes how Syrian refugees in Germany cross borders and create, in the process, transnational identities and networks that challenge popular representation of them as invisible and disposable “Others.” Nusair finds that as their narratives contest the rigidity of increasingly militarized, technologized and exclusionary borders, they are also searching for an alternative to war and displacement, and for new modes of transnational social and political transformation.
This event is being cosponsored by the UMass Boston CLA Dean's Office; Department of Anthropology; Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance; Department of History; Department of Political Science; Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Honors College; the Sociology Club; the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies; and the William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences.
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