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
Extractive Industries, Violence, and Corporate Criminality: Is There a Pathway to Global Justice?
Anna Zalik
Associate Professor of Environmental and Urban Change, York University
Catherine Coumans
Ph.D. Research Coordinator and Asia-Pacific Program Coordinator, MiningWatch Canada
Marta Ruedas
Former Deputy Special Representative, United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq; Former UN Resident Coordinator, Humanitarian Coordinator & Resident Representative, UNDP Iraq
December 2, 2021
This was the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights' second Fall 2021 Webinar. You can watch a recording of the event below or on our YouTube channel here.
Toxic Extraction and Corporate Criminality
Anna Zalik
Inspired by the work of critical scholars of corporate crime, as well as broader calls for both reparations to colonized and racialized peoples and abolition of carceral systems, Zalik's presentation considers the contradictory forms in which criminality and violence have been interpreted in the context of extractive industry operations. A number of historical and contemporary global examples will be considered: in the longer term, questions of colonial state control over land and its appropriation from Indigenous peoples; in the medium term, the toxic legacy of oil, gas and other extractive industries - particularly in regions where BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) reside; and in the immediate term, the role of the policing and criminal justice system in disputes between corporations and communities negatively affected by extraction. Substantive solutions will be considered, including those specific to: a) extractive firm governance, including public ownership of energy and industrial infrastructure, an end to firm subsidies and restriction of hydrocarbon production; and b) the criminal justice system - ranging from the development of a substantive transnational system for corporate criminal prosecution to the more categorical change proposed by the prison abolition movement.
Exposing Mines as Sites of Crime Against Women
Catherine Coumans
Coumans’s presentation draws on studies that expose violence experienced by community women and female workers at mine sites, as well as on her own work with victims of rape by police and security at mines in Papua New Guinea and Tanzania. She discusses resistance strategies and agency of the women themselves, as well as recommendations emerging out of joint work by victims of violence, researchers, and corporate accountability activists. These recommendations address persistent impunity in regard to corporate criminality, weak responses by governments and international bodies, such as the United Nations, and corporate strategies that deflect policy focus and resources from efforts to establish binding mechanisms in home countries of multinationals to strengthen prevention of harm and create pathways to legal remedy.
Commentary from the Field Perspective
Marta Ruedas
Ruedas will comment on the presentations from the perspective of a practitioner, reflecting on the real-life feasibility of using the ideas and recommendations made by Zalik and Coumans in a recovery or peace-building context. She will use examples from specific crisis contexts to illustrate elements that might need to be taken into account, as well as how government, international community and NGO actors might play into different scenarios.
This event was co-sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Boston's Africana Studies Department; Anthropology Department; Asian Studies Department; Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance; Economics Department; History Department; The Honors College; Political Science Department; School for Global Inclusion and Social Development; Sociology Department; and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department and Human Rights Minor.
In a World of Interlinked Crises, is the Green New Deal Enough? How a Feminist & Decolonial Global Green New Deal Can Transform Systemic Inequalities
Bhumika Muchhala
Senior Policy Analyst on Global Economic Governance & Justice - Third World Network
Anne Marie Goetz
Clinical Professor - Center for Global Affairs, New York University
November 9, 2021
Over the last few years there have been several Green New Deals emerging across the developed world. There have also been responses, critiques and alternative formulations, particularly from the Global South, centered on global economic and social justice and on the need for Green New Deals to address systemic inequalities and still-persisting colonial dynamics. What does a feminist and decolonial global Green New Deal look like? What would be its key principles and provisions? And could it serve as a viable, intersectional framework for building sustainable peace in worn-torn countries?
Bhumika Muchhala is a political economist and critical theorist engaged in research, writing, advocacy, activism and public education on the international financial architecture, feminist economics and decolonial futures. She has 20 years of experience in global economic and social justice advocacy, and is a movement leader in global civil society who has advised developing country governments in UN conference negotiations and in the Human Rights Council. Since 2009, she has led Third World Network's programme on global economic governance, carrying out advocacy, research and campaign initiatives on fiscal justice, economic governance reforms for recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, the role of the IMF in the debt and fiscal crises generated by the pandemic, systemic inequalities and Special Drawing Rights, as well as the systemic transformations and paradigm shifts required for a decolonial and feminist global green new deal. Muchhala has a Masters of Science in Development Economics from the London School of Economics and a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature and Political Science from Carnegie Mellon University. She is of Indian origin, grew up in Jakarta and is now based in New York.
Anne Marie Goetz is Clinical Professor at the Center for Global Affairs, New York University, and former Chief Advisor on Peace and Security at UN Women. As a political scientist, she has focused on studying how development policies in fragile states promote the interests of marginalized social groups, particularly poor women. She has researched democratization and good governance reforms in South Asia and East Africa, including research on pro-poor and gender-sensitive approaches to public sector reforms, anti-corruption initiatives, and decentralization, as well as political liberalization and state building in fragile states and post-conflict situations. She has published widely, including seven books on the subjects of gender, politics and policy in developing countries. Goetz holds a PhD from University of Cambridge, UK, a Masters of Science from the London School of Economics, and Bachelor of Arts from Queen's University, Canada. She is a Canadian who was brought up in Venezuela, Brazil, Trinidad, France, Australia, and Singapore, and currently lives in Connecticut, USA.
Moderated by Carol Cohn, Director, Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights; and Claire Duncanson, Senior Research Scholar and Co-Investigator, Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace and Planet Project, Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights
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This event was co-sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Boston's Africana Studies Department; Anthropology Department; Asian Studies Department; Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance; Department of Public Policy and Public Affairs; Economics Department; History Department; The Honors College; Political Science Department; School for Global Inclusion and Social Development; Sociology Department; and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department and Human Rights Minor.
New Economic Paradigms for Peace and the Planet: Intersectional Feminist Perspectives
Corinna Dengler
Senior Lecturer, Global Political Economy and Development Master's Program, University of Kassel
Patricia (Ellie) Perkins
Professor, Department of Environmental Studies, York University
Lebohang Liepollo Pheko
Senior Research Fellow, Trade Collective
Mariama Williams
Principal, The Integrated Policy Research Institute (IPRI) and Managing Director, FromtheInside2theOutside
April 15, 2021
Join the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights for the fourth panel of our Spring 2021 Speaker Series. To join the webinar, Zoom registration is required.
Our Degrowth Is Intersectional: Feminist Decolonial Pathways for Sustainable Futures
Corinna Dengler, Senior Lecturer, Global Political Economy and Development Master's Program, University of Kassel
This intervention introduces degrowth scholarship and activism and discusses how it can help us to build a new economic paradigm - a paradigm that ventures beyond what Rachel Carson has called the "war on life", a war arising from an economic system that structurally depends on the exploitation of nature, women, and people discriminated against in terms of, for example, class, race, and gender. Having its origins in an ecological critique of our economic system, this talk emphasizes that a degrowth alternative necessarily needs to embrace intersectionality in order to pave the way for socially (and also: gender-) just and ecologically sustainable futures.
Envisioning the Decline of Patriarchy, Race and Capitalism
Patricia (Ellie) Perkins, Professor, Department of Environmental Studies, York University
The current pandemic heightens massive racialized, gendered, class-based, geographic and ecological inequities, with life-and-death consequences for millions. How, at what point -- or is it even possible -- to repudiate and replace the systems behind this catastrophe, while climate chaos looms? How to distinguish transformative actions from those which just help the current systems to reinvent themselves? I suggest some ideas grounded in wellbeing, care, and stabilizing feedbacks.
Addressing COVID-Nomics and Its Implications to Transform the World from an Afrikan Feminist Perspective
Lebohang Liepollo Pheko, Senior Research Fellow, Trade Collective
The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed weaknesses of capitalism as an economy and polity and revealed the huge potential of post-capitalism. Afrikan feminist scholars, activists, researchers have collectively critiqued current market orthodox models of macro and micro economics made with ongoing forms of colonialism, including colonialisation of natural resources, of the economy, of political relations, and of health provision.
Integrating Mindfulness, Social Sustainability and Just Transitions Issues into National and Global Climate and Economic Policy and Practice
Mariama Williams, Principal, The Integrated Policy Research Institute (IPRI) and Managing Director, FromtheInside2theOutside
The current pandemic is revelatory about how deeply unequal, imbalanced and unjust our societies are. In the face of the inextricably linkage between Covid-19 and climate change, there are tremendous lessons to be learned. Where do we go? Is the ‘building-back-better’ mantra ultimately the way or can we think of ways of incorporating ‘mindfulness’ and related approaches to human provisioning and thriving, if indeed we seek to contribute to more robust and life-enhancing economic analyses and policy-relevant practices in the context of just transitions and sustainable development.
Moderated by Suzanne Bergeron, Helen M. Graves Collegiate Professor of Women's Studies and Social Sciences at University of Michigan-Dearborn
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This speaker series is cosponsored by the University of Massachusetts Boston's Anthropology Dept; Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance Dept; Economics Dept; History Dept; Philosophy Dept; Political Science Dept; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Dept; Human Rights Minor; and the Honors College.
The Climate Crisis, Gender, and Prospects for Sustainable Peace
Kavita Naidu
International Human Rights Lawyer and Consultant, Edith Cowan University
Bernadette P. Resurrección
Associate Professor, Global Development Studies Department; Queen's National Scholar in Development in Practice, Queen's University
April 8, 2021
Join the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights for the third panel of our Spring 2021 Speaker Series. To join the webinar, Zoom registration is required.
How Can Development Justice Tackle the Climate-COVID Crisis to Ensure Sustainable Peace?
Kavita Naidu, International Human Rights Lawyer
Development Justice is a transformative framework that aims to reduce inequalities between countries, between rich and poor and between women and men to challenge the existing hyper-growth, profit driven extractivist model of economic development that perpetuates the climate-covid crisis. The alarming lack of political will to protect our ecosystem and eradicate inequalities of wealth, power and resources and uphold human rights is threatening sustainable peace. This global agenda is curated and influenced by mega corporations, undermining any accountability that governments may have towards people.
Green and Climate-Responsive Technologies: Mismatches with Everyday Gendered Lives
Bernadette P. Resurrección, Associate Professor, Global Development Studies Department; Queen's National Scholar in Development in Practice, Queen's University
Due to the urgency of the climate and disaster crisis, science and technology are now being touted as a benign force and key to enabling green transformations. Science and technology efforts are thus being designed to make climate change and its effects more intelligible and thus, manageable. From feminist political ecology and STS perspectives, I aim to unpack how science and technology ‘lands’ in climate policy environments setting in motion ‘messy’ gender power dynamics re/producing exclusions, injustice, disquiet and hegemony. Through brief examples in Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam, I highlight how technical climate solutions may sidestep or even reproduce the same drivers that steered climate catastrophes, inequality, and unrest that dramatically prompted us to pursue such solutions in the first place.
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This speaker series is cosponsored by the University of Massachusetts Boston's Anthropology Dept; Communications Dept; Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance Dept; Economics Dept; History Dept; Philosophy Dept; Political Science Dept; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Dept; Human Rights Minor; and the Honors College.
Gender, Race and Climate Justice: National and Global Policy Perspectives
Colette Pichon Battle
Executive Director, Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy
Jacqueline Patterson
Senior Director, Environmental and Climate Justice Program, NAACP
Osprey Orielle Lake
Executive Director, Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International
Anita Nayar and Camden Goetz
Director and Coordinator, Regions Refocus
April 1, 2021
Join the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights and the University of Massachusetts Boston Sustainable Solutions Lab for the second panel of our Spring 2021 Speaker Series. To join the webinar, Zoom registration is required.
The Climate Crisis and the Sacred Femine
Colette Pichon Battle, Executive Director, Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy
This talk will explore the impacts and roles around solutions that honor the sacred femine. From community organizing to investment strategies, our ability to survive and thrive in this climate reality calls for a rebalancing of global systems from individual, patriarchal, extractive methods to the collective, femine, sustainable values held by frontline communities in the Global South.
[Title TBA]
Jacqueline Patterson, Senior Director, Environmental and Climate Justice Program, NAACP
Feminist Actions Addressing the Climate Crisis and Systemic Change
Osprey Orielle Lake, Executive Director, Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International
Globally women and feminists are building grassroots solutions and transformative climate policy to address interlocking systems of patriarchy, colonization, racism and capitalism. From food sovereignty to forest protection, fossil fuel resistance to feminist climate policies, Indigenous rights to the rights of nature, we are imagining and building the healthy and just world we seek.
Confronting Economic Imperialism: Connections with Struggles against Neo-Colonialism and Patriarchy
Anita Nayar, Director, Regions Refocus and Camden Goetz, Coordinator, Regions Refocus
Drawing on our work to build cross-regional, cross-movement solidarity in the struggle for progressive and feminist economic policy, we will explore connections with struggles in the US against neo-colonialism, patriarchy, and global capitalism. These intersections are shaping our emerging work to confront US economic imperialism, an often unchallenged threat to people and the planet.
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This speaker series is cosponsored by the University of Massachusetts Boston's Anthropology Dept; Communications Dept; Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance Dept; Economics Dept; History Dept; Philosophy Dept; Political Science Dept; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Dept; Human Rights Minor; the Honors College; the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development; and the Sustainable Solutions Lab.
Black Feminist Ecological Perspectives
Kishi Animashaun Ducre
Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies, Syracuse University
Tiya Miles
Professor, Department of History, Harvard University
Frances Roberts-Gregory
Future Faculty Fellow, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University
March 11, 2021
Join the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights for the first panel of our Spring 2021 Speaker Series. To join the webinar, Zoom registration is required.
Harriett Tubman is DOPE
Kishi Animashaun Ducre, Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies, Syracuse University
My short presentation focuses on what we can learn about the Black Feminist Spatial Imagination and fugitive geographies from the life and times of Harriett Tubman. I will highlight scholarship on Tubman that emphasizes her contributions to peace and liberation beyond her exploits on the Underground Railroad.
Black Women and the Nature of Fugitivity
Tiya Miles, Professor, Department of History, Harvard University
Early thinkers in the Black feminist literary tradition worked with the materiality and symbolism of nature to imagine as well as to enact free lives. Can their form of environmental consciousness, forged in the fires of slavery, speak to today’s existential threats?
Black Feminist Activist Research for Environmental, Energy, and Climate Justice
Frances Roberts-Gregory, Future Faculty Fellow, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University
Drawing upon my fieldwork eco-memories, I reflect upon the potential for feminist activist research and ecowomanism to address longstanding environmental racism and racialized health disparities in the Louisiana Gulf Coast.
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This webinar is part of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights’ Spring 2021 Speaker Series. It is also affiliated with the Becoming Liberated & Knowledgeable (BLK) Conference, which is organized by students at University of Massachusetts Boston and will take place on February 27, 2021.
This webinar is being co-sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Boston's Africana Studies Department; Department of Anthropology; Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance; Department of Economics; History Department; Philosophy Department; Political Science Department; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department and Human Rights Minor; the Honors College; and the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development.
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