Consortium Lectures are edited transcripts and video recordings from the Consortium’s International Speaker Series. Our Speaker Series brings an international roster of frontline practitioners, reflective activists and engaged scholars. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Currently, the discourse and actions around terrorism prevention and response are strongly infused with socially-constructed images of masculinity and femininity. Women are often ignored and instrumentalized in terrorism prevention and response approaches. Such approaches have a real and direct impact on women’s rights, with consequences for the right to participation, and freedom of association, among others. This talk will address the need for context-specific security measures through ongoing engagement with local women’s groups to ensure a more effective response that improves lives and access to rights for all.
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; Human Rights Minor; the Honors College; the William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences; the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development; and the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies.
Challenges today are global in nature and are best addressed through global responses with diverse voices engaged. However, those most vulnerable, people and particularly women of color, are not adequately represented at the policy tables where decisions are being made. This discussion will examine some of those challenges, particularly infectious disease, and the impact of those challenges on the most vulnerable communities.
This event is being cosponsored by the UMass Boston CLA Dean's Office; Africana Studies Dept; 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 and Human Rights Minor; the Honors College; the William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences; the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy; the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development; and the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies.
The talk charts Al-Ali's trajectories as a feminist activist/academic seeking to research, write and talk about gender-based violence in relation to the Middle East. More specifically she draws on research and activism in relation to Iraq, Turkey and Lebanon to map the discursive, political and empirical challenges and complexities linked to scholarship and activism that is grounded in both feminist and anti-racist/anti-Islamophobic politics.
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; and the Honors College.
Credit: Georgina Smith / CIAT
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In societies impacted by war or civil conflict, women experience violence as a continuum across domestic and societal spheres. However, studies of violence treat micro and macro violence as theoretically distinct. The lecture will illustrate how the separation of violence into micro or macro violence is problematic for understanding gender-based violence in post-crisis contexts. Using examples from field research in Nepal, it is shown that this separation obscures structural forms of exclusion in post-conflict societies. The neglect of post-conflict reconstruction frameworks of the different forms of gender-based violence leads, therefore, to new and persistent forms of discrimination and marginalization.
This event is being cosponsored by the William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences; the UMass Boston Global Governance and Human Security PhD Program; and the Honors College.
This event is being cosponsored by the UMass Boston Global Governance and Human Security PhD Program; Department of Political Science; Department of History; Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy; Honors College; and Department of Anthropology.
This event is the UMass Boston Human Rights Minor Spring Keynote Address and is co-hosted by the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. It is cosponsored by the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights; the Graduate Consortium in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality; the Department of Political Science; the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy; the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance; and the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development.
The deluge of exposés about diverse men harassing and assaulting women in the workplace has galvanized women worldwide. But those revelations have been treated as if they have nothing to do with international politics. That is a serious missed opportunity.
This event is being cosponsored by the UMass Boston Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Human Rights Minor; Global Governance and Human Security PhD Program; Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy; Department of Political Science; Department of History; and Honors College.
This presentation examines the band of brothers myth and how it informs US military policy. It also asks what a Trump presidency means for US military culture and for recent policy changes such as removing the combat exclusion for women and opening the military to transgender service members.
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