2022 IFJP CONFERENCE CLOSING PLENARY CONVERSATION
Remapping the Feminist Global
How do we reclaim the South-South space in the spirit of dialogue and dissent? In this Round Table, we bring together feminist colleagues across regions and locations speaking and sharing ideas about breaking free from academic norms and protocols to reimagine the feminist global in inclusive and non-hierarchical ways. This requires radical methodologies, pedagogies and interdisciplinary collaborations that can challenge the existing forms of knowledge and especially create dialogic spaces for South - South feminisms even as the 'global' is being remapped. The participants here will especially reflect on ways to promote South-South vision of the ‘global’, and why that matters at a time when violence, erasures and exclusions are the norm across geographies and socio-political contexts.
Panel of Discussants
Elora Shehabuddin is Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Global Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism (University of California Press, 2021), Reshaping the Holy: Democracy, Development, and Muslim Women in Bangladesh (Columbia University Press, 2008), and Empowering Rural Women: The Impact of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (Grameen Bank, 1992). She currently serves as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Bangladesh Studies and as an Associate Editor (Central and South Asia) of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (Brill).
Natália Maria Félix de Souza is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), where she is currently serving as Advisor for International and Institutional Affairs. She is also the coordinator of Tibira – Center for International Studies on Gender and Sexuality at PUC-SP. She is currently a co-editor in chief of the International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFJP). Her research and teaching focuses on critical approaches to subjectivity and subject formation; studies on gender violence and feminist resistance in Latin America; and the agenda on decolonizing knowledge production in international relations theory. She has been active in promoting the agenda on Feminism, Gender and Sexuality in Brazilian IR.
Dzodzi Tsikata is Professor of Development Sociology and Director of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana. She is also one of the five editors of the journal Feminist Africa. In a career spanning over 30 years, Tsikata’s teaching, research and publications have been in the areas of gender and development policies and practices; the politics and livelihood effects of land tenure reforms, large scale land acquisitions and agricultural commercialisation; and informal labour relations and conditions of work. She has extensive experience with leading multi-disciplinary and multi-national research projects, supervising student theses and examining post-graduate theses. Tsikata is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the immediate past President of Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). Dzodzi Tsikata is also active in the leadership of several leading policy advocacy networks in Africa, including the Network for Women’s Rights in Ghana, Third World Network-Africa, and Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja.
Alice Urusaro Uwagaga Karekezi, a scholarly practitioner holds a PhD from the School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University, Sweden, focused on decolonizing international norm construction and a Master Degree in Law from the University Aix-Marseille III. Karekezi co-founded the University of Rwanda Center for Conflict Management (CCM) in 1999 where she is based. Her main areas of interest include Rwanda's Postgenocide reconstruction; Women, peace and security, African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA). Her work and research interests include postgenocide reconstruction homegrown practices, chiefly Gacaca and Gir’inka; transitional justice and reconciliation; decolonial global politics; gender, peace and security; civil-military cooperation and the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA); and since recently, children and armed conflict.
Gaphee Ko is an activist, professor and theoretician. She is the founder of the ‘Network for Glocal Activism’, an international activist organization that includes the establishment of the ‘School of Feminism for Glocal Activists’ with other glocal-point (GP) members in Mexico, China and South Africa in 2009. She is the current director of glocal point chapter in Korea. She started with other feminist-labor activists ‘World Women and Seong Workers Congress’ in 2018. She was the founder of ‘the Center for Women’s Culture and Feminist Theories’ in 1997, for which she served as the first director. The center opened the feminist publishing company Alterity, and she has been acting as the company’s president since 1998. In 1999 she and the founding members started the biannual feminist journal Theoria: A Journal of Feminist Theories and Practices. She had been on the faculty of Hanshin University since 1995. She is the author of several books, including Seong System (2011), The Patriarchal Regime-System Theory and the Red-Green-Purple Paradigm (2017) and Feminism is Transition (2016). She got Ph.D. at New York University.
Chaired by:
Swati Parashar is Professor in Peace and Development research at the School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University, Sweden. Her research interests include feminism, postcolonialism, security, conflict and development in South Asia. Most recently she has co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research with Tarja Väyrynen, Élise Féron and Catia Cecilia Confortini; Gender, Silence and Agency in Contested Terrains with Jane Parpart; and Revisiting Gendered States: Feminist Imaginings of the State in International Relations with J. Ann Tickner and Jacqui True. She is a co-editor in chief of the International Feminist Journal of Politics and serves on the advisory boards of Millennium, Security Dialogue, Third World Quarterly, Critical Studies on Security and, Critical Terrorism Studies.