Author: keshabgiri

Chair: Dr Amanda Chisholm, Senior Lecturer in Security Studies / Researcher in Gender and Security

Registration: Link to Registration

Speaker: Sarah Gharib Seif, doctoral researcher at the University of St Andrews

Discussant: Professor Caron Gentry, Pro Vice-Chancellor for the Faculty of Arts, Design, and Social Sciences at Northumbria University

In 2015, the ‘phenomenon’ of women traveling to join the Islamic State seemed to have taken over the news, with regular mentions of disbelief of why they would decide to leave their ‘ideal’ Western lives to join a ‘barbaric’ terrorist group. Various attempts to engage with the roles these women have played (and media coverage of it) has focused on a shallow interpretation of agency, and depictions thereof.

Moreover, much of the existing literature on women involved in terrorism not only focuses on the personal, but it treats the women themselves as the challenge for the existing parameters and policies set by the state, whilst simultaneously avoiding how these policies are inherently gendered. Feminist security studies has argued against the dismissal of women using gendered language which erases their agency. However, this still exists within the shallow binary of “having” agency.

Using the case study of the UK government and media narratives of the women who joined IS, and building on postcolonial and decolonial feminist theorisations, this talk  aims to uncover the racialised and gendered nature of these narratives and to take a step towards a deeper conceptualisation of agency.

About the speaker

Sarah Gharib Seif’s doctoral research focuses on the (re)production and perpetuation of colonial, racialised and gendered constructions of women who joined the Islamic State through media and government narratives in the Anglosphere, with a particular focus on the United Kingdom.

Sarah’s research interests include postcolonial, decolonial and feminist approaches to International Relations, critical approaches to terrorism, the politics and creation of narratives and discourses, the intersections of gender, race and religion, and the colonial nature of citizenship. Sarah received her undergraduate degree in International Relations from the University of St Andrews and holds an M.A. in International Peace and Security from King’s College London.

She previously worked as a researcher on Preventing Radicalisation and Extremism Leading to Terrorism at the Cairo International Center for Conflict Resolution, Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding (CCCPA), with a focus on the intersections of gender and terrorism, and of DDR and counterterrorism. She also previously worked as a geopolitics and social media intelligence analyst.

This event is part of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies (FTGS) Global Voices Seminar Series. 

Registration: Link to Registration

Speaker: Dr Maria Rashid, post-doctoral scholar at the UCL Social Research Institute at University College London

Discussant: Dr Amanda Chisholm, Senior Lecturer in Security Studies / Researcher in Gender and Security

Militarism penetrates social structures, relations, and practices including popular culture, modes of economic production, and hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Maria Rashid’s book Dying to Serve, Militarism, Affect, and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army, traces this process of infection outward by affixing its gaze on to the military as an institution, the affective bonds it cultivates with soldiers and their families, and the function of these relationships in fashioning the appeal and presence of militarism in modern society.  Saturated with tropes of honour, nation and gender, military deaths are political instances that attach meaning to private grief to produce a public politics of service and sacrifice for the nation-state.

The Pakistan Military invested heavily in crafted rituals for mourning dead soldiers as soldier casualties and the clamour against ‘America’s war’ mounted during the military operations in the ‘War on Terror.’ Through an ethnographic exploration of soldier death in military commemorative ceremonies and its reception in ‘martial’ villages in Punjab, this talk will explore the gap between everyday experiences of families that mourn their dead in rural Pakistan and the idealized image of the martyr that saturates national representations. Positioning dead body politics and ritualistic mourning as technologies of rule, through a focus on subjectivity, intimacy and affect, the talk will explicate the persuasive powers through which hegemonic institutions seek to produce consensus and ideological conformity. 

About the speaker 

Dr Maria Rashid completed her doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies in Politics and International Studies in 2018. 

Her book Dying to Serve, Militarism, Affect and the Politics of Sacrifice was published in 2020 by Stanford University Press and has been awarded the Bernard S. Cohn 2022 prize and was shortlisted for the IPS- International Political Sociology Book Award, 2021 and the British South Asian Studies 2022 book prize.

Maria is also a psychologist by training and has worked with various national and international non-governmental organizations in Pakistan for overtwenty years. She is currently a post-doctoral scholar at the UCL Social Research Institute at University College London, UK and is involved in training and research around violence, gender and militarism.

This event is part of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies (FTGS) Global Voices Seminar Series.

At this event

Amanda Chisholm

Senior Lecturer in Security Studies / Researcher in Gender and Security

Registration: Link to Registration

Chair: Dr Amanda Chisholm, Senior Lecturer in Security Studies / Researcher in Gender and Security

Speaker: Dr Nivi Manchanda, Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Queen Mary, University of London. 

Dr Nivi Manchanda excavates the question of the border in the political thought of four foundational thinkers: Gloria Anzaldua, Temsula Ao, Jean Genet and Huey Newton. These scholars’ grapple with the border, albeit often obliquely, and posit an expansive conceptualisation of the border beyond its immediate material infrastructure.

Thinking the Border Otherwise offers a new and generative account of the processes of bordering whilst decentring the physical border as a ‘line on the map’. Specifically, by drawing on the vast archives of these scholar-activists, it reorients critical geography from a narrow focus on migration regimes and open borders towards more politically urgent and theoretically enriching engagements with memory and history vis-à-vis borders. It also brings into conversation four preeminent mid-twentieth century theorists whose writing and lives have compelling parallels, but have hitherto never been studied collectively.

About the speaker 

Dr Nivi Manchanda is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Queen Mary, University of London. She is interested in questions of racism, empire, and borders and has published in, among other journals, International Affairs, Security Dialogue, Millennium, Current Sociology, and Third World Quarterly. She is the co-editor of Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (Routledge, 2014). Her monograph Imagining Afghanistan: the History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2020) was awarded the LHM Ling First Outstanding Book Prize by the British International Studies Association. She sits on the editorial board of International Studies Quarterly, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and Security Dialogue. She was the co-editor in chief of the journal Politics from 2018 to 2021.

This event is part of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies (FTGS) Global Voices Seminar Series. 

Please find below the details for the upcoming FTGS Global Voices seminar scheduled on Wednesday, 15 June 2022 (2 pm-3 pm/UK time).  

Registration: Online link here

Chair: Dr Amanda Chisholm, Senior Lecturer in Security Studies / Researcher in Gender and Security

Speaker: Dr Maria Tanyag, Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the Department of International Relations, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University

Discussant: Professor Shirin Rai, Department of Politics and International Studies and the Director of Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development (WICID).

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, health workers and women’s rights service providers worldwide experienced severe depletion and mortality rate. In many cases, they were even subjected to discrimination and vilified by their own governments and local communities. One of the most striking paradoxes of the COVID-19 pandemic is why at time when our collective need for care is most profound, that the very sources and providers of care were not only egregiously neglected but also assumed self-renewing. While clearly a global phenomenon, this pandemic paradox is even more perplexing in the case of the Philippines – a country whose competitive edge in the global labour market is built on nationalist quality of care.

This discussion Dr Maria Tanyag charts feminist explanations for the depletion of care in times of crisis by drawing on pandemic experiences in the Philippines. She presents preliminary evidence from an online survey and key-informant interviews with health workers and women’s rights service providers in the country. Learning from the perspectives of carers reveals important insights on the gendered logics of crisis defining who is owed care, when, how and why.

About the speaker 

Dr Maria Tanyag is a Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the Department of International Relations, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University. She was awarded her PhD from Monash University in 2018. Maria received first class honours for both her MA (Research) and BA Honours in Political Studies from the University of Auckland, New Zealand; and a BA in Political Science magna cum laude from the University of the Philippines-Diliman. She was selected as one of the inaugural International Studies Association (ISA) Emerging Global South Scholars in 2019, and as resident Women, Peace and Security Fellow at Pacific Forum International (Hawaii) in 2021.

This seminar is part of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies (FTGS) Global Voices Seminar Series. 

Please find below the details for the upcoming FTGS Global Voices seminar scheduled on Wednesday, 08 June 2022 (1pm-2pm/UK time).  

In this upcoming seminar, we have Dr Julia Zulver, Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and the Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas (UNAM, Mexico), discussing her research on ‘High-Risk Feminism in Colombia: Women’s Mobilisation in Violent Contexts’.

In this seminar, Dr Julia Zulver documents the experiences of grassroots women’s organisations that united to demand gender justice during and in the aftermath of Colombia’s armed conflict. In doing so, she illustrates a little-studied phenomenon: women whose experiences with violence catalyse them to mobilise and resist as feminists, even in the face of grave danger. Despite a well-established tradition of studying women in war, we tend to focus on their roles as mothers or careers, as peacemakers, or sometimes as revolutionaries. Dr Julia Zulver explains the gendered underpinnings of why women engage in feminist mobilisation, even when this takes place in a ‘domain of losses’ that exposes them to high levels of risk.

Chair: Dr Amanda Chisholm, Senior Lecturer in Security Studies / Researcher in Gender and Security

Speaker: Dr Julia Zulver, Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and the Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas (UNAM, Mexico)

Discussant: Dr Jelke Boesten, Professor in Gender and Development at King’s College London 

Registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_BgZGwy2hQJWBDHZnFnLPLg

Please find below the details for the upcoming FTGS Global Voices seminar scheduled on Wednesday, 25 May 2022 (2pm-3pm/UK time).  

In this upcoming seminar, we have Dipali Anumol, Ph.D. Candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, discussing her research on ‘Slow Violence and the Law: Feminist Activism around Sexual Violence in India’. 
Registration link: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/slow-violence-and-the-law-feminist-activism-around-sexual-violence-in-india

About the Award

FTGS annually awards a prize for new publications making a substantial contribution to our understanding of international studies and global politics through feminist theory and gender studies.

The award recognizes a book published in the preceding two calendar years that excels in originality, impact, and rigor towards furthering feminist theory and gender studies within the discipline of international relations.

Details on previous award recipients can be found here: https://genderingworldpolitics.com/awards/book-prize/

Application Information

Criteria

1. Recipients must be current members of ISA and FTGS section, or be willing to join ISA and FTGS section when the award is granted.

2. Books must have been published in the two preceding calendar years (i.e. the book must have an official publication date of 2021 or 2022 for nomination this year). Books that were previously nominated are not eligible for nomination in the following year.

3. Nominators/ nominees are responsible for making sure the publisher provides 7 copies of the nominated book for the committee by July 10, 2022.

Application Process

o The award is given annually based of nominations by individuals and peers. Publishers are limited to 2 books.

o Nominations should be submitted to the Chair of the Award Committee, Anwar Mhajne, amhajne@stonehill.edu

o Please send your nomination and a 300-500 words explaining the significance and originality of the work for understanding international studies and global politics through feminist theory and gender studies.

o The deadline for nominations is July 1, 2022.

o The winner, and finalists will be announced by December.

Prize

Recipients receive a $800.00 (USD) cash prize and a certificate.

Selection Process

The winner will be selected by the FTGS Award Committee and the award will be presented at the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies (FTGS) Section business meeting during the ISA Annual Convention in 2023.

About the FTGS

The Feminist Theory and Gender Studies section of the International Studies Association brings together scholars who apply feminist theory to International Relations or look at the field through a gender lens. For more information, visit: https://www.isanet.org/ISA/Sections/FTGS.

Time to submit proposals to the ISA Feminist Theory and Gender Studies (FTGS) section programme!

You may have seen that the call for proposals is now live and the deadline for submissions is June 1, so now is the time to start planning papers, roundtables and panel. The conference is scheduled for 15-18 March 2023. Details can be found here.  

The theme for this year is “Real Struggles, High Stakes: Cooperation, Contention, and Creativity.”

Feminist scholarship has played a crucial role in theorising, resisting, and transforming how ‘struggles’ and ‘stakes’ are shaped by overlapping structures of power based on gender, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity/citizenship, epistemologies, and geographic location. Feminists have multiple traditions that critically unveil the continuum of struggles between ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics, ‘crisis’ and the ‘mundane’, and the individual with the ecological. These traditions offer diverse ways of rethinking the very terms of the debates that constitute political domains and disciplinarity itself. Moreover, they generate pluralist understandings and a richer accounting of the stakes involved in human and societal struggles through analysis of gendered ideologies, structures, subjectivities, onto-epistemologies, and processes. Feminism’s diverse epistemological, ontological, conceptual, methodological, and ethical toolkits can inform and embody emancipatory solutions and processes in addressing contemporary political struggles. They connect feminist research with activism and practice and disrupt the dualism between the two.

The FTGS section invites proposals seeking to critically interrogate diverse struggles and stakes that define global politics today. The section is particularly interested in submissions that address elements of the following questions, with the aim of creating dialogues among established and emerging feminist and gender theory scholars across our Section and our broader Association.

These questions include:  

• What forms of gendered struggles animate international studies as a discipline and arena of power?

• How might feminist scholarship challenge, inform and reimagine prevailing knowledge on global risks, hazards, and what is at stake?

• How can feminist approaches help reveal the gendered logics underpinning how and why particular struggles are memorialised while others are erased or ‘normalised’? 

• What are feminist alternatives to ‘cooperation’ and ‘contention’? How might these concepts link with ‘solidarity’, ‘resistance’ and kinship?

• What are past, present and emergent forms of feminist cooperation and contention to address global political struggles?

• What has been the role played by creativity in feminist struggles and knowledge making practices? To what extent can creativity reflect feminist ethics and activism?

• How can feminist research and activism privilege struggles from the margins and in so doing decentre current global centres, subjectivities and structures of economic, political, ecological decision making?

This is not an exhaustive list, and we invite proposals for panels and roundtables relevant to the conference theme and those advancing more expansive understandings of or alternative frameworks to cooperation, contention, and creativity.

While we encourage FTGS panels that specifically address the conference theme, this is not a requirement. The ISA is also accepting some specialty proposals for a limited number of innovative panels, non-English language roundtables, research workshops and career courses (see here for Special Convention Programmes.  

We are also looking to continue co-sponsoring panels with other Sections to maximise our presence, the depth of our reach, and co-learnings: please do indicate your co-sponsorship preferences when submitting as it is likely to enhance the possibility of getting on to the program as well as enhancing our links with other elements of ISA.  

Please be reminded that following the decision from ISA, the conference will be an in-person event only.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact FTGS Program Co-Chairs: Toni  Haastrup  (toni.haastrup@stir.ac.uk) and Maria Tanyag (maria.tanyag@anu.edu.au).

About this Award

This award recognises the significant contributions of mid-career to senior scholars in and from the Global South to feminist and gender scholarship in IR broadly defined. 

Hegemonic Euro- and West-centrism often renders the important work of this category of scholars invisible, as study after study from within and without the ISA has shown. Because their subjects, methods, sources, resources, theories and frameworks are evaluated according to standards of scholarship set by the Global North academy, this work is often devalued, underrepresented, and invisibilised. At the same time, scholars from the North, feminist or not, draw upon these and other indigenous knowledges, often without acknowledgement, to better situate their own research on those contexts. 

Thus, this award addresses the acknowledged tendency for epistemologies of the Global South to be marginalised, appropriated, and unaccounted for both in IR specifically, and global knowledge production in general, and for feminist scholarship to be diminished within the various disciplines. It aims to decentre whiteness, recognise other universes of knowledge, acknowledge the contributions of Global South studies to the global academy, and engender the decolonisation of the field of feminist and gender studies, and of international studies itself. 

In so doing, the award enhances the ongoing efforts at inclusion and transformation within the FTGS, complementing existing awards which recognise excellence in feminist research, while at the same time filling a gap in redefining excellence in more global and inclusive terms.

Eligibility

• Scholars in the area of feminist theory and gender studies whose scholarship have extended the frontiers of the discipline and advanced our understanding about Global South contexts in particular.
• Must be from the Global South and based at institutions located there.
• Must have made significant and demonstrable impact (locally or internationally) on the fields of feminism, gender and international studies, broadly defined, either through scholarship and teaching, mentoring, leadership, policy-relevant work, or any combination of these.
• Targets mid-career to senior scholars specifically.
• Nominees need not be members of ISA and FTGS at the time of nomination, but awardees are expected to become members of ISA and FTGS upon conferment of the award.

Nominations

The award committee eagerly solicits nominations from all across the globe of individuals who meet the above criteria. Given the structural barriers already identified above, the award committee will also actively reach out to individuals, institutions and networks in the Global South for nominations.

• Nominators may submit (a) a nomination letter highlighting the fitness of the nominee for this award (b) nominee’s abridged CV, no more than 5 pages long, and (c) supporting letters (if available) from persons familiar with the nominee’s scholarship and work.
• Nomination and supporting letters should not exceed two pages each.
• Nominations may be made by anyone in the profession.
• Self-nominations are strongly encouraged.

Prize

• The recipient will receive a certificate and a cash prize of $800.

How to apply

• Submit all documents by email to the chair of the award committee, Luah Tomas (luahbt@yorku.ca). 
• The deadline for nomination this year is September 5, 2022.
• The recipient will be notified by the end of October 2022. They will be encouraged to attend the ISA Annual Convention 2023 in order to receive the award in person.

Past winners

2022: Dr Srila Roy, the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Honourable Mention: Professor Jean Encinas-Franco, University of the Philippines

About the FTGS

The Feminist Theory and Gender Studies section of the International Studies Association brings together scholars who apply feminist theory to International Relations or look at the field through a gender lens. For more information, visit: https://www.isanet.org/ISA/Sections/FTGS. 

About the Award

This award, sponsored by Feminist Theory and Gender Studies (FTGS) section, was established in 1996 to honor an outstanding graduate student paper that covers themes and areas of interest of the FTGS.

The award is open to papers presented at the ISA Annual Conference in 2022 or at any ISA-affiliated conferences worldwide (e.g. CEEISA-ISA Joint International Conference in Belgrade, the ISA-Asia Pacific Conference in Singapore, and the ISA International Conference in Accra) from the period right after the ISA Annual Convention in 2021 until July 1, 2022.  Papers that were not fully sponsored by the FTGS section may be nominated. Given the disruption caused by COVID-19, we are accepting applications from anyone who was accepted to present at these conferences (even if they were unable to present in person or the conference was cancelled).
 
General Information
Eligibility

1.      We welcome papers from ISA members and non-members. However, the recipient must be a member of ISA when the award is granted. 

2.      The person nominated must have been a student at the time the paper was (due to be) presented.
 
Prize
*       A $500.00 (USD) cash prize along with a certificate.
*       The award-winning paper will be peer-reviewed by the International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFJP) with the prospect of publication.
 
Selection Process
*       Results will be announced in mid-September, 2022
*       The Committee Chair will notify the recipient  and encourage them to attend the ISA Annual Convention in 2023 to receive the award in person.
 

How to apply

 
The deadline for nominations is July 1, 2022, 11:59 PM (EST).
*       Self-nominations are strongly encouraged.
*       Nominations may be made by anyone in the profession. We encourage discussants and chairs on FTGS panels at the ISA Annual Convention and other ISA conferences to nominate outstanding papers you encountered.
*       Nominations must include contact information of the nominee and a copy of the relevant paper. They should be submitted electronically to the Chair of the Award Committee, Dr Sharmila Parmanand, s.parmanand1@lse.ac.uk.

We encourage students from geographical, social, gender, or intellectual backgrounds that tend to be underrepresented in academia to apply for this award.