We know for many of you, and for a multitude of reasons, you are unable to make the conference in person.  We will miss you but as an exec we have been thinking about ways we can continue to build our inclusive community.  ISA does not support hybrid events during the conference and they do not have the facilities.  We have decided, where possible, to make our own events hybrid through the use of MSTeams.  Please do see the agenda for our key events below with the dedicated MSTeams link.  We encourage you all to come along and share in the knowledge exchange and continue to community build as a section.  We hope to see you there in person or through the screen.

Much love and solidarity,

FTGS Executive Committee 

Key Programme Events

Thursday 16 March 12.30-1.30 Business Meeting

Tidan A, Montreal Marriot Chateau 

MSTeams: Click here to join the meeting

We will be going over our annual report.  Please do let me know as committee chairs if you will be there in person to talk about the persons you awarded this year. 

Also, do let me know if there is a particular agenda item you’d like us as a section to discuss.

Agenda

1. Introduction/Open Address (Amanda) 
2. Welcoming of new executive committee (Amanda)
3. Review of annual report
   1. Programme Review (Toni and Maria)
   2. Finances (Amanda)
   3. Communications (Keshab)
   4. Inclusion and Transformation (Amanda and Luah)
      1. Convention awards
      2. FTGS Global Voices 
4. Awards
   1. Distinguished Scholar (Amanda)
   2. Book Prize (Anwar)
   3. Global South Feminist Scholar (Luah)
   4. Early Career and Engagement (Anwar)
   5. Teresa Teawai Award (Amanda)
5. Nominations (Maria)

4. BDS and Palestinian Academic Freedom at ISA (Andrew Delatolla or another representative)
5. Any Other Business

Thursday 16 March 1.45-3.30 FTGS TownHall Militant Mentoring and Nurturing Communities of Care

Tidan A, Montreal Marriot Chateau 

MSTeams: Click here to join the meeting

Speakers: Megan Mackenzie, Toni Haastrup, Sara Motta, Yolande Bouka, Katharine Wright, Qais Munhazim and Chamindra Weerawardhana

The FTGS Townhall is conceived as an open, ethical and dialogical space for FTGS members and any other invited persons to share experiences, exchange knowledges and extend support, solidarity, listening and kinship to one another. According to the 2019 FTGS Report, the Townhall “gathering is an open meeting slot that feminist scholars at ISA use to discuss questions and concerns amongst its members.” This coming year we chose the theme: Militant mentoring and nurturing communities of care from within, against the beyond the ruins. The broader discussions are underpinned by the fact that we are currently surviving in the ruins of the not post-covid world and the ongoing anti-life logics and (ir)rationalities of our current systems of governance, education and economy. To some It feels like our infrastructures of learning, teaching, thinking, governing and social reproduction have broken down and it is unclear whether they can be fixed, or whether we want to do the labour of repair. For many Black, Indigenous, POC, queer and gender non-conforming colleagues and communities the academy and systems of governance and economy have always been a ruined and ruinous landscape and epistemological project that has been complicit in the denial of our (political) knowing-being difference. It is within this context, and learning together with our brilliant Black, Indigenous/POC and queer feminist scholars in and beyond the academy this upcoming townhall seeks to create a space to think about and nurture communities of care, infrastructures of resistance and ecologies of intimacy within, against and beyond the ruins. We aim to reimagine what mentoring and community building look like in- spite-of market extractivist logics, colonial patriarchal (ir)rationalities, toxic landscapes of social reproduction and anti-life governance strategies of abandonment. We begin with short interventions by our roundtable experts, before breaking into thematic groups and then returning as a collective to share and map ways forward.

Thursday 16 March 4-5.45 Distinguished Scholar Panel for Anna Agathangelou 

Tidan A, Montreal Marriot Chateau 

MSTeams: Click here to join the meeting

This year, we are very pleased to announce the winner of the 2023 Eminent Scholar Award is Professor Anna Agathangelou. Anna is a long-time member of the ISA, taking on significant leadership positions which include ISA, North-East, President, (2020-2021), and as ISA, North-East Program Chair, Elected Position (2018-2019). She has also served as an ISA Diversity Committee Member, Appointed Position (2014- 2017). Professor Agathangelou has likewise served as an ISA, North-East Section, Member of Organizing Committee (2010-2013), as ISA, North-East, Organizing Committee (2011-2013), and on the Nomination’s Committee, New Political Science Award Committees (2008-2009). Anna played a foundational role in creating a new cross disciplinary section at ISA, Science, Technology, Art in International Relations Section (STAIR).  

Professor Agathnagelou’s service to the FTGS Section is also noteworthy.  Anna has served on the FTGS Graduate Award Committee Member (2005-2006), as an FTGS Chair (2003-2004), as FTGS, Member of Coalition against Human Trafficking, Houston (2002-2006), as the FTGS Program Chair for the 43rd Annual ISA Convention, New Orleans, LA (March 24-27, 2000-2001), and as Executive Committee of FTGS (1994- 2000). She has also actively participated along with other key members to diversify the intellectual agenda of FTGS. While a chair and a program chair of FTGS, she not only ensured the inclusion of feminists from the Global South but also from the African continent. In all these leadership roles within ISA, Anna has shown a dedication and commitment to diversity and transforming around who and what knowledge is given space and included. She has worked to diversify ISA by inviting Black, Indigenous, and Women of the Global South to become members. She has used her leadership positions to increase the diversification of intellectual agendas in the discipline and the broader field of IR by focusing on postcolonial, feminist and science and technology perspectives.   

Thursday 16 March 7.30-8.30 FTGS and LGBTQA Caucus Reception 

Tidan A, Montreal Marriott Chateau         

Here we will be handing out award certificates to our awardees. We will try to livestream this so you can all watch through social media. 

Shame, Honour and Gender: Tamil women in Devakottai Refugee camp (15 February 2023, 2 pm-3 pm UK time)

Registration: Link to the Registration

Chair: Dr Amanda Chisholm, Senior Lecturer in Security Studies / Researcher in Gender and Security at King’s College London 

Speaker: Sudha Rawat, Doctoral Candidate at Centre for International Politics, Organisation, and Disarmament (CIPOD), Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

Discussant: Dr S. Irudaya Rajan, former Professor at the Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Kerala and current chair of the KNOMAD (The Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development)

Sudha Rawat explores the gendered experiences of Tamil women, focussing on the implication of socio-cultural norms related to notions of shame and honour.

She shares the personal stories of Sri Lankan Tamil women, who are living as refugee persons in Devakottai camp in the district of Sivaganga in the state of Tamil Nadu, India.

In the camp a clear gender division exists, as certain expectations and pressures are placed upon women to conform based on social norms and code of conduct. Women are generally subjected to very strict shame-honour norms and scrutiny, and any ‘deviation’ to it attracts social, cultural and moral consequences. These cultural notions are often reinforced with greater emphasis, especially on young girls who attain puberty. Regulating their sexuality, mobility and gendered relationship to safeguard their ‘purity’ is extremely common among the Tamil families here.

As women’s bodies, ideologically, heralded as repositories of honour and status of their families, male members of the camp enforce patriarchal surveillance on women’s behaviour, which is reinforced by systematic and often quite sever control of women’s social and especially sexual behavior including their mobility and access to certain space. These strict rules constrict women’s behaviour and make them perform according to the demands and wishes of the family and community members.

About the speaker 

Sudha Rawat is Doctoral candidate at Centre for International Politics, Organisation, and Disarmament (CIPOD), Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.

Sudha’s identify herself as feminist geography and her research interests include gender and geography, gender based violence, wartime violence, research methodology and geopolitics.

Currently, she is working on her doctoral thesis titled ‘Honour, Shame and Body as a Site of conflict: Tamil Women in the Sri Lankan Civil War’. She has published two papers titled ‘Geopolitical inquiry into Climate and Resources: Why Syria undergoes Syrian War And ‘Politics of Language and Education: An Evaluation of Tamil Separatism in the Sri Lankan civil war’.

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

Bodily subjections, sovereignty as excess: investigating mechanisms of power in Brazilian society (25 January 2023, 2 pm-3 pm UK time)

Registration: Link to the Registration

Chair: Dr Amanda Chisholm, Senior Lecturer in Security Studies / Researcher in Gender and Security at King’s College London 

Speaker: Amanda Álvares Ferreira, PhD candidate at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and Associate Professor at Instituto Brasileiro de Ensino, Desenvolvimento e Pesquisa, in Brasília.

Discussant: Professor Anna M Agathangelou, Department of Politics, York University. Professor Agathangelou teaches in the areas of international relations and women and politics. 

Amanda Álvares Ferreira analyses the reproduction of the discourse on sovereignty in International Relations as a mechanism of fixation of bodily identity, in line with Judith Butler’s and Michel Foucault’s body of work.

By looking at the politics of death in the Brazilian context, Amanda Álvares Ferreira explores the intersections of race and gender as investments that demarcate abjection and constitute a specific necropolitical practice (the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die) that are characteristic and derivative of its colonisation process.

Most importantly, the contribution in this work is to provide an alternative focus on sovereignty as adopted by Lauren Berlant and Georges Bataille, where agency invested in a rational and decision-making subject is contested once sovereignty is proposed as product of a moment, and of excess. As an attempt to expand queer theory’s questioning of identity politics, Ferreira investigates how a bataillan perspective on sovereignty can help us understand the limits of agency in terms of identities; considering their normalisation as a constant reframing of individuation in the productive terms of modernity.

About the speaker 

Amanda Álvares Ferreira is PhD candidate at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, and master by the same institution. She is currently working as Associate Professor at Instituto Brasileiro de Ensino, Desenvolvimento e Pesquisa, in Brasília.

Her current research is focused on queer and cuir theories and decolonial feminisms in IR, with a special focus in Latin America, and she has also conducted research on prostitution and sex trafficking in Brazil. Amanda has recently published an article at the journal Contexto Internacional, where she discussed lesbian activism in Brazil, at the occasion of the celebration of Stonewall’s 50th anniversary.

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

This series aims to bring a global conversation within and beyond our community members on issues pertaining to feminism, gender, and international relations. 

It is designed to showcase and amplify the expertise and research of Feminist Theory and Gender Studies (FTGS) members as well as foster a larger global community of those with like-minded interests.  We are particularly interested in representation from members of marginalised backgrounds, from the global South and who experience institutional barriers in disseminated their research. 

Link: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/series/feminist-theory-and-gender-studies-global-voices-seminar-series-1

25 Jan

Bodily subjections, sovereignty as excess: investigating mechanisms of power in Brazilian society

25 January 2023, 14:00 to 15:00

Amanda Álvares Ferreira analyses the reproduction of the discourse on sovereignty in International…

15 Feb

Shame, Honour and Gender: Tamil women in Devakottai Refugee camp

15 February 2023, 14:00 to 15:00

Part of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies (FTGS) Global Voices Seminar Series. Sudha Rawat…

22 Feb

Marta Vergara and the struggle for equal nationality rights at the League of Nations

22 February 2023, 14:00 to 15:00

Natali Cinelli Moreira will discuss how Global South actors have historically brought plural…

Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Executive Committee

Call for Nominations 2023

FTGS invites nominations for the following positions on the Executive Committee:

• 2023-25 Section Chair (one position but open to job share) **two year position to replace current incoming chairs and to start as acting Chair in April 2023
• 2023-26 Section Chair (one position but open to job share)
• 2023-26 Program Chair (one position but open to job share)
• 2023-25 Members-at-Large (three positions)
• 2023-24 Graduate Student Member (two positions)
• 2023-25 Communication Officer (one position but open to job share)

How to nominate:

• Each nomination requires one lead nominator & two “seconders”, all members of ISA at the time of nomination.
• Self-nominations will be accepted, but please provide names of seconders if possible
• Nominees need not be members of ISA but must take out membership if elected.
• Please nominate using the form below. EITHER the lead nominator OR the nominee may complete and submit this form.
• Submit ONE form for each nomination, by email, to the chair of the nomination committee, Maria Tanyag, on maria.tanyag@anu.edu.au.  
• The deadline for receipt of nominations is 20 December 2022.
• Please nominate using the form by 20 December 2022.

Please provide the following information:

FOR THE 3 NOMINATORS

(1)        Name

(2)        Affiliation

(3)        Full contact details

 FOR THE NOMINEES

(1)        Position nominated for

(2)        Name, affiliation, & contact details

(3)        200-word bio for FTGS website

Responsibilities for each role: During their tenure, all FTGS Elected officials are required to take part in executive committee meetings at the annual ISA conventions, along with associated email communications and administrative activities. The tasks of the program chair, the section chair, and member-at-large also include the following role-specific responsibilities:

SECTION CHAIR (1-year term officially, effectively 3 years as incoming & outgoing too)

• Maintain communication with ISA
• Fundraise for section reception
• Populate & advise standing committees
• Respond to section initiatives
• Respond to ISA initiatives

• Initiate FTGS policy and projects
• Maintain records of all FTGS business
• Preside at annual business meeting
• Convene FTGS executive committee
• Serve as section’s spokesperson

PROGRAM CHAIR (1-year term officially, effectively 3 years as incoming & outgoing too)

• Attend ISA meeting prior to term
• Write FTGS call for papers
• Organize FTGS panels of interest
• Receive FTGS submissions
• Organize paper submissions into

panels

• Recruit chairs & discussants for panels
• Acquire co-sponsorship for panels
• Complete panel & poster forms
• Receive & edit preliminary list of panels
• Edit schedule of panels
• Replace chairs & discussants who  

withdraw up until ISA conference

• Support panels at ISA conference
• Continual email availability May-July

GRADUATE STUDENT MEMBER (1-year term)

• Engage in at least one of the FTGS section committees.

MEMBER-AT-LARGE (2-year term)

• Engage in at least one of the FTGS section committees.

COMMUNICATION OFFICER (2-year term)

• Promote FTGS activities on social media and online platforms
• Maintain FTGS website
• Dispensing announcements/calls via social media and online platforms

Dear FTGS family, please register by the 26th of October confirming your participation in the program. Link for registration: https://www.isanet.org/Conferences/ISA2023/Registration

Look forward to seeing you in person next year in Montréal!

Registration: Link to registration

Chair: Dr Amanda Chisholm, Senior Lecturer in Security Studies / Researcher in Gender and Security at King’s College London 

Speaker: Julio César Díaz Calderón, Ph.D. Student at the University of Florida

Discussant: Alison Howell, Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University

Autism has appeared in International Relations (IR) mostly as discourses that use widespread stereotypes. They attach ideas that autistic subjects (from people to States) are ‘abnormal’ or ‘diseased’ and thus, in need of treatment for a ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ behaviour useful for the well-being of societies.

As a response, this discussion will explore the relations between dehumanising uses of autism and body metaphors in academic/scientific texts, and alternative narratives about autism in (literary) texts, studying representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight of autism, disabilities, and bodies.

The talk will expand on previous understandings of fiction in IR and Fictional IR by undoing the relations between the concepts of fiction-imagination-discipline-autism-first-person narration. As creative contributions and as exemplifications of another type of narratives of autism across international borders, it will present three (post)/(de)colonial queer/feminist crip/tullido original fictions (a poem and two narratives) inviting thinking about fictions of autism moving in/through/to classrooms in different locations (disciplines, North/South divides, material/representational constraints, dis-able/too able/un-ableable narratives, love/hate/hope/hopelessness affections) and about ethical dilemmas and alternatives for when institutions and people are asked, are forced, or want to teach Autistic subjects or subjects that perform autistic behaviour.

About the speaker 

Julio César Díaz Calderón are a Ph.D. Student at the University of Florida where they held a Fulbright-García Robles Fellowship. They won the Alonso Lujambio Political Essay Contest 2017 with the research entitled “Queer Diplomacy and National Indecision: The Federal Executive Actions on Sexual Diversity in Mexico”. They have published in different peer-reviewed journals and books such as Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Critical Studies on Security, Foro Internacional, Revista Interdisciplinaria de Estudios de Género de El Colegio de México. Currently, they are working on two book manuscripts: “(Violent) International Relations (Violence) and Transformative Aest-Ethics” and “Autism and International Relations: From International Security/Development to Fiction and Back.”

At this event

Amanda Chisholm

Senior Lecturer in Security Studies / Researcher in Gender and Security

Dear FTGS family, ISA 2023 Preliminary Program has been announced. Those who submitted your panel/roundtable/abstracts might have gotten an email notification confirming your place. Please register by the 26th of October confirming your participation in the program! Look forward to seeing you in person next year in Montréal!

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