The Feminist Theory and Gender Studies section of ISA invites members to vote for the available positions on the executive committee. We have nominations for section chair, program chair, communications officer, members-at-large and graduate student representatives. Please read the candidate statements below before voting online HERE by Friday 25 February 2022. Our heartfelt thanks to all nominees for standing and to all voters for your participation.
(Any questions/problems, please contact the chair of the nominations committee, Catherine Eschle)
Nominees for Section Chair 2022-2025
Lata Narayanaswamy (standing jointly with Srila Roy): Lata is Associate Professor in the Politics of Global Development, School of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), University of Leeds, UK, Since 2001, she has worked as a research practitioner, consultant and now an academic working at the nexus between development theory and practice. Her research critically reflects on gendered/intersectional and post/decolonial dynamics of development knowledge and its perceived contribution to addressing global development challenges. She is currently involved in applied, interdisciplinary research related to gender/feminism/intersectionality as these relate to climate change, water security and decolonising development. Nominated by Catherine Eschle, Ola Yacob-Haliso and Punam Yadav.
Srila Roy (standing jointly with Lata Narayanaswamy): Srila is associate professor of sociology and heads development studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She is the author of Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement (Oxford, 2012), editor of New South Asian Feminisms (Zed, 2012), and co-editor of New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualising Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford, 2015). Her book on feminist and queer politics in neoliberal India is forthcoming with Duke University Press. At Wits, she leads the Governing Intimacies project, which promotes new scholarship on gender and sexuality in Southern Africa and India, and is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation. She is an Editor of Feminist Theory, Associate Editor of the Journal of South Asian Development, and is a member of the South African Young Academy of Science. Nominated by Catherine Eschle, Khushi Singh Rathore and Ola Yacob-Haliso.
Nominees for Program Chair 2022-2025
Anwar Mhajne (standing jointly with Itziar Mujika Chao): Anwar is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and the Head Faculty Fellow for the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Social Justice at Stonehill College. Her research strengths lie in the following areas: Feminist International Relations and Security Studies; Civil Society and Activism; Political Islam; Middle East; Gender Politics; and Social Movements. She is a Co-chair of the Faculty of Color Association at Stonehill College. She currently serves as a Member-at-Large on the executive committee of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section (FTGS). Previously she served as a Member-at-Large (2019-2021) and the first graduate student representative on the executive committee of WCIS (2016-2018). Nominated by Catherine Eschle, Punam Yadav and Ola Yacob-Haliso.
Itziar Mujika Chao (standing jointly with Anwar Mhajne): Itziar teaches at the Department of Political Science and Administration and is an affiliated researcher at the Hegoa Institute for International Cooperation and Development Studies, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), and affiliated faculty at the IBEI Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals. She holds a PhD in Development Studies from the UPV/EHU, and obtained her Masters in International Studies and Women, Gender and Citizenship Studies at the UPV/EHU and the University of Barcelona, respectively. Her research focuses on gender politics of violent and nonviolent conflict, civil resistance, post-conflict peacebuilding and development, feminist activism, and the implementation of the United Nations’ Security Council Women, Peace and Security agenda. She served as a Member-at-Large on the executive committee of FTGS 2019-2021. Nominated by Catherine Eschle, Khushi Singh Rathore and Punam Yadav.
Nominations for Communications Officer 2022-2024
Khushi Singh Rathore (standing jointly with Keshab Giri): Khushi is a PhD candidate in International Politics in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), India. Her thesis is a biographical study of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the first female diplomat of India. Through her work, Khushi is questioning the invisibility of women as practitioners of international politics from the disciplinary history, particularly of the women of the Global South. Her areas of research interest are, women in foreign policy, gender and diplomacy, feminist foreign policy, Indian foreign policy, 20th century transnational feminist networks, women in the United Nations, and women’s intellectual history, to name a few. She looks forward to contribute towards making the FTGS a more representative and inclusive space. Having already served as Graduate Student Representative and as Member at Large on the FTGS executive committee, she has gained an understanding of its workings and intends to take the conversation further ahead, helping the committee in bringing on board voices beyond American and European academic networks. Her focus continues to be on highlighting the geographical and economic imbalances in the academic space that render it inaccessible for many and the need to work towards a course correction.Nominated by Catherine Eschle, Ola Yacob-Haliso and Punam Yadav.
Keshab Giri (standing jointly with Khushi Singh Rathore): Originally from Nepal, Keshab is currently an honorary affiliate, researcher, and sessional academic at The University of Sydney, Australia. His research explores experiences of female ex-combatants during and after the war. His research expertise includes gender and war, feminist IR, feminist security studies, gender and violent extremism or terrorism, gender and peacebuilding, Women, Peace and Security, intimacy in armed conflict, rebel governance, sexual and gender-based violence in war, feminist International Relations, and intersectionality. His research articles have appeared in Global Studies Quarterly and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. Keshab has coordinated and taught more than a dozen courses in gender, politics, comparative politics, popular culture, and International Relations and has undertaken a range of prestigious research projects such as ‘Donor Funding and WPS Agenda’ and ‘International System Dataset. Nominated by Catherine Eschle, Ola Yacob-Haliso and Punam Yadav.
Nominations for Member-at-Large 2022-2024
Note there are a total of four nominees for THREE posts: please take the time to read all four personal statements
Masaya Llavera Blanco: Masaya is Assistant Professor of Development Studies at the Centre for Global Studies at Huron University College at the University of Western Ontario, in Canada, in the unceded territories of the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Wendat, Attawandaron, and Lenape peoples. Her research centres social reproduction, intimate labours and human mobilities in the Caribbean and South America. She obtained her PhD in Global Governance in Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada) and her MSc in Women Studies in Venezuela’s Central University. She is Venezuelan and has over 15 years working on feminist research and activism in Venezuela, the Dominican Republic and global spaces. Her feminism is rooted in the global south, and is reflected in her work as current executive committee member and longtime collaborator with Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), as well as in her collaboration with the Household Workers Association in the Dominican Republic. Nominated by Catherine Eschle, Ola Yacob-Haliso and Punam Yadav.
Saba Joshi: Saba is a Lecturer in Gender and Development in the Department of Politics at the University of York, United Kingdom. Her research and teaching interests lie in the intersecting fields of feminist political economy, agrarian politics and authoritarian state formation, with a geographical focus on South and Southeast Asia. In recent years, her research has examined women’s contentious politics over “land grabbing” in Cambodia and India, drawing on extensive field-based empirical study. Prior to taking up her current position at York, she was a Swiss National Science Foundation Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of International Development (2020-2021). She has also held visiting scholar positions at the Department of Food and Resource Economics and Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen, and the Centre for East and Southeast Asia, Lund University. Born and raised in New Delhi, India, I obtained my PhD in Political Science/International Relations from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in 2020. Nominated by Catherine Eschle, Elisabeth Prügl and Maria Tanyag.
Luna KC: Luna is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Research Network on Women, Peace, and Security, Centre for International Peace and Security, McGill University, Canada. She is also an Honorary Research Associate at the School of Public policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia. Luna specializes in international development focusing on women, peace and security and her work sits at the nexus of women & warfare, gender justice, activism, and intersectionality. Currently, Luna is working on gender, peace, and security project—examining grassroots women in postwar reconstruction and transnational networks. Her area specialties are Nepal, South Asia, and Canada. Luna was awarded a Nuffic fellowship to pursue her master’s and Ph.D. degree at Wageningen University, The Netherlands. Luna’s work has been published in Conflict, Security & Development; The International Journal of Feminist Politics; and The Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs. Nominated by Punam Yadav, Catherine Eschle and Maria Tanyag.
Dipti Tamang: Dipti is currently employed as a permanent faculty in the Department of Political Science, Darjeeling Government College India. She holds a PhD in International Relations from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India and is currently a recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Post doctoral research grant. Her areas of interests are gender, politics and security with focus on the conflict affected regions of the Eastern peripheries in India. She has published her work in IFJP, International Studies, and Zubaan Publications India. She also writes regularly on issues of identity, conflict and belonging through different web outlets. She is part of different formal, informal group of scholars from the Global South focused on creating safe, collaborative learning spaces, especially for early career scholars from the margins. She is co-founder and current member of the Confluence Collective- a group of scholars and practitioners from the Sikkim-Darjeeling Himalayas, exploring the oral-visual methods of creating repositories of community histories. Her current work is an exploratory process of developing a critical engagement with global politics from the ‘local’ spaces, pushing beyond traditionally defined fixed boundaries of IR. Nominated by Khushi Singh Rathore, Catherine Eschle and Punam Yadav.
Nominations for Graduate Student Representative 2022-2023
Note there are a total of four nominees for TWO posts: please take the time to read all four personal statements
Karoline Faeber: Karoline (she/her/hers) is a PhD researcher at King’s College London, Department of War Studies. Her research is located on the nexus of feminist international relations, International Political Sociology, and institutional ethnography. Karoline is interested in feminist (analyses of) foreign policy, explorations of how gender, class, and racialisation structure Ministries of Foreign Affairs, and practices of resistance and change in diplomacy and foreign policy. Her current project explores how feminism materialises (or doesn’t) in the everyday struggles of German foreign policy practitioners. Karoline is a Deputy Features Editor with E-International Relations and a member of the Programme for Gender and International Politics at the Polis180 Think Tank for Foreign and European Policy. She also serves on the Department’s Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Committee, where she leads the Gender and LGBTIAQ+ Working Group, and the UK Civil Society Working Group on Feminist Foreign Policy. If successfully elected, Karoline would focus on how the FTGS can support early-career researchers, particularly those in non-European and non-US-American locations, access and navigate a precarious academic world. Nominated by Amanda Chisholm, Columba Achilleos-Sarll and Jessica Cheung.
Eda Gunaydin: Eda is a graduate student in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. Her key research interests are in the areas of gender, race and violence in international relations. In 2016 she received the University Medal in Government and International Relations, and she has been a research assistant in the Department since 2015. Her research has been published in International Studies Quarterly and the International Feminist Journal of Politics. Nominated by Khushi Singh Rathore, Catherine Eschle and Punam Yadav.
Luah Tomas: Luah is currently a PhD student at York University. She has a BA from American University and an MSc from the University of Sao Paulo, in Brazil. Her research topics include women and gender issues in diplomacy, and the intersections between feminist and far-right movements, particular during the first half of the 20th century and with a focus on Latin American women. She is part of the executive committee of the newly-created Feminisms, Gender and Sexuality section of the Brazilian Association of International Relations (FGS-ABRI, @fgs_abri). She also has a mentorship project for fellow Brazilians who wish to pursue graduate studies in countries in the global north (@ocupe.omundo). Nominated by Khushi Singh Rathore, Catherine Eschle and Punam Yadav.
Laura Zuber: Laura (she/her) is a doctoral researcher at the War Studies Department of King’s College London. Her thesis investigates (neo)liberal/modern and decolonial articulations of crisis and crisis governance with regard to the global crisis of social reproduction. The aim of her thesis is to find alternative articulation(s) of crisis and their governance that are able to account for, and offer viable solutions to, the global crisis of social reproduction. Her research interests lie in global political economy, crisis management, feminist theory, and decoloniality. Her research is fully funded by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Germany’s oldest political foundation to promote educational equality. Laura is the leader of the Women in War and International Politics Committee (WIWIP), a War Studies Department-affiliated and -funded initiative at King’s College London which aims to promote the work of, and build community among, woman-identified, genderqueer, and non-binary students, staff and alumnae in the fields of Wars Studies and IR. Nominated by Amanda Chisholm, Tom Gregory and Saskia Stachowitsch.
*End of list. Please remember to vote online here by Friday 25 February 2022*
Gendering World Politics 