Alternative Imaginaries: Feminist Transformative Politics in the Global South: Panellists Announced
18 May 2024, Lecture Theatre G22 in the North-West Wing, UCL, Reserve your seat HERE.
This conference examines the ways in which feminist imagination is changing the face of the Global South, by challenging gendered political structures, legal systems, and development trajectories. With Fatemeh Sadeghi as convenor and co-convenors Sertaç Sehlikoglu, Yuan He, and Burcu Kalpaklioglu to grapple with some of the big questions facing feminists in this space: What are the prospects that feminists in the Global South offer for addressing democratic, social, epistemological, cultural, and political relations? How do feminists in the Global South imagine a more egalitarian future for themselves and the younger generations, and how do they build solidarity networks and future collaboration? What are the backlashes and responses to gender equality demands? How do feminists deal with them?
Drawing on several years of collaborative work with scholars across the Balkan-to-Bengal-Complex through the TAKHAYYUL Project, norms and challenges to legislations in the Muslim contexts, and extended scholarly debate around the parallels across Islamic and non-Islamic contexts of the Global South, this event aims to better understand the tensions between the gender norms and the new politics.
Over the course of the day, we’ll be welcoming a long list of esteemed speakers to the UCL:
Feminist Futures: An Introductory Conversation (10.00am-11.45pm)
Dr Fatemeh Sadeghi: ‘Politicization of Family as a Response to Domestication of Politics’
Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu: ‘Not so Gender-Neutral: The New Right and its Populism’
Dr Burcu Kalpaklioglu: ‘Women’s Sense of Their Hak (Rights): Divine Justice and Economies of Divorce in Istanbul’
Dr Yuan He: A Silent Reproductive Revolution: “We are the last generation”
Politics of Intimacy: Gender, Law, and the Perpetuation of Inequality (13.15-15.00)
Professor Homa Hoodfar: ‘Beyond Imagining an Inclusive and Women-centric Constitution: Shifting Paradigms in the Iranian Protest Culture
Professor Vrinda Narain: ‘Who’s afraid of Marriage Equality? India’s Same-Sex Marriage Decision and its Implications for Women’
Professor Aili Tripp: ‘Women’s Rights Reform in North African Constitutions’
Professor Mona Tajali: ‘Feminist resistance against undemocratic structures in Iran and Turkey’
Subaltern Forms of Feminist Resistance (15.15-17.00)
Professor Ziba Mir-Hosseini: ‘Feminist Epistemology in Islam’
Professor Nazan Ustundag: ‘Kurdish Women’s Movement’
Professor Silvia Posocco: Rethinking violence, emerging subjects: ‘Indigenous perspectives in Central America’
Roundtable Discussion (17:15-18:30)