Workshop on Gender and the Global Locations of Liberalism
Organization
- Lila Abu-Lughod, Organizer
- Nadia Guessous, Coordinator
Overview
The interdisciplinary faculty Seminar on Gender and the Global Locations of Liberalism will explore critically the global locations and applications of discourses of women's rights and/as human rights. Our focus will be on the challenges scholars and theorists have been developing to the liberal underpinnings and transnational institutional circuits of this form of politics and policy-making.
While acknowledging the emancipatory intent of humanitarian and women's rights discourse and the useful legal gains it makes possible, scholars with deep knowledge of particular regions and cultural traditions now question both the universalism of the concepts of "the human" and "woman" and the self-representations of liberalism (e.g. examining how and when it comes to be applied to disadvantaged groups, what talk of "rights" and even "tolerance" might hide in terms of systemic inequality, structural violence, and imperial relations; and what a serious study of "illiberal" religious traditions can contribute to relativizing liberalism and locating it historically and culturally). What can anthropological, sociological, political-theoretical, and historical analysis contribute to more adequate understandings of the dynamics of gender and culture and the relationships among culture, social systems, and historical change? What would an interrogation of the uneven geopolitical distribution of liberalism contribute to understanding the dilemmas faced by those working for women's rights transnationally, or in national settings outside the West?
Workshop
Schedule
The Workshop on Gender and the Global Locations of Liberalism will reconvene soon. Please check back with us.
