On Thursday 12th February at 7pm eminent feminist historian Professor Tanika Sarkar and leading feminist and left activist Kavita Krishnan will reflect on multiple forms of gender violence in India, both in the recent past and under the current government of Narendra Modi, the challenges faced by those confronting this violence, and how it has been affected by India’s neoliberal policies and the rise of the right-wing political forces of Hindutva. This lecture will take place at Khalili Lecture Theatre, SOAS Main Building, Russell Square.
This will then be followed on Friday with a one-day workshop focuses upon both the structural dimensions of gender injustice and emerging contestations and struggles towards achieving gender justice. Since the December 2012 gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in Delhi through to the high profile stoning of Farzana Parveen outside of Lahore High Court in Pakistan by male members of her own family and the caste/gender-based rape and lynching of two teenage girls in U.P. in India in May 2014, gender violence in South Asia has been very much in the international spotlight.
The intention of the workshop is to not once again collude in reproducing the spectacle of gender violence in South Asia, but rather to critically engage with movements, policies and processes and to further our understandings of the systemic nature of gender injustice, how it is being simultaneously deepened, transformed and extended by the interventions of the neoliberal state, and the multiple ways in which it is being resisted.
The workshop brings together leading scholars and activists addressing a number of areas, including women’s access to and safety in the public space; the politics of gender in the context of caste and communal violence; neo-liberal notions of ‘rights’; the Indian and Pakistan states’ attempts to intervene in, regulate and control sexuality; religious supremacism and cultural conservatism; and feminist mobilization and protests.
Speakers include: Tanika Sarkar, JNU, Kavita Krishnan, CPI M-L/Liberation , Shahnaz Khan, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada, Kalpana Wilson, LSE, Navtej Purewal, SOAS, Sumi Madhok, LSE, Goldie Osuri, University of Warwick, Jennifer Ung Loh, SOAS, Agomoni Ganguli Mitra University of Edinburgh, Naaz Rashid, University of Manchester, Nirmala Rajasingam , South Asia Solidarity Group (SASG)
Registration is free. Places are limited and will be allocated on a first come first serve basis. To register please go to http://www.soas.ac.uk/ssai/events/
