Alternative Imaginaries: Feminist Transformative Politics in the Global South

This conference is organised to examine the ways in which feminist imagination is changing the face of the Global South by challenging gendered political structures, legal systems, and development trajectories in the Global South. On the one hand, the existing normative attitudes around gender are protected by advocating misogynist tradition and law, thus leading to feminist critique of constitutionalism, especially in Malaysia, India, Iran, and Afghanistan. On the other hand, feminists in the Global South, including Africa, Asia, and South America, encounter the challenges of colonial feminism. We are keen on understanding feminists’ response to this situation:

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?

The participants of this conference aim to understand these tensions: first, the existing norms being appropriated to the new politics and thus deepening normative attitudes, including gender inequality, misogyny, gender-based violence, and pro-natalist policies; second, the invisibility of feminists of the Global South and the forms of resistance towards changing their society and politics, and third, the masculinist backlash against them exemplified in right-wing populism, religious fundamentalism, and conservative politics.

Based on 1) several years of collaborative work with scholars across Balkan-to-BengalComplex working in TAKHAYYUL Project1, norms and challenges to legislations in the Muslim contexts, and 2) a number of scholarly conversations drawing parallels across Islamic and non-Islamic contexts of the Global South, this conference is to understand the tensions between the gender norms and the new politics.

Conference Convener 
Dr Fatemeh Sadeghi 

Co-Conveners 
Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu, Dr Yuan He, Burcu Kalpaklioglu 

Programme schedule

9.30 - 10.00 | Welcome, Coffee, and Introduction
Join us for a warm welcome and a cup of coffee and pastries with an introduction to our exploration of feminist perspectives in the Global South

10.00 - 11.45 | Opening Panel
Feminist Futures: An Introductory Conversation
Chair: Dr Juliana Demartini Brito, UCL
Feminist Alternative Imaginaries in the Global South Dr Fatemeh Sadeghi, Institute for Global Prosperity, UCL 
Not So Gender-Neutral: The New Right and Its Populism, Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu, Institute for Global Prosperity, UCL
Women's Sense of Their Hak (Rights), Divine Justice, and Economies of Divorce in Istanbul, Burcu Kalpaklioglu, University of Amsterdam
A Silent Reproductive Revolution: “We are the last generation”, Dr Yuan He, Institute for Global Prosperity, UCL

11.45 - 13.15 | Lunch Break

13.15 - 15.00 | Panel 2: Politics of Intimacy: Gender, Law, and the Perpetuation of Inequality
Chair: Prof. Silvia Suteu, UCL
Beyond Imagining: Shifting Paradigm in the Iranian Protest Culture and an Inclusive and Women-centric Constitution, Prof. Homa Hoodfar, Concordia University 
Who’s Afraid of Marriage Equality? India’s Same-Sex Marriage Decision and Its Implications for Women, Prof. Vrinda Narain, McGill University
Women’s Rights Reform in North African Constitutions, Prof. Aili Mari Tripp, University of Wisconsin
Feminist Resistance Against Undemocratic Structures in Iran and Turkey, Prof. Mona Tajali, Stanford University

15.00 - 15.15 | Afternoon Tea Break

15.15 - 17.00 | Panel 3: Subaltern Forms of Feminist Resistance
Chair: Prof. Alex Hyde, UCL
Challenge of Islamic Feminism, Prof. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, SOAS
Political Imagination through Kurdish Women’s Movement, Dr Nazan Ustundag, independent scholar
Rethinking Violence, Emerging Subjects: Indigenous Perspectives in Central America, Dr Silvia Posocco, Birkbeck University of London
Anti-Racism, Intersectionality, and the Struggle for Dignity, Prof. Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa, Cambridge University

17.00 - 17.15 | Afternoon Tea Break

17.15 - 18.30 | Roundtable: Future Collaborations and Publications
Speakers TBC

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