BU Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program Co-sponsoring: "Not My Life": Documentary on Child Trafficking Worldwide

Save the Date: March 26, 2012

Event: "Not My Life" -  narrated by Glenn Close 

Time: 7:45 PM

Location: Brandeis University Campus, Olin Sang 101

We are pleased to share with you news of an upcoming event WGS is co-sponsoring, hosted by the Gender and International Development Initiatives (GaIDI) of the Brandeis University Women's Studies Research Center (WSRC). On March 26th at 7:45, you are invited to a screening of the powerful documentary on child trafficking entitled "Not My Life." Filmed across four years and five continents, this unprecedented project reveals the terrifying scope and depth of one of the worst forms of human rights abuse in the world today. "Not My Life" goes beyond simply raising awareness about the pandemic of child trafficking around the globe and highlights the work and enduring commitment of modern-day abolitionists.

Dr. Mei-Mei Ellerman, member of GaIDI and Board Director of the Polaris Project-leading anti-human trafficking NGO in the US and Japan-will give an overview of the issue of modern-day slavery and a brief introduction to the film. After the film, Dr. Ellerman, GaIDI/WSRC and the Co-sponsors will invite the audience to remain for a discussion of "Not My Life", the role of the 21st century abolitionists, and how to join the fight against slavery in our times.

Co-sponsors include: Women's Studies Research Center, Brandeis University; Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program of Boston University; Gender Working Group, Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University; Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, Brandeis University; Our Bodies, Ourselves; Coexistence Program, Brandeis University; Brandeis Interfaith Chaplaincy.

Reporting from Rwanda: A Letter from Former Gender and International Development Student, Rachel Vannice

BU Alum and former Gender and International Development student, Rachel Vannice has been serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Rwanda since May 2011. In her letter below, Rachel writes about the work she has been doing to promote the growth and success of a women's informal cooperative. In addition, Rachel also touches on additional projects aimed at educating and empowering young men and women in the region.

Abakobwa n'Abagore- Girls & Women as Actors in Development in Rwanda

I came to Rwanda as a Peace Corps Volunteer in May of 2011. I am currently situated in Nyagatare district in the Northeast of the country. In my community, I have had the opportunity to work with the Centre de Développement Pour les Femmes (Center for Women's Development). The women have come together with capital support from a local religious community. They have formed their own informal cooperative and are empowering each other with new skills in traditional Rwandan basket-weaving and embroidery. I have been connecting them with local resources to become an official cooperative to reap the benefits that come with such a legal status as well as attempting to find them new markets so that they may continue to grow their small business and move from the subsistence farming that the majority of them practice.

Women making traditional Rwandan baskets

Women working on livelihoods projects

As a member of the Peace Corps Gender and Development (GAD) committee and the National Coordinator for all GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) and BE (Boys Excelling) camps, I have also had the opportunity to work on the empowerment and sensitization of young women and men through lessons on life skills, communication, and goal-setting. In addition, much of our focus was on reproductive health and the prevention of HIV/AIDS transmission. Our main vehicles for this information transfer included week-long camps and then the formation of clubs at local schools, with camp attendees as animators and co-facilitators. Further, most clubs are co-facilitated by local teachers so that the clubs and camps are sustainable.

Participants of Camp GLOW - Eastern Province, along with Peace Corps volunteers and Rwandan facilitators.

Inaugural Newsletter of the Global Network of UNESCO Chairs on Gender

We are pleased to announce the publication of the very first newsletter of the Global Network of UNESCO Chairs on Gender, produced by our partners in Cyprus and Buenos Aires and now posted at http://www.catunescomujer.org/globalnetwork/news.html
Feel free to disseminate it among your colleagues.

Boston University's Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program (WGS) hosts the UNESCO/UNITWIN (University Twinning) Network on Gender, Culture, and Development, and is a founding member of the Global Network. The Co-Coordinators of the BU-based UNESCO/UNITWIN, Professor Deborah Belle and Dr. Brenda Gael McSweeney, are delighted that this inaugural issue features a lot of the work that they and their collaborators in India, West Africa, and the Boston area have been engaged in. To read more about our Network's activities in 2011 and beyond, please see the newsletter at the link listed above.

More information on our UNITWIN Network is at http://unitwin.blogspot.com/ and equalityburkina.blogspot.com

UN Women designates BU's Brenda Gael McSweeney as its Focal Point for Women and Gender Studies

UN Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women has invited Dr. Brenda Gael McSweeney of the Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program to be its Women's and Gender Focal Point at Boston University.


UN Women "acts on the fundamental premise that women and girls worldwide have a right to live a life free of discrimination, violence, and poverty and that gender equality is central to achieving development." UN Women just launched its first report on the Progress of the World's Women, focusing on gender justice.

A key priority of UN Women is combating gender-based violence. The campaign titled "Say No-UNiTE to End Violence Against Women" gives everyone a chance to join this global initiative. Do visit http://saynotoviolence.org/ to add your voice.

News from Dr. Asha Mukherjee: Announcing First International Conference of 2012

We wish to share with you news of an upcoming International Conference being organized and hosted by one of our UNESCO/UNITWIN Network partners,  the Women's Studies Center at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan. Dr. Asha Mukherjee, Director of the Center, has informed us that Professor Amartya Sen is expected to inaugurate the Conference and Professor Martha Nussbaum has agreed to deliver the keynote address. Entitled "Women's Creativity and Social Concern" this gathering will be held on January 5-7, 2012. For more information, please see the Conference's theme note below:

      Photo Credit: globalshiksha.com

" International Conference: Women Creativity and Social Concern

Ashramkanya Amita Sen: 100^th birth anniversary Celebration) 
 5-7 Jan. 2012 (Tentative)

Women’s Studies Centre, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan

In a life span of eighty years, Rabindranath Tagore wrote two thousand five hundred poems, seven novels, composed eighteen hundred songs and a number of plays, wrote, directed and produced at least four well-known dance dramas (nritya natya/geeti natya). Over the years these dance dramas and songs have become an inalienable part of Bengali culture. As if that was not enough, in his late years, he took to painting and produced almost two thousand paintings, which are believed to be a new initiative in the world of art. A mere enumeration of these creative aspects can hardly do justice to his incredible achievements and the great contributions he made to the civilization. He took to interpretation of Religion, History and Society proposing a new concept of “India”, preaching internationalism when nations like Japan, Germany and Britain were preparing for World war. He not only proposed but also implemented significant programmes in rural reconstruction in pre-independent India. Needless to say, contribution of this magnitude is not possible without a novel foundational attitude arising out of a basic philosophical position. Over time his attitude towards Man and the World changed and so did his philosophy. 

Lives without Rights by Jharna Panda

We are pleased to announce that Jharna Panda, one of our UNITWIN-affiliated researchers in India, has written an article calling attention to the livelihoods of women in the Sundarban region in West Bengal. Below is the abstract of Jharna's powerful paper.

"Lives without Rights" by Jharna Panda: Abstract

'Any sympathetic discussion with the women of the Sundarban region (the famous archipelago in the southern fringe of the Gangetic delta in eastern India known for its mangrove forest and Royal Bengal tigers) will reveal the stark realities about their abysmal health standards and the widely prevalent reproductive health problems in spite of a plethora of public health programmes. For example, a large number of women suffer from genital prolapse while they are still in the third decade of their lives.

Most of them are working women from landless or marginal peasant families and because of their very social position, they have to simultaneously bear the burden of a failing agrarian economy and the weight of an oppressively discriminatory social tradition. Hence, these women can be regarded as living testimonies of the process whereby social and livelihood practices frustrate the dream of empowerment to the extent that village women are not in a position to decide upon matters related to their individual selves, let alone to social affairs.

Though to a significant extent their appalling health standards can be traced back to the poor material - including economic - condition of their living, this is clearly also a function of their position as women in a social milieu which is a heady mix of patriarchal domination, archaic traditions and entrenched taboos. The average woman has to follow the extant rituals and practices regarding child birth, birth control, and child health. Even the health workers, when they are present, fail to make much headway with their repertoire of scientific health awareness programmes because the women whose health is at stake are not supposed to make a choice.

The story is complex, yet revealing. It reveals the interrelated nature of the issues of empowerment and economy, health and social practice, reproductive health and productive activities.'

 To see the full text of Jharna's work called "Lives without Rights" please visit http://www.catunescomujer.org/globalnetwork/publications.html

Researcher Jharna Panda shared her firsthand experience living and working in the Sundarban Region in West Bengal, at Visva-Bharati's International Conference on Women after Independence.

Just Published!

Visiting Scholar Smitha Radhakrishnan of Boston University's Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program, the hub of our UNITWIN Network, has just had her book Appropriately Indian published.

‘Appropriately Indian is an ethnographic analysis of the class of information technology professionals at the symbolic helm of globalizing India. Comprising a small but prestigious segment of India’s labor force, these transnational knowledge workers dominate the country’s economic and cultural scene, as do their notions of what it means to be Indian. Drawing on the stories of Indian professionals in Mumbai, Bangalore, Silicon Valley, and South Africa, Smitha Radhakrishnan explains how these high-tech workers create a “global Indianness” by transforming the diversity of Indian cultural practices into a generic, mobile set of “Indian” norms. Female information technology professionals are particularly influential. By reconfiguring notions of respectable femininity and the “good” Indian family, they are reshaping ideas about what it means to be Indian.’
Read more at http://www.appropriatelyindian.com/


You can find Smitha's Boston Univeristy bio at http://www.bu.edu/wgs/community/womens-studies-family/visiting-scholars/


Niraja Gopal Jayal, Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and an affiliate of our UNITWIN Network, has recently had her article "The Transformation of Citizenship in India in the 1990s and Beyond" published in a peer-reviewed collection on the political economy of 21st century India.

'This paper discusses how the three central transformations of the 1990s – Hindu nationalism, backward caste mobilization and economic reform – have shaped practices of citizenship in India in recent times. Women enter this story in three ways: lower middle class women experience a new feeling of freedom by being able to enter the market; women experience social empowerment through their participation in and leadership of panchayats; but, as victims of sex-selective abortion, they are also disadvantaged in practices of biological citizenship. The article is published in the volume titled "Understanding India's New Political Economy: A Great Transformation?”, Sanjay Ruparelia, et al. eds. (Routledge, London, 2011)'. -Niraja Gopal Jayal



You can find Niraja's bio at: http://www.jnu.ac.in/Faculty/ngjayal/Address.html

JMI's International Seminar: In Pictures

We are pleased to announce that our colleagues at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi have provided us with a terrific visual portrayal of the most recent UNITWIN International Seminar hosted at Jamia. To see the entire collection of photos, please click here.

Seminar organizer, Dr. Arvinder Ansari of Jamia, has also just shared with us that the thirty-five papers presented in the seminar are due to be made into a UNESCO Reference Document by early next year. We of the Boston University-based UNITWIN are most excited about this recent news and join our friends at Jamia Millia Islamia in expressing our deep gratitude to Mr. Najeeb Jung, Vice Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia University. His help and unwavering support helped to make possible this inaugural event of the second phase of our UNITWIN Network. The two-day gathering on "Gender, Violence and Development: The South Asian Experiences" marked another "first," as the first International Seminar organized by the Department of Sociology, Jamia Millia Islamia. It was well attended by scholars and students, and deemed "a big hit"!

Chandana Dey Reporting Live from Jamia on the UNITWIN International Seminar!

Dear Brenda,

Was just settling down to write to you. Today's Seminar was an unqualified success! Everyone was really happy at the variety of presentations and the two halls were packed with students and faculty, right to the end- even though the Session went on for about half an hour longer than scheduled.

The UNESCO delegate gave a very fulsome description of the UNITWIN initiative- and lots of very nice things were said about the Boston-based team- quite deservedly.YOU WERE GREATLY MISSED. Arvinder did a sterling job!

 Seminar organizer Dr. Arvinder Ansari of Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi

There were many presentations from all sorts of places in India- and from outside too; a very intellectual delegate from Colombo who decided to "de-construct" the definitions of "empowerment and development". We will be hearing from Dr. Imtiaz tomorrow.

There are several male delegates here and a couple of very interesting papers looking at "masculinities". Kamla Bhasin (author and social activist) gave a stirring call to ditch patriarchy, which she said was squeezing the "humanity" out of all the men- here in the room and elsewhere.

My own presentation on empowerment and development from the grassroots perspective went off quite well. Tomorrow, I'm chairing! UNITWIN was well represented by Malkit (Professor Malkit Kaur of Punjabi University at Patiala) and also JMI's Dr. Savya Saachi; Asha (Professor Asha Mukerjee of Visva-Bharati) will be able to come tomorrow.

 Dr. Savya Saachi, a founder of our UNITWIN Network

More tomorrow!

Chandana

(Chandana Dey, Co-Founder of the Bhab Initiative of West Bengal and a founding member of the UNITWIN on Gender, Culture, and People-Centered Development)

_________________________

Day Two:

Day 2 was really an emotional day- as we heard first-hand accounts of state-induced violence against women in neighbouring countries- the Hudoot in Pakistan and the fatwas in Bangladesh- and although we were told to leave "emotions" outside the door- it was difficult. It occurred to me that perhaps a Conference of this kind could only be held in India.

 

Chandana Dey

There were also stories of hope: for example, how the police approached the Social Department of Jamia Millia to sensitize them on the topic of domestic violence and, in particular, understand the ramifications of the Domestic Violence act;  how women activists working with women's organizations are finding the courage to act as "change agents" in their personal lives; how men working on women's issues are re-evaluating their own masculinity and the way they have been brought up.

I was really impressed at the level of scholarship displayed by the young scholars who showed both intellectual rigour and chose topics that had a humanist relevance- and which the UNESCO delegate, Dr. Huma Massod, hopes will make it into working papers for May 2012. Huma says she's had the good fortune of working with you and hopes to really take this UNITWIN initiative to ever greater heights. I think, too, that Arvinder achieved such a high benchmark with the themes, variety of papers, the level of interaction, and the extremely warm atmosphere for all who participated. I'm sure the other UNITWIN partners will now be doubly inspired.

 Picture courtesy of Jamia Millia Islamia Alumni Directory

I also had the good fortune to meet several "gurus"- Kamla Bhasin, Mary John, and such big names such as Imtiaz Ahmed. To have so many "eminent personalities" interacting, under one roof, with scholars and students alike on an equal footing: what better example of building a new world where hierarchies will dissolve and where we can think out of the box? We heard about the 'paradigm of patriarchy" from a Sociologist/feminist man, who's now working to build shelters for the homeless women in Delhi. The ex-Head of the Sociology department of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Dr. Oomen, spoke about the need to eradicate not just "structural and physical violence" but also what he termed "symbolic violence"- verbal abuse of women inside the home. We also heard the repeated demand that participants in the development process stop and think about the root causes of violence- those that are separate from issues of equity and justice; namely, if one achieves more egalitarian economic relations, this does not necessarily impinge on social relations and improve gender balances- or stop the violence inflicted on women.

What better example of active participation than Dr. Mohini Anjum, who used to head the Sociology department of Jamia, and had many students among the faculty today- and who chose to come all the way from Ghaziabad to attend the Seminar.

Chandana

UNITWIN Colleagues Visit Boston University's Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program

We are pleased to share with you news of a recent visit from two of our UNITWIN colleagues in West Bengal. Social activists Chandana and Nandini Dey spent a day with the Boston branch of our UNITWIN Network at Boston University's Women's, Gender, &  Sexuality Studies Program. Welcoming the visitors were Program Head Deborah Belle, UNITWIN Network Initiator Dr. Brenda Gael McSweeney, Program Coordinator Carly Pack-Bailey, Visiting Scholar Smitha Radhakrishnan, and Teaching Assistant Katherine Lochery. We were fortunate to have the opportunity to hear about some of the great work that Chandana and Nandini are doing in their native India, particularly in the areas of rural women's education and livelihoods and  the Right to Information movement of MKSS (MAZDOOR KISAN SHAKTI SANGATHAN - a non-party People's Organization engaged in the political process in India) spearheaded by Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey, and Shanker Singh.

Right to left: Professor Deborah Belle, Visiting Scholar Smitha Radhakrishnan, Chandana Dey, Nandini Dey, Carly Pack-Bailey, and Katherine Lochery

 Program Coordinator Carly Pack-Bailey and Nandini Dey speaking of the Right to Information campaign in India

For more pictures of the visit of our UNITWIN  partners, please visit our flikr site: