Dr. Diane Balser leads London Workshop

Dr. Diane Balser, faculty of the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program at Boston University, was the primary leader of a workshop held in early 2014 in London for women and some men from many European countries. The workshop reached a truly international audience, including two women from India, several women and men from Israel and two women from Kenya.  The sessions were based on a peer counseling system in which participants explored their feelings and thoughts around issues, which pertain to the situation for women (primarily) and some men. The main issues included sexism and

more specifically violence against women, sexism in the workforce, child rearing, reproductive rights, marriage, sexism in education, and politics. She has been invited to conduct a forthcoming workshop in the Netherlands.

New Publication from Boston University's Women's and Gender Studies Faculty affiliated with our UNESCO/UNITWIN Network

We are pleased to announce the publication of On the Wonders of Land and Sea: Persianate Travel Writing, a comparative study of non-European travel writers in the eastern Islamic or Persianate world from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries.

Edited by Dr. Roberta Micallef - Master Lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature at Boston University, and Dr. Sunil Sharma - Associate Professor of Persianate and Comparative Literature at Boston University, this compilation of essays discusses travel narratives by female and male Muslim and Parsi/Zoroastrian travelers in the Hijaz, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and Europe. The authors' methodological approach places the texts in their socio-historical contexts and the travelers in their geographical locations, taking into account their gender and national identity.  (Source: here)

Dr. Savyasaachi of Jamia Millia Islamia Just Published!

Dr. Savyasaachi, a founding member of our UNESCO/UNITWIN Network, and Dr. Ravi Kumar, both of Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi, are co-editors of a new volume just published by Routledge, titled "Social Movements: Transformative Shifts and Turning Points." It analyzes such issues as difference feminism, protests against globalization, and legal opportunity in struggles, especially in South Asia.

The publishers highlighted the following:

"Mapping the development of social movements in South Asia, this book offers a penetrating study of the nature and modes of protest and dissent as manifest in people’s struggles in securing equity, justice and security in labour, gender, human and environmental rights.

Amid significant changes in society, economy and polity, combined with far-reaching consequences of globalization and neoliberalism, it situates the understanding of social movements within concrete experiences and examples of diversified resistances, collective dissensions and radical transformative mobilizations.

Through case studies and examples from across South Asia, that reinforce vibrant democratic dissent, this volume challenges the view that in recent years there has been a decline of mass movements in the region. Besides drawing attention to the interconnections between New Social Movements (NSMs) and Classical Labour Movements (CLMs), it discusses the patterns of development of growing NSMs, particularly in South Asia, such as the Zapatistas’ revolution; anti-capitalist movements; protests against globalization, Statism and difference feminism; and roles of language, money and legal opportunity in struggles.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, social movements, politics, gender and feminist studies, labour studies, as well as the general reader."

Burkina Photo Exhibit sponsored by BU-anchored UNITWIN

                                                                                                                                        The BU-based UNESCO / UNITWIN Network is proud to announce an upcoming photo exhibit, covering the evolution of the roles and rights of women in Burkina Faso from the 1970s to present. The exhibit will include a large collection of photos that tell the story of workload-lightening technologies that were introduced to Burkina in the 70s, and their impact on female education and empowerment over the following decades.

The opening reception for the exhibit will be held on March 8, International Women's Day, from 11 AM-1 PM at the Oak Square-Faneuil Branch Gallery of the Boston Public Library. The reception is open to the public, and will allow community members to learn more about the rich history of women in West Africa and to celebrate the progress that they have made over the past 40 years. It is sponsored by the Friends of Faneuil Branch- Boston Public Library, Unbound Visual Arts, Inc., and UNITWIN at Boston University.

The exhibit is based on the work undertaken by Dr. Brenda Gael McSweeney of Boston University's Women's and Gender Studies and UNESCO/UNITWIN Network during her time managing UN Development Programme projects in Burkina Faso. One of the key initiatives was to boost female education through the introduction of time and energy-liberating technologies. This project for Equal Access of Women and Girls to Education was managed by Scholastique Kompaoré, National Coordinator. She and Brenda also jointly led village research into the operations and outcomes of this project. The exhibition will run throughout Women's History Month, and until 12 April 2014.

More here at the Website, including a Guide to the Exhibition

Our New UNITWIN Network Affiliate: Unbound Visual Arts!

I'm delighted to update you on the newest affiliate of our UNESCO/UNITWIN Network on Gender, Culture & Development: it's called Unbound Visual Arts (UVA), and is based in my now-home community of Brighton, Massachusetts. I'm on the Council of Advisors, and must say that I really admire the mix of events and partnerships generated in just one year of existence. UVA has become a venue for sharing some of our UNITWIN work: initially, an exhibit at the Harvard Allston Education Portal included photographs giving a glimpse of women's empowerment work in Burkina, and a recent exhibit at Boston City Hall curated by UVA Executive Director John Quatrale included six photographs plus a storyboard on women's progress in education and political voice in West Africa. This was a high-profile showcase for the two overarching priorities of UNESCO, Gender Equality and Priority Africa. The UVA group also branches out into such events as "Book Art" exhibits and a number of the members are engaged in issues of social justice.

   City Councilor Mark Ciommo (left); Ruth Rieffanaugh (center), President and Founding Member of Unbound; and Nicole, a member of the community (right)

It was thrilling to receive positive feedback from several continents, including from our university and NGO Network partners to the proposal that Unbound Visual Arts be affiliated with our Boston University-anchored UNESCO/UNITWIN Network on Gender, Culture, & Development.

Along with announcing that Unbound Visual Arts is our newest UNITWIN Network affiliate, I'm happy to share some related news: the UVA exhibition hosted at Boston City Hall drew substantial participation at the opening Reception and terrific feedback. We've thus been invited to make this a "traveling exhibition": the next venue is the Harvard University Education Portal for the first two to three months of this New Year!

Unbound Visual Arts, Inc. was founded in 2012 in Allston-Brighton to enliven and to stimulate the creative economy with contemporary visual art for all by exhibiting, educating and sharing.  As it celebrates it's first anniversary, Unbound is now the fastest growing visual arts non-profit in Greater Boston with nearly 70 members and 25 quality themed exhibitions completed. Welcome to our UNITWIN, Unbound! Happy & Fruitful 2014 Everyone ---

Brenda

     

Second E-Book of the Global Network of UNESCO Chairs on Gender in Progress!

Following the exciting March 2013 release of our first e-book of gender case studies of the Global Network of UNESCO Chairs on Gender, we are delighted to announce that preparations are underway worldwide for a second volume. Brenda Gael McSweeney (Boston University and Brandeis University) is the Editor of this volume. Overarching themes include women's political empowerment, economic livelihoods, gender gaps in education, and combatting exploitation. Please see below to read a preliminary description of the contributions to this publication, to be released in 2014. The Global Network's first e-book, "Gender perspectives in case studies across continents" can also be read here.

The new volume will open with a Foreword by Saniye Gülser Corat, Director for Gender Equality at UNESCO Paris, and conclude with an Afterword by Gloria Bonder, Coordinator of the Global Network of UNESCO Chairs on Gender anchored in Buenos Aires.

Case Studies:

In "Gender Equality in Tertiary Education of Cyprus: The perceived superiority of men as academics and researchers", authors Mary Koutselini, Froso Patsalidou, and Katerina Tsimpimpaki analyze the causes and effects of gender equality within the academic profession in Cyprus. This inequality is illustrated through the underrepresentation of women in academic posts, their limited numbers in the rank of professorship, their absence in decision-making bodies and positions, and the restricted participation of women in externally funded research positions. Using quantitative and qualitative data, as well as historical context, the authors analyze the prevalent assumption of male superiority in research and academia.

"'Indrer Pori' - Nachni, a Tragedy" is a paper from West Bengal, India that addresses the social exclusion of nachni, low-caste women who work as traditional dancers and performers under the abusive and exploitative authority of male proprietors, or "rashiks". Author Jharna Panda explores the socioeconomic factors that lead these women to a life of exploitation, and explains the social and cultural rejection that they face as a consequence of their position, in spite of the high cultural value ascribed to their art.

"Irish Women Today: Perspectives from Galway to Dublin on Gender Equality", reveals that Ireland is a highly 'developed' nation, yet gender disparities persist, particularly in the areas of wages and political voice. Through interviews with Irish women and men, Dr. Brenda Gael McSweeney (with Raffi Freedman-Gurspan and Jade Sank) shares factors that contributed to these disparities, as well as some steps taken that improved women's political empowerment and employment opportunities.

Boston University student and activist Alessandra "Sasha" Goodfriend will contribute "Students for Gender Advocacy: Comparative Analysis of the Center for Gender, Sexuality, & Activism at Boston University and the 2110* Centre for Gender Advocacy at Concordia University". In this exciting collaborative work, this young author examines the student activism tactics employed in addressing issues of gender and sexual assault on university campuses. The author will compare her experiences as an activist for the formation of the Sexual Assault Response and Prevention Center at Boston University with the student-led strikes in Montreal, Quebec. Sasha acknowledges fellow student and activist Gabrielle Newton for her contributions on this important topic.

*Since renamed 'Centre for Gender Advocacy' as of June 2013.

In "Role of Gender Quota Systems in Polish Parliamentary Elections After the Fall of Communism" Renata Siemienska addresses the changing cultural attitudes towards gender equality to evaluate the status of women in politics in Poland. Women have been seeking political candidacy in increasing numbers, but face limited success and prominence even with the implementation of quota-based systems during elections in 2001 and 2011. Siemienska attributes these obstacles to the inconsistency of cultural support for women's political participation, which in turn limits access to cultural capital that women candidates need in order to be elected to public office - particularly authority and economic resources.

"Visible or Invisible Money: Different Opportunities for Rural Women in Iran" will explore the factors that led to the financial failure of a group of women beekeepers in Iran, in spite of microfinance loan support from national and international donors. Soheila Alirezanejad discusses the the cultural and socioeconomic factors that inhibited the women from sustaining their business, including gendered expectations from their families, as well as divergent cultural conceptions of money. These factors prevented the women from understanding the sources of their capital or the conditions of their loans. Drawing from seven years of observation, as well as interviews with the women, Alirezanejad's ethnographic work addressed many of the cultural challenges of international development and philanthropy.

Margaret "Peg" Snyder, the founding director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), will contribute "How African Women led the World: The Story of the Women's Centre of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA)". This paper identifies the events which led up to the 1975 founding of the first UN regional center for women, in a time when none of the other five UN regional commissions in the world had programs or staff dedicated to addressing women's concerns. The program, which later became the African Training and Research Centre for Women (ATRCW), was formed in response to demands of from African women, whose roles in economic development were frequently unacknowledged in the modern sectors of agriculture, industry, commerce and government. Through institution-building, innovative approaches to women, documentation, and inter-agency cooperation, the ATRCW became a global model for addressing this major obstacle to development.

In "Legacy of the Reduction of Enslavement of Men and Women: Several Cases from West Africa", Aminata Kiello examines the gendered impact of historical to modern-day slavery in West Africa, as well as its impact on the development of African societies. This paper highlights the stigmas of modern-day slavery, particularly for women, who are subjugated both within the family structure and the broader society, and who may be subject to a gender-specific form of slavery known as wahaya ("fifth wives"). Championing empowerment through education and cultural pride, Kiello argues that combatting the economic, social, and psychological determinants of slavery is key to West African development overall.

Fernand Sanou of the University of Ouagadougou is coordinating a team paper with Afsata Paré, Soumaïla Keita, Aminata Elisabeth Ouédraogo, and Guidouma Oumar Sanou, on the performance of girls in science at the secondary and university levels in Burkina Faso. Drawing on earlier studies in the US and France, the team works to identify the complex sociocultural factors that influence female performance in the sciences in the West African context. By carefully measuring and analyzing factors ranging from profession of parents to hours per day spent on domestic work, the authors explore the gendered breakdown of academic performance. The goal is to identify reasons that female students consistently perform less well than their male counterparts in certain subjects, with the long-term vision of addressing these inequalities in order to create a system that is truly egalitarian.

Summaries of the above two essays, submitted in French, will also be available in English.

Another anticipated contribution concerns an educational tool on the story of women's roles and rights in Burkina Faso over four decades: a story in photographs of West African women's empowerment. This is based on action-research by Brenda Gael McSweeney and Scholastique Kompaoré, with Cassandra Fox. The tool is being used for outreach to Boston communities via the Boston Public Library and a photo exhibition. 

Post contributed by: Cassandra Fox, Lucia Hsiao, and Rose O'Connell-Marion

UNITWIN/UNESCO Photo Exhibit at Boston City Hall

The UNESCO/UNITWIN Network at Boston University is excited to announce the launch of an exhibit on women shaping history in Burkina Faso at City Hall in Boston, Massachusetts, as a part of a larger "All Things Change" show hosted by Unbound Visual Arts (UVA) and the Mayor's Office of Arts, Tourism and Special Events. UVA is the newest affiliate of the UNESCO/UNITWIN on Gender, Culture & Development. The component of the exhibit titled "All Things Change: Evolving Roles of Burkinabé Women" follows the progression of roles taken on by women in this West African nation, and the impact that they have had on the development of the country. "Equality Burkina" team member Scholastique Kompaoré features prominently among the six Burkinabé women whose work and achievements are highlighted in the exhibit. The "All Things Change" exhibition, curated by UVA Executive Director John Quatrale, was showcased in an article in the Boston Globe, here!

Above, an educational poster describing the Burkina entries

The exhibit will run from late November to December 31, 2013, at City Hall in the Scollay Square Gallery. On December 12, a reception was held for the public and the artists. Brenda Gael McSweeney and Rose O'Connell-Marion represented the Boston University UNITWIN team at the reception, enthusiastically sharing the story of female empowerment in Burkina Faso. 

The All Things Change Exhibit has now been invited to show at the Harvard Educational Portal for the first several months of 2014! 

At left, Unbound Visual Arts Executive Director John Quatrale, with UVA Founding Member and 
Exhibiting Photographer Brenda Gael McSweeney and Founding Member-Artist Anita Helen Cohen.

Boston University Research Assistant Rose O'Connell-Marion (left) with Nicole, 

a member of the Brighton community who has worked in East Africa.

At center, Marion and Stan Freedman-Gurspan who have spent time in Burkina, pictured with John Quatrale at right, 

interacting with the representative of an arts coalition.

See more All Things Change Reception photos!

Report on “Of Pitfalls and Possibilities: The Case of India and Feminist Anti-Rape Organizing Across Difference”

On Friday November 15^th Debotri Dhar Ph.D., Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University and Visiting Scholar at Boston University’s Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies (WGS) Program, gave a lecture and book reading at BU. The event, hosted by WGS and co-sponsored by GaIDI (Gender & International Development Initiatives) of the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center (WSRC), showcased Dhar’s research on the relationship between rape, suicide and the postcolonial state.

“South Asia is described in the Status of World’s Women Reports as the world’s ‘most unsafe’ region for women – with Afghanistan, and India in that order – as the two ‘topmost unsafe’ countries – in terms of crimes against women, female foeticide, honor killings and overall discrimination.”  

In introducing Professor Dhar on behalf of WGS, Dr. Brenda Gael McSweeney highlighted events and statistics including the one quoted above that demonstrate the severity of violence against women in India and therefore just how vital it is for academics and researchers like Dhar to be focusing on this issue.

Dr. Smriti Rao, Visiting Research Associate at WSRC, and Associate Professor of Economics and Global Studies at Assumption College, submitted the following report on Dr. Dhar's lecture and the event:

“On December 16, 2012 a 23 year old young woman with a male companion got on what they thought was a bus to her New Delhi neighborhood.  He was there because it would be unthinkable for a woman of any age to get on a Delhi bus alone after dark, which says a great deal about what it means to be a woman in India today.  In this case, as it turned out, that precaution was not enough.  The six men on the bus, including the driver, were on a joyride after an evening of drinking. They beat both the woman and her companion unconscious and brutally gang raped her. Then they left them both for dead on a New Delhi street, where, until the next morning, not a single passerby stopped to help. 

Dr. Debotri Dhar at the podium, and Dr. Diane Balser of WGS along with one of the students

She died a few days later of severe internal injuries – she had lost almost all of her intestines. The police in this case did their job and found the six rapists, a task made easier by the fact that they hadn’t thought to hide or run away.  Two were teenagers.  The two oldest, like the young victim herself, had come to the city as children when their families left villages in northern India to seek a better life in the city. The rest were more recent migrants to Delhi. 

One difference in the backgrounds of the victim and her murderers was that her family had managed some degree of upward mobility. They had, after considerable sacrifice, been able to pay for her to complete a degree in physiotherapy (a degree in medicine would have been too expensive) so that she could aspire to becoming part of India’s urban middle class. And that, as Debotri Dhar argued in her talk, made all the difference when it came to how the media and its urban consumers responded to her rape and death.

Dhar, a Visiting Scholar at Boston University Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program, is a researcher and an activist whose main area of focus is sexual violence against women in South Asia.  Her dissertation work on rape victim suicides in India revealed the importance of class and caste as well as gender in framing acts of violence against women, or, as she put it, “how causes become causes.”  As she told her audience of students, faculty members and researchers from Boston and Brandeis Universities and beyond, rather than being an act of “embodied shame”, the rape victim suicides that are documented as such in India tend to be very public acts committed by less privileged women to protest the failure of the state to prosecute their rapists. These women, Dhar’s research shows, “offer up their bodies as a way to get justice,” in a country where too many acts of violence against women go unreported or, when reported to the police, go unprosecuted if the victim is from a less privileged caste or class than her assailant. The media shares the state’s brutal indifference to the fates of these women, leaving these very public acts of suicide as the victim’s only recourse. 

On the other hand, the case of the “New Delhi gang rape”, as it has come to be known, received tremendous national media attention and resulted in an outpouring of public protest against not just the aggressors but also the Indian state’s failure to ensure (or even show much interest in) women’s safety.  Dhar argued that the stark contrast with the rape suicide victims she had studied was partly explained by the girl’s perceived status as a member of the middle class, and that of her assailants as outsiders to the city. The assailants were portrayed as migrants from a backward and rural patriarchal past that was holding back a modernizing India (never mind the fact that at least a few of them had spent most of their lives in New Delhi).  Class, as Dhar emphasized, was key to the framing of the event. 

Marion Freedman-Gurspan of Brookline listening in on the students' debate

This framing takes on an additional layer of complexity when we move from national to international spaces, as we must in building transnational alliances as feminists.  Gendered acts of violence in the 'third world' have a long history of being interpreted by those in the West as ‘barbaric’, and thus evidence of the need to ‘civilize’ those cultures. Dhar pointed to a recent article on the Delhi gang rape that argued that the international publicity and outrage it generated largely fell within the narrative Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, postcolonial theorist and philosopher, famously termed ‘the white man rescuing the brown man from the brown woman’, and that feminists from the third world needed to push back against that narrative. 

Dhar’s central argument, however, was that while acknowledging the power of that narrative and the fact that this event was surely framed in that way by much of the western media, pushing back against that narrative cannot mean denying the real and horrific acts of violence committed against this particular woman, and against thousands of other lesser known victims in India. She argued that, hard as it is to do so, the alliances we build must avoid the pitfall of the “white man’s burden” while at the same time calling out violence and injustice wherever they may occur. 

Her own conclusion was optimistic – she told the audience she believed that such alliances were possible and most powerful when they link violence against women in other contexts to those against women in western cultures, and when they force us to look “within as well as without”.

In the lively discussion that followed, audience members pointed to further commonalities across cultures, such as the functional role of rape as a means of disciplining all women (not just the rape victim). There was a discussion of the degree to which age shaped narratives about the victim and the assailant, as well as the extent to which the rapists in the Delhi case were themselves victims of the wider economic failures of the Indian nation – adrift and rootless in a large city with little real prospect of a better life. There was also considerable interest in the role of the Indian state and the nature of its response to the public protests that followed the events of Dec. 16^th. Dhar argued that while the state had moved slowly, she believed that there had been some real change and called upon her audience to join the struggle to make the world safer for women everywhere.”  

                         

~ Report on Debotri Dhar's Lecture submitted by Smriti Rao, GaIDI/WSRC, Brandeis University

Dr. Barbara Gottfried of WGS/BU and Dr. Smriti Rao of Brandeis after Debotri's lecture

Debotri's lecture was followed by a poignant reading at WGS from her volume of short stories, Postcards from Oxford: Stories of Women and Travel

BU's WGS Sponsoring "Of Pitfalls and Possibilities: The Case of India and Feminist Anti-Rape Organizing Across Difference"

We are pleased to report that Boston University's Women's Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program (WGS) is sponsoring a timely event titled "Of Pitfalls and Possibilities: The Case of India and Feminist Anti-Rape Organizing Across Difference." The event will be co-sponsored by GaIDI (Gender and International Development Initiatives) of the Women's Studies Research Center (WSRC) at Brandeis University.

Boston University's own Professor Deborah Belle will introduce the event speaker, Dr. Debotri Dhar - a 2013-2014 Visiting Scholar at BU's WGS. Dr. Dhar's research examines the relationship between rape, suicide and the postcolonial state, and explores such themes as gender, caste and class; silence and subaltern speech; culture, rights, and the nation; women's agency; transnational feminism and egalitarian justice. Dr. Dhar holds a Masters in Women's Studies from Oxford University and a Ph.D. in Women's and Gender Studies from Rutgers. Please join us for this event on Friday, November 15th, at 3:00pm in SCI Rm 117 (Metcalf Science Building), 590 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston.

After her lecture, Dr. Dhar will give a reading from her recent book: Postcards from Oxford: Stories of Women and Travel. The reception will be held at WGS, 704 Commonwealth Avenue, Suite 102, Boston. Books to be signed by the author will be available for purchase!

"Patriarchy, Power, and Paradox: Dreaming Gender Equality and Development" now published!

Some news: a book of the Pardee Center's South Asia 2060 Project here at Boston University, in which we participated, is now published! The peer-reviewed volume is South Asia 2060: Envisioning Regional Futures. 

Shahla Haeri and Brenda Gael McSweeney co-authored the chapter entitled "Patriarchy, Power, and Paradox: Dreaming Gender Equality and Development". Details of the anthology, edited by Adil Najam and Moeed Yusuf, are on the Anthem Press website.