May 2015 – Gender and the Colonial
Gender and the Colonial
CGS Biennial Conference
May 2015
SOAS, University of London
View the Conference Poster here
View the SOAS page for the event here
Opening keynote: Professor Oyeronke Oyewumi (Stony Brook University, New York)
Unlearning the Lessons of Coloniality: Exhuming Subjugated Knowledge and Liberating Marginalized Epistemes
Keynote: Professor Dianne Otto (Melbourne Law School)
Justice Beyond the Law: People’s Tribunals and the Politics of Listening
Closing keynote: Professor Ratna Kapur (Jindal Global Law School, India)
Precarious Desires, Postcolonial Justice and the Epistemic Fishbowl of Human Rights
Guest lecture:Dr Fatou Kiné Camara (Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Senegal)
The Colonial Gender Construct – The gift that keeps on giving. Senegalese Women’s Uphill Struggle to Topple the Colonial Legacy of Institutional Male Dominance
Panels and roundtables will look at colonial edifices in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and seek to analyse occupation (in particular in the Palestinian territories), military and missionary interventions, and/ or issues of race and migration, transnational, queer and postcolonial analysis.
Biographies
Professor Oyeronke Oyewumi
Stony Brook University, New York
Born in Nigeria and educated at the University of Ibadan and the University of California at Berkeley, Professor Oyewumi has been widely recognised for her work. The monograph The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) won the 1998 Distinguished Book Award in the Gender and Sex Section of the American Sociological Association and was a finalist for the Herskovitts Prize of the African Studies Association in the same year. She has garnered a number of research fellowships, including Rockefeller Fellowships, a Presidential fellowship, and a Ford Foundation grant. Oyewumi’s most recent research support was a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship on Human Security (2003/2004), managed by National Council for Research on Women (NCRW).
Professor Ratna Kapur
Jindal Global Law School, India
Professor Ratna Kapur is currently a Research Fellow at the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies. She is a Global Professor of Law, Jindal Global Law School in India, and the Executive Director of the Global Justice programme at the school. Professor Kapur is also Senior Faculty at the Institute of Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School, and is a sessional faculty at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations. She has been a visiting professor at a number of schools around the world including Yale Law School, NYU School of Law, the UN Peace University, Georgetown University Law Centre and has also held fellowships at Harvard Law School and Cambridge University. She writes and publishes extensively on issues of gender and sexuality, postcolonial feminism, human rights law, and critical legal theory.
Dr Fatou Kiné Camara
Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Senegal
Dr Fatou Kiné Camara is an Associate Professor of Law at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, and currently teaches Anthropology of Law and Human Rights at the school. She is the author of a variety of books and articles on indigenous African law and human rights subjects in Africa. Dr Camara is also a feminist activist. From 2009 to 2013, she was the Secretary General of the Conseil sénégalais des femmes (COSEF), an association that works to promote women in politics. She is the current elected president of the Association des Juristes Sénégalaises, an association devoted to the establishment of gender equality and children’s rights, as well as providing free legal assistance. In 2010, Dr Camara was awarded the “Prix des Droits de l’Homme du Cinquantenaire des Indépendances” by the Académie des Sciences d’Outre-mer and the Secrétariat du cinquantenaire des Indépendances, France.
Professor Dianne Otto
Melbourne Law School, Australia and Centre for Gender Studies, SOAS, University of London
Professor Dianne Otto is Francine V. McNiff Chair in Human Rights Law and Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH) at Melbourne Law School. Dianne’s scholarly research in the field of public international law and human rights law enjoys a national and international reputation, marked by its emphasis on melding theory with transformative practice. Her research interests include addressing gender, sexuality and race inequalities in the context of international human rights law, the UN Security Council’s peacekeeping work, the technologies of global ‘crisis governance’, threats to economic, social and cultural rights, and the transformative potential of people’s tribunals and other NGO initiatives. Dianne’s scholarship explores how international legal discourse reinforces hierarchies of nation, race, gender and sexuality, and aims to understand how the reproduction of such legal knowledge can be resisted. Her work draws upon a range of critical legal theories particularly those influenced by feminism, postcolonialism and queer theory.