The Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies organises the DOING GENDER Lecture Series in cooperation with her partners. These lectures stress the importance of doing gender work combined with an active involvement in the practice of gender theory and research. The concept of DOING GENDER supports a hands-on approach to gender issues in the sense of social and political engagement with the new forms of gender inequalities that are taking shape in the world today. The lecture series wants to give space to the new generations of gender theorists and practitioners and to perspectives that innovate the field and do gender in new ways. Key is the notion of doing gender: what is the state of the art definition of gender? How do contemporary scholars and activists utilise this definition?
The Doing Gender Lecture series for 2024-205 will be framed around the theme of Feminist Solidarity in Times of War.
On Thursday, January 16, Dr. Marsha Henry (Queen’s University, Belfast) will give the Doing Gender Lecture entitled From Intersectional to Abolitionist: Decolonial, Feminist and Anti-Militarist Theorising on Peacekeeping.
Lecture: From Intersectional to Abolitionist: Decolonial, Feminist and Anti-Militarist Theorising on Peacekeeping
This lecture focusses on feminist, postcolonial, and anti-militarist frameworks to expose peacekeeping as an epistemic power project in need of abolition. Drawing on critical concepts from Black feminist thought, and from postcolonial and critical race theories, I show how contemporary peacekeeping produces gender and racial inequalities through increasingly militarized strategies. I use an intersectional analysis based on more than fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork in peacekeeping missions and training centres around the world, including interviews with UN peacekeepers, humanitarian aid personnel, and local populations. I demonstrate how a focus on the policy and practice of peacekeeping has obscured the geopolitical knowledge project at peacekeeping’s root, allowing its harms to persist unquestioned by mainstream scholarship. Arguing that we must recover critical theoretical contributions that have been side-lined within the field, I bring the insights of feminist and postcolonial scholarship to bear on peacekeeping studies, whose production of empirical data and evidence continues to provide the justification and foundation for policy and global governance actions. Revealing that peacekeeping is not the benign, apolitical project it is often purported to be, the book encourages readers to imagine and enact alternative and abolitionist futures to peacekeeping.
Biography:
Marsha is the Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair in Women, Peace, Security, and Justice, Mitchell Institute, Queen’s University, Belfast and a Visiting Scholar, Gender Studies, LSE. Marsha’s research is concerned with the gendered and racialised politics of violence; militarisation; global south development; international aid and intervention; and conflict, peace and security. In addition, she has published on the challenges of decolonial, intersectional, and feminist qualitative approaches, methodologies and fieldwork. She is the author of several books, the latest of which is: The End of Peacekeeping: Gender, Race and the Martial Politics of Intervention (Penn Press). She is currently Associate Editor for Security Dialogue and has helped to develop a range of courses on gender, peace and security at the GEST Programme, University of Iceland, Iceland; UNITAR, Switzerland; and the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeper Training Centre, Ghana. Marsha has also advised several national governments on women’s participation in the armed forces, combatting sexual exploitation and abuse in humanitarian settings, and developing anti-racist and diversity strategies in foreign policy ministries.
Doing Gender Lecture by Dr. Marsha Henry
Thursday, January 16, 2025
Lecture: From Intersectional to Abolitionist: Decolonial, Feminist and Anti-Militarist Theorising on Peacekeeping
Time: 17:15-18:45hrs.
Location: Drift 25, Room 102, Utrecht University (this room is wheelchair accessible. Please contact NOG@uu.nl to make further arrangements.)
Chair: Prof. Dr. Sandra Ponzanesi
Registration: nog@uu.nl
Reading: Henry, Marsha. ‘Chapter 3: The Limits of the Singular: Intersectionality, Binaries, and Coloniality of Gender’. In The End of Peacekeeping: Gender, Race and the Martial Politics of Intervention. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024, pp. 67-102. https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.2667635
