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?

On Wednesday, January 14, Dr. Rahul Rao will give a Doing Gender Lecture entitled The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire.

The Doing Gender Lecture series for 2025-2026 will be framed around the theme of Feminist Solidarity in Times of War.

Lecture: The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire.

Why have statues become terrains for the assertion and contestation of racial and caste supremacy? Unlike the overwhelming majority of recent works on statue politics, which examine this phenomenon within nationally bounded parameters, in this talk I offer a transnational and connective account of iconoclastic politics that pays attention to the intertextuality of movements such as Rhodes Must Fall, Gandhi Must Fall, Black Lives Matter, the global Dalit movement and the Hindu Right in India. In doing so, I consider both the toppling and erection of statues as assertions of racial and caste identity and explore the justification of these apparently contradictory phenomena under the rubric of ‘decolonisation’. Placing race and caste in conversation with one another, I will explore how struggles around these categories manifest themselves in the built environment with particular reference to statues.

Biography

Rahul Rao is Reader in International Political Thought in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews, and Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London. He is the author of three books – The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire (London: Pluto Press, 2025), Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), and Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). His work has been supported by fellowships awarded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He is a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective. In addition to writing regularly for academic journals and collections, his work has appeared in more public-facing venues such as The Caravan and Himal Southasian.

Doing Gender Lecture by Dr. Rahul Rao

Wednesday, January 14, 2026
Lecture:The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire. 

Time: 17:15 – 18:45 hrs.
Location: Drift 25, Room 102.
Chair: TBA.
Registration: nog@uu.nl. Please register by using ‘Registration Doing Gender Lecture Rao’ as the subject line.
Reading and Preparation: