Conference Details
The four broad questions the 3-day institute will engage include:
- Why study Islam through the lens of feminisms?
- What is the relationship between Islamic feminisms as social movements, as
quests for personal identity, as forces of resistance?
- What are the exigencies confronting Islamic feminisms particularly in the
realms of democratic politics, cultural productions, and social policy? How
are these exigencies negotiated?
- What is the relation between state structure, its move towards
democratization in a number of countries, and Islamic feminism? How have state
policies shaped the rise, content and form of feminist resistance? How have
they influenced, or not, the articulation between Islam and feminism?
The conference will be organized along three days, with six sessions tackling
these broad themes:
Themes may include but are not limited to...
Defining Islamic Feminisms
- Faith based feminisms/secular feminisms
- Feminist interpretations of religious texts
- Challenging imperial feminism through engaging national, post-colonial,
and transnational contexts
- Islamic masculinities, subjectivities, agency
Social Movements, Social Transformations
- Resistance and occupation
- Democracy, civil society, and women's groups
- Political economy and globalization
- Faith based tribunals/arbitration/courts
- Legal Reform and women's rights
Identities, Citizenship, Resistance
- Nationalism, sexuality, "War on Terror"
- Immigration
- International Law and Human Rights Regimes
- State Violence and its links to regimes of race/gender/nations/sexuality
- Coalition building, transnational solidarity practices
Challenging Hegemonic Representations of Islam, Muslims, and the West
- Islamic feminist engagements with creative expressions of visual arts,
cinema, literature
- Teaching, pedagogy and global education
- Colonial discourses, post-colonial modernities
The 2007 Fall
Institute is made possible by a grant from the Ford
Foundation.