This event is part of #DecolonisingLSE Week 2019
This panel aims to raise and discuss some of the tensions, contradictions and challenges entailed in efforts to practise decoloniality in Gender Studies.
While both feminist and decolonial theory share a commitment to challenging traditional hierarchies of knowledge and interrogating issues of power and difference, the project of decolonising Gender Studies within the institutionalised western academy throws up a series of difficult questions.
What, precisely, does it mean to ‘decolonise’ a curriculum, and how does this interact with other critical feminist legacies of de-centring dominant forms of knowing? How do we work to undo and resist hegemonic feminism’s complicity in racist, classist and colonialist ventures from within our position in the western academy? What are the dangers of claiming to ‘do’ decolonial work within such a setting, at a moment when institutions seem particularly invested in claiming a ‘decolonising impulse’? What are the challenges to operationalising the decolonisation of epistemic frameworks that are constitutive of academic disciplines and fields of knowledge?
Join our collective effort to think through the difficulties of a decolonial feminist praxis at 6pm on 2 October in the Graham Wallas Room, Old Building.
Dr Jacob Breslow is Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality at the LSE Department of Gender Studies. His primary area of research is on contemporary U.S. social justice movements, and the ways in which the idea of childhood operates within and against them. Specifically, this work interrogates and thinks with Black Lives Matter, transfeminism, queer youth activism, and anti-deportation movements.
Priya Raghavan started her LSE funded doctorate that the Department of Gender Studies in 2016. Her work evaluates discourses around sexual violence in India, and explores possibilities for agency and resistance within gendered regimes of sexual violence.
Dr Leticia Sabsay is Associate Professor in Gender and Contemporary Culture at the LSE Department of Gender Studies. Her work interrogates the entanglement between sexuality, subjectivity and political ideals of freedom and justice as processes of cultural translation, both across disciplines and transnational contexts. Throughout her career, Leticia also developed an enduring interest in theories of performativity and discourse, which led her to publish extensively on Judith’s Butler work.
Hannah Wright started her ESRC-funded PhD at the Department of Gender Studies in 2016. Her thesis focuses on understanding the relationship between gendered organisational cultures and discourses in foreign policy-making institutions and approaches to international peace and security. Hannah also works as a Researcher at the LSE's Centre for Women, Peace and Security.