A Gender Institute research seminar led by Dr Marsha Henry
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Wednesday 21 January 2015
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5.30-6.30pm
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Room NAB.1.04, New Academic Building, LSE
Based on a research studies conducted in the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia in 2006 and 2012, this seminar argues that peacekeepers' everyday experiences reflect a series of contradictory identities and performances in regard to their national militaries, labour and leisure time, and gender roles. Peacekeepers straddle paradoxical worlds simultaneously and manage oppositional demands and obligations. Importantly, the contradictory experiences provide opportunities for peacekeepers to narrate themselves into multiple social, cultural and moral economies. Thus the concept of the peacekeeping economy is used more openly and broadly, to include the ways which peacekeepers draw on contradictory expectations and experiences to tactically and favourably position themselves as social subjects. The findings from these studies challenge the idea of stock military characters, who acquiesce to or reject the militarised order, who benefit uniformly from the geopolitical inequalities of peacekeeping economies, and the conventional gender roles which so often privilege the masculine side of the dichotomy.
Dr Marsha Henry is Associate Professor at the Gender Institute. Her research interests focus on three main research areas: gender and development; gender and militarisation; and qualitative methodologies. Her doctoral research focused on reproductive decision-making amongst middle-class women in India and her postdoctoral research was concerned with immigration medical exams in Canada. Over the past 10 years, her research interests have been concentrated on documenting the social experiences of living and working in peacekeeping missions. Her recent research focusses on female peacekeepers from the Global South.