This event is part of the Gender, Peace, Education and International Law Symposium held under the ERC project ‘A Gendered International Law of Peace’.
What insights do folk couplets called ‘Landay’- an oral, and often anonymous song by Pashtun women in Afghanistan bring to us, when we think about gender, and peace education? Why do we need to re-centre our gaze to the historie(s) for instance of dalit women from India, who stand on the margins of hegemonic epistemic traps? Why do lived experiences of coloniality/postcoloniality matter? How does an intersectional lens push us to think differently about both what is labelled as gender and peace education, and also what is not labelled as gender and peace education?
So is the trajectory of peace education about paying attention to the ‘politicization of experiences’, and re-centring our gaze to the language of dialogue, difference and dissidence? In this lecture, by a careful reading of feminist historie(s) in South Asia, I bring to fore how feminists in Global South, have scripted an alternative vocabulary of peace education, marked by both dialogue and dissidence. In doing so I pay particular attention to the politics of ‘difference’ by recognising the epistemic silences and marginalisation, not just ‘about’ the field, but also ‘within’ the field.
About the speaker:
- Shweta Singh (she/her/hers) (@shwets_singh) is Senior Assistant Professor of International Relations at the South Asian University (New Delhi, India). Her research broadly focuses on the politics of ‘everyday’, norms and WPS agenda(South Asia), critical peace and conflict studies, with a particular focus on post-colonial South Asia, gender and populism, and contemporary politics of Afghanistan, Kashmir and Sri Lanka. She has been the recipient of the prestigious United States Leadership Award in 2010, and the Mahbub Ul Haq Award in 2013. She was recently appointed as the UN Women International Expert on populism, nationalism, and gender (Regional Office for Asia and Pacific).
- Chair: Sheri Labenski is a Lecturer in the Law Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. She was previously a Research Officer at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security where she worked on the ERC project ‘Gendered Peace’. Sheri is continuing to work on the project and her current research interests are gender, peace and education in international law. Her forthcoming monograph, with Routledge's GlassHouse series, looks at female perpetrators in international criminal law, feminist dialogues and the media.