International Women's Day. A Transregional Conversation on Feminism and the State.

A transnational and interdisciplinary conversation on the complications and complexities of working with, in and on the state, and the dilemmas that feminist activists, researchers and policymakers grapple with in their research and practice.

We'll look at how gendered social and economic inequalities are produced and reproduced all around the world - including in the UK at the moment, where 74 universities are currently taking industrial action over pay, workload, equality and casualisation.  

The panel will also discuss the effects of discourses on policy outcomes (specifically the discourses around gender justice and gender equality) and reflect on the importance of contextualising and historicising policymaking, policy outcome, and policy analysis.

Speakers:

• Mala Htun - Professor of Political Science at the University of New Mexico, co-PI and deputy director of ADVANCE at UNM, a NSF-funded program to promote women and minority STEM faculty, and Special Advisor for Inclusion and Climate, UNM School of Engineering. She works on comparative politics, women’s rights, politics of race and ethnicity, Latin American politics, and diversity and inclusion in the academy.

• Ania Plomien - Assistant Professor in Gender and Social Science at the LSE Department for Gender Studies. Her core research interest is changing inequalities in relation to production and social reproduction from a feminist political economy perspective. Committed to progressive social change, she is concerned with understanding the production and reproduction of gender inequalities through social processes and social and economic policies occurring at national and transnational levels, with a view to providing insights on how they might be effectively addressed.

• Francesca Refsum Jensenius - Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo and Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), specializing in comparative politics, comparative political economy, and research methods, with a regional focus on South Asia. Her main research interest is how institutional design and electoral dynamics affect different types of inequality.

• Poulami Roychowdhury - Assistant Professor of Sociology at McGill University. Her research examines the relationship between politics, law, and social inequality. Her forthcoming book, Capable Citizens (Oxford University Press), shows how political mobilization against gender-based violence has transformed ordinary women's interactions with the Indian criminal justice system. Other projects include: masculinity and labor organizing, and media coverage of sexual violence.

• Wendy Sigle - Professor of Gender and Family Studies and Head of the LSE Department of Gender Studies. She has worked on a variety of issues related to families and family policy in historical and contemporary societies. Her research is is quantitative and applies both econometric and demographic methods to the analysis of secondary survey data or data drawn from official government records.

Chair:

• Nazanin Shahrokni - Assistant Professor of Gender and Globalisation at the LSE Department for Gender Studies. Her research interests fall at the intersection of gender politics, feminist geography, and ethnographies of the state in Iran, the Middle East, and beyond. She brings a critical lens and an ethnographic approach to the study of gendered public spaces and spheres, the reconstruction of gender difference in city spaces, and the complex gendered underpinnings of urban governance and political institutions.