Gendered Transportations:

What effects does displacement in its multiple forms - war, globalization, disaster - engender in South and Southeast Asia ?

Gendered Transformations explores the multiple ways in which women respond to and negotiate displacement and its violences, opportunities and challenges. It encompasses a range of gendered movements across and between times, spaces and states of being:

•  through internal and external migrations as refugees, workers or settlers

•  through forms of cultural production and the fashioning of new affective and social spaces

•  through forging other modalities of citizenship

•  through reworking grounds for agency and activism

Gendered Transportations brings together an interdisciplinary roundtable of researchers, artists and policyworkers from Bengal to Aceh to consider the gendered effects of displacement in a climate of heightened interest in security at the global level. While considerations of gender are often bypassed in discussions of national security, they are of critical importance in formations such as state, nation, community and religion. The slippages and crossovers between home, nation, community and state and the often violent processes of their mapping onto one another, are processes located in gendered and racialised spatial practices and representational economies. Gendered Transportations pays particular attention to the gendered effects of displacement, disaster and conflict in zones that pose complex human and national security questions. It extends understandings of security beyond military issues to examine wider cultural and social factors that are indispensable to the forging of a secure future in the region.

The work shop will include a mini-festival of films including an exclusive showing for the first time in Australia of the documentary No More Tears, Sister recently shown at the Human Rights Watch film Festival in New York. This screening is open by invitation only to workshop delegates.

To view the program click here

Coordinator: Jessica El Daoud

Sponsors:

Asia-Pacific Futures Network
Media-Asia Research Group, Curtin University of Technology
Gender Studies, The University of Melbourne