FemInt workshop-in-progress

(IntLawGrrls is pleased to welcome back alumna Susan Harris Rimmer, who contributes this guest post)

As previously posted, The Australian National University is currently hosting a workshop on Feminist Internationalisms in Canberra, Australia. The workshop is intended to reflect on twenty years of feminist scholarship in the fields of international law and international relations, in Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific.

IntLawGrrls everywhere can follow the proceedings:

Live

Click on the conference Twitter account here and receive tweets live from the conference floor.

Podcasts

The following podcasts from the workshop also are available: "You May Never Understand: Prospects for Feminist Futures in International Relations," the keynote address by Dr. J. Ann Tickner (below right), Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, is here, and the Q&A that followed is here.

Here's a taste of what Ann had to say:

While feminist research has been successful in making women visible, it has gone much deeper. Getting beyond women and IR, and even beyond gender and IR, it has successfully demonstrated -- not maybe as much as we would like to the discipline as a whole -- that IR theory is thoroughly gendered, both in the questions it chooses to ask, as well as how it goes about answering them.
One of the most creative moves feminism has made is to challenge disciplinary boundaries and bring in new issues and voices.
Rich empirical case studies –- using methodologies not normally employed by IR scholars -- have shed light on those on the margins (both women and men) whose lives are deeply impacted by global politics and economics. Feminists have sccessfully demonstrated how the lives of sex workers, domestic servants, home-based workers and those who work at unremunerated caring and reproductive labour, are intertwined with global politics and the global economy. They have also suggested that the security of states is sometimes dependent on rendering insecure the lives of certain, often marginalized, people, and how the global capitalist economy could not function without unremunerated labour, the majority of which is performed by women. IR feminists have also pointed to the inadequacies of social scientific methodologies for answering many of the questions they want to ask.

All workshop papers will appear in a special issue of the Australian Feminist Law Journal in July 2010.