UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations

and

UCLA Department of Women’s Studies 

  

PRESENT

 

A Symposium on 

Women in Conflict Zones

April 10, 2009

Sequoia Room, Faculty Center, UCLA

9am to 7:30pm

The Women in Conflict Zones Symposium, a Working Group component of the UCLA Global South Gender Initiative, will feature a keynote/public lecture by Shahrzad Mojab of the University of Toronto, followed during the day by a panel and a workshop designed to explore various conflict zones (e.g., Palestine, Iran (Kurds), Algeria, Sudan, Mexico, Lebanon, Cuba, Eritrea, Tunisia, Philippines, Rwanda/Congo, South Africa, and the United States where individuals may be actors, warriors, victims, pawns, perpetrators, survivors, collaborators, icons or symbols and may be ambivalent, complicit, and have complicated relationships to their adversaries.  In these areas women may also be mediators, peacemakers, justice-seekers, and human rights advocates. Symposium participants will explore these and other similarly urgent contemporary developments shaped by the intersections of gender, conflict, and militarism. The themes explore the nature and rationales for violence, militarization and masculinity, the politics of memory and naming, trauma and healing, and forms of reconciliation. 

Participants include Dina Al-Kassim (UC Irvine), Azza Basarudin (UCLA), Lara Deeb (Scripps College), Sondra Hale (UCLA), Caren Kaplan (UC Davis), Jennifer Terry (UC Irvine), and Juliet Williams (UCLA), and other faculty and graduate students, primarily from UCLA, who will participate in a workshop on “Women in Conflict Zones and Human Rights Questions—Theories, Cases, Practices, and Archival Activism” (Beyene, Blackwell, Finch, Khedher, Santos, and Sharif).

Cosponsored by the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and the Office of the Dean of Social Sciences, UCLA