Trade, Gender and Post-War Recovery, Part One: Exploring the Intersections
Wednesday, April 20, 2022 - 09:00 to 10:30
The first in a two-part webinar series, "Trade, Gender & Post-War Recovery: Exploring the Arguments & Intersections," a collaboration between the Gender & Trade Coalition and Consortium on Gender, Security & Human Rights.
Part One, now available here, explored the fundamentals of Gender and Trade, as well as the ways that trade has been used at national and international levels to engage with post-war recovery contexts. Case studies looked at how the intersections have impacted the prospects for building gender-just peace that is both politically and environmentally sustainable. This first webinar featured:
Chair: Michelle Maziwisa, African Women's Development & Communications Network
Liepollo Lebohang Pheko, Trade Collective, and Women in Migration Network
Fatimah Kelleher, Nawi - Afrifem Macroeconomics Collective
Azra Talat Sayeed, Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law & Development
Dr. Michelle Rufaro Maziwisa is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Dullah Omar Institute in the Multilevel Government, Law and Development Project. Her research includes the decentralisation, and specifically evaluating the roles of different spheres of government in international trade, investment, and socio-economic development, as well as the advancement of women's rights in these contexts and women's representation. She is an admitted attorney, and advocates for multi-disciplinary approaches to economic development, taking into account the gendered dimensions of economic governance and prioritizing the developmental mandate in multilevel systems of government. Dr Maziwisa holds a Master of Laws (LLM) from the University of Cape Town and a Doctor of Laws (LLD) from the University of the Western Cape. She is a Marie Skłodowska Curie fellow, and has been awarded research fellowships from the University of Hamburg (Germany) and has presented in national and international conferences.
Liepollo Lebohang Pheko is the Senior Research Fellow at Trade Collective, a research and policy advocacy think tank. She is an activist scholar, public intellectual, international movement builder, senior strategist and Afrikan feminist theoretician. Her areas of specialization include international trade and economics, political economy, feminist economics, policy analysis, international development & international relations, women's entrepreneurship development, and migration and globalization. Liepollo has contributed extensively to framing policy alternatives that center African women in post covid economic recovery and explore new definitions of work, the possibility of post capitalism and a covid resilient, people-centered ecology. She has taught at universities in Mexico, Sweden, Kenya, the UK, Zambia , Germany and the US and has lived and worked across 42 countries.
Fatimah Kelleher is a pan-African feminist, Nigerian and Irish-British independent women's rights strategic and technical adviser involved in feminist policy, research, and advocacy in the areas of economic justice, education, and health. She has worked across Africa, south Asia, and parts of the Caribbean. Within economic justice, her work focuses on rural and agricultural development models, gender and trade, equitable and decent work, and the role of the private sector. Drawing-on African and African feminist thought wherever possible, she continues to pursue analyses that challenge and offers alternative pathways to orthodox developmental trajectories that are failing to dismantle structural inequalities.
Azra Talat Sayeed, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of Roots for Equity, an organization working for the rights of small and landless farmers, that include the rights of women farmers and agriculture workers. She is part of the anti-neoliberal globalization movement and has fought against the WTO and neoliberal policies, fighting for farmer's rights. She has taken part in developing and implementing political education centered on equity and equality of marginalized communities, especially women and girls in the rural communities and urban squatter settlements. She is currently the Chairperson for the Asia Pacific Research Network (APRN) as well as the International Women's Alliance (IWA). Dr. Sayeed has served on the regional council of the Asia Pacific Forum on Women Law and Development (APWLD) for many years. From 2019 to 2021, she was one of the two facilitators for the Women's Constituency of the Civil Society Mechanism (CSM) lodged in the United Nations Committee on World Food Security (CFS). She obtained her Ph.D in Social Pharmacy in 1995 from the University of Minnesota, USA.
Webinar Series Background
In this two-part webinar series, we examine the kind of trading paradigms currently being pursued in post-war contexts, and ask what relationships these have–if any–with sustainable peace? A feminist analysis is critical to this exploration, as it is not only the realm of war/peace/security, but also the realm of trade, that have deeply gendered dynamics, and the successes and failures of recovery and reconstruction are felt disproportionately by women. The unequal gendered impacts of trade liberalization and the international free trade architecture that promote it have been well-documented by feminist scholars and activists in recent decades. More recently, the connections between climate justice, digital justice, and trade justice have also been highlighted. These analyses have been successful at illuminating the unequal global dynamics of power that exist between the north and south and the extractive relationship that underpins it. However, the intersections of gender, trade and post war recovery remain a relatively unexplored area, a gap this webinar series is meant to address.
This webinar series is co-sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Boston's Anthropology Department; Asian Studies Department; Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance; Economics Department; History Department; The Honors College; Latino Studies Program; School for Global Inclusion and Social Development; School for the Environment; Sociology Department; and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department and Human Rights Minor.
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