Global Protests
Unprecedented levels of global hardship and suffering in 2020 have been accompanied by stunning eruptions of people gathering on the streets and in public venues protesting systemic oppressions. From authoritarian regimes to white supremacy, police brutality to military occupation, caste discrimination to gendered and sexualized violence, economic inequality to policy failures, labor exploitation to health disparities, voluminous and vociferous crowds have peppered our visual landscape and living experience of the pandemic and illuminated the increasing urgency to co-imagine a different future. From Australia to Hong Kong, USA to UK, Brazil to Bangladesh people are marching – masked, undeterred and resistant- demanding attention and justice with bold messages like “Silence is Violence”, “I Can’t Breathe”, and “No Justice No Peace.” These messages and movements lay bare the asymmetries of privilege and oppression, the unevenness of growth and wellbeing, and simultaneously encourage a social transformation that takes seriously interdependencies of life, humanity, and ecology. We invite panelists to think through the lessons of their areas of research and expertise and to shed light on how they are thinking about the paradoxes and power of protests.
Roundtable Participants:
Ather Zia, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Northern Colorado Greeley
Ather Zia, Ph.D., is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and a columnist. She teaches at the University of Northern Colorado Greeley. Ather is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir (June 2019) and co-editor of Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak (Women Unlimited 2020), Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (Upenn 2018) and A Desolation called Peace (Harper Collins, May 2019). She has published a poetry collection “The Frame” (1999) and another collection is forthcoming. Ather’s ethnographic poetry on Kashmir has won an award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. She is the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit and is the co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the Kashmir region. Find her on twitter @aziakashmir and here on Academia.
Ghassan Moussawi, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Illinois
Ghassan Moussawi is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Sociology at the University of Illinois- Urbana Champaign. His research and teaching lies at the intersections of transnational gender and sexuality studies, urban studies, race and ethnicity, queer theory and queer of color critique. His recent book Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies (Temple University Press, 2020), examines queer strategies of survival amidst everyday life violence and disruptions. His work has appeared in Gender, Place, and Culture, Sexualities, The Sociological Review, Sociological Forum, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Introducing the New Sexuality Studies.
Marcela Fuentes, Associate Professor of Performance Studies, Northwestern
Marcela A. Fuentes’s work focuses on tactical media and performance in contemporary protests and activisms. Her book Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America/ Activismos tecnopolíticos: Constelaciones de performance (University of Michigan Press, 2019; Eterna Cadencia, 2020) maps the entanglement between on and off-line organizing and mobilization in movements such as neo-zapatismo, the post-2001 Argentinazo, the 2011 Chilean student revolt, solidarity campaigns with the families of Ayotzinapa’s 43, and contemporary transnational feminisms. She offers the concept of “performance constellations” to trace how notions that are central to studies of performance such as embodiment, liveness, eventness, and site-specificity are redefined in contemporary protest movements. She has been awarded national and international grants and fellowships such as the Fulbright Fellowship and the Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral research grant. Her work has been published in Text and Performance Quarterly, e-misférica, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Conjunto, LatFem, Moléculas Malucas, Página 12, and edited volumes on transnational and activist performance.
Maria John, Assistant Professor of Native American History and Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies, UMass Boston
Maria John received her PhD in History from Columbia University. Before joining UMass Boston as an Assistant Professor of Native American History, she was an Indigenous Studies Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the American Studies Department at Wesleyan University. Her research interests include 20th-century urban indigenous histories, comparative histories of settler colonialism, social and political histories of health and healthcare, histories of health activism, and the history of Indigenous sovereignty. Her book-in-progress compares health struggles and Indigenous health activism among urban Indigenous communities in Australia and the United States from the mid twentieth century to the present. At UMass Boston, she teaches undergraduate and graduate classes on Native American history, Indigenous Studies, comparative colonialisms and decolonization, Native American health, Public History, and Oral History. She currently serves as the Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at UMass Boston.
Nusrat Chowdhury, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Amherst College
Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Amherst College. She studies and teaches on topics such as protest, popular sovereignty, and political communication. Her first book, Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh (Stanford University Press, 2019), is an anthropology of crowd protest. Her current book project explores the concept of sacrifice in relation to development megaprojects in Bangladesh by looking closely into the role and the ruse of language - of rumor, policies, politics, and international law. This new work is situated within a wider field of the philosophy of postcolonial development.
Moderator: Elora Chowdhury is Professor in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Human Rights Minor at UMass Boston. Her teaching and research interests include transnational feminisms, gender violence and human rights advocacy, narrative and film with an emphasis on South Asia. She is the author of Transnationalism Reversed: Women Organizing Against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh (2011), which was awarded the National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldua book prize in 2012; and the co-edited volumes (with Liz Philipose) Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism and Transnational Solidarity (2016), Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Rights: History, Politics, Practice (with Rajini Srikanth, 2018), and the recently published anthology, South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters (with Esha Niyogi De, 2020).
ABOUT FEMINISMS UNBOUND
This Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS) initiative, Feminisms Unbound, is an annual event series featuring debates that focus on feminist concerns, theories, and practices in this contemporary moment. This series is intended to foster conversations and community among Boston-area feminist intellectuals and activists. The series, in its open configuration, endeavors to allow the greatest measure of engagement across multiple disciplinary trajectories, and a full array of feminist investments.
The event organizers, who are also visiting scholars with the GCWS this year, are Elora Chowdhury (Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston), Faith Smith (Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English at Brandeis University), and Kareem Khubchandani (Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor in theDepartment of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and the Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Tufts University). have programmed the events in this series.