International Feminist Journal of Politics

2022 Conference program

International Feminist Journal of Politics - Asian Center for Women’s Studies
Ewha Womans University
Hybrid Conference
South Korea, July 21-23, 2022

Remapping the feminist global: A multi-vocal, multi-located conversation


This multi-location hybrid conference, Remapping the feminist global is co-convened by International Feminist Journal of Politics and Asian Center for Women’s Studies, Ewha Womans University. The main conference will be based in Seoul, Korea, while our Pacific and Southeast Asia regional hubs are based in Australia and the Philippines respectively.

Feminism(s) – like other academic knowledge and global movements – bear the effects of historic and new permutations of Eurocentrism, colonialism and imperialism that continue to shape not only feminism but the global world we inhabit and seek to change. This year, the conference turns to Asia as a geographic location and imaginary that offers an important anchoring for global feminist conversations to move beyond the current hegemonic hold of the West and the (imperial) nation-state system that has pre-determined how feminism becomes a salient political and academic discourse. We seek urgently needed collective reflections on emerging hierarchies not only between West and non-West but as the focus of this call for conversation, the hierarchies and relations in and between ‘the non-West’. More than ever, feminist scholars, editors, policymakers, practitioners, activists and teachers need to come together to exchange ideas and co-create transnational and/or global feminist futures by mending broken linkages. This is an age-old conundrum that has riddled feminist inroads into institutions and public spaces. In convening the conference, we hope to cultivate more satisfactory redress and connections in the wake of greater separate and parallel developments in feminist research in siloes, global anti-feminist backlash and polarization of politics.

The set of questions animating this conference is: How do feminists across regions and locations speak and share ideas when the work cannot wait for academic feminists, when the worlds we live in and work to change do not wait and cannot wait for academic conventions to catch up? These questions are not discrete or exclusive. We encourage and expect work where multiple inquiries/ conditions/ identities/ experiences intersect and/or collide. We believe that feminists working in universities as organic intellectuals and teachers for change demands radical epistemic and methodological moves to keep true. In this spirit, we invite critical and creative discussions that expand and better locate ‘academic research’, ‘the university’ and ‘scholarship’ with artists, poets, activists, and policy practitioners across regions and locations. We believe engendering new, surprising conversations and encounters that would otherwise not happen should be the main way we think about inter-institutional, and interdisciplinary collaboration across the activist-academia divide and locations.

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

Conference timetable


The online registration is now closed, but on-site registration on the days of the conference is still possible for in person participants. Registration Fee: 30,000won (Student 15,000won).

Aims and Themes

As part of the Remapping the feminist global: A multi-vocal, multi-located conversation conference, a joint special issue is planned by the two conference convening institutions, IFJP and the ACWS which hosts the journal, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies. An open call for papers will be announced in early 2023.

This conference recognizes Asia is plural, requiring inter-Asian exchanges, and further, that the global world requires more careful remapping and engagement via and from Asia. With inter-Asia/plural Asias at the center, the conference also seeks to explore the global through interregional south-south connections such as Afro-Asia and Pacific-Indigenous-Asia. The gathering also seeks to remap global feminism through rethinking disciplinary and academic categories of knowledge production that marginalize feminist visions, bodies, connections and modes of politics and knowing.

Centering Asia as a way of disrupting hegemonic discourses requires a reckoning with race, racialization and the dynamics of gender discourses that are shaped by western and colonial influences. We aim to gain deeper understanding of how issues of race, gender and racialization are conceptualized and entwined, how they manifest, and what meanings they carry especially when using terminologies developed and spread from imperial spaces. We hope to stimulate scholarly debates that think through implications of these alternate discourses in light of the urgent need to dissect ramifications of racial, ethnic and gendered discriminations particularly when examined from Asian and postcolonial settings. Main conference themes include:

Postcolonial and non-western feminist theories and practices

  • methods and theories on remapping the feminist global through Asia and/or other locations

  • methods for theorizing the intimate, aesthetics and/or the non-

  • military colonialism and neocolonialism

  • empires and imperialism

  • south-south relations and internationalisms

Feminist politics and policy

  • feminist perspectives on humanitarianism and human rights

  • discourses and practices to tackle gendered/sexualized violence

  • hate crime, affect, and activisms

  • activism and in-between spaces as sites of democratization

  • migration and displacement

Race, racialization and gender

  • racialization and racial hierarchy in Asia

  • intersectional discrimination, anti-multiculturalism and activism

  • gendered and racialized social policies and institutions

  • gendered and racialized experiences of the Covid19 pandemic

  • queer perspectives on race and racial issues

View pre-conference event: A conversation of Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa's book and life work

View program of Opening Plenary ConversatioN

View program of CLOSING Plenary Conversation


Conference Information

Format

This year’s conference is a fully hybrid conference with in-person proceedings in Seoul hosted by the Asian Center for Women’s Studies, Ewha Womans University. Regional Pacific and Southeast Asia hubs will also hold plenary sessions and regional gatherings on Day 3, with in-person events if they can be safely held. More information on hub activities will be announced when the preliminary programme is released in May. Those who wish to participate in the conference through the regional hubs will have to register for the main conference and also register separately with the respective hubs. All sessions will be livestreamed, allow online participation and allow mixed in-person and online participation for all three conference days. Some panels may be fully virtual, and these sessions may take place outside the in-person/hybrid conference time slots, and allow accommodation of timezone needs.

Hub Information

More Hub information will be updated shortly, please check back again in mid-May.

Southeast Asian (SEA) Hub

Convened by Primitivo III Ragandang, Assistant Professor, Mindanao State University-Iligan, Convenor, Seeds for Mindanao's Advocacy and Youth Leadership, PhD Candidate, The Australian National University

The Southeast Asian (SEA) Hub organizes two plenary panels. Programme here.

The SEA Hub highlights experiences, lessons, and trajectories of the women’s movement in Southeast Asia. Exploring the women’s movement will likewise examine the state of historically marginalized groups, including youths and LGBTQ. Women, youths, and LGBTQ have shared histories of being in the margins.

The hub hopes to discuss the following questions: What is the women’s rights movement trajectory in Southeast Asia? How do women’s experiences of inclusion relate to the struggle for inclusion in youths and LGBTQ groups? How do civil society and government institutions coalesce in advancing the narratives of inclusion? And finally, how do women contribute to addressing social issues, including post-conflict reconstruction, peacebuilding, and human rights?

With these questions, the SEA Hub invites scholars, academics, policymakers, and practitioners to submit individual papers, panels, or Roundtable Discussions. The hub’s deadline for submission is the 5th of June. Please note, participants who wish to present as part of the SEA Hub and participate in its one day location-based programming must register using two links: the general IFJP conference registration link (see below), and the SEA Hub link.

The SEA hub will run on the 3rd day of the conference, 23 July 2022. Enumerated below are the confirmed panels, roundtable discussions, and mentoring workshops for early career researchers. The session will be via Zoom and will start at 9 am Philippine time and end at 5 pm Philippine time. The confirmed sessions are as follows:

  1. Advancing women's rights in the Philippines: structures, trajectories, and challenges

  2. Between youths and women: trends and intersections of inclusion

  3. Women in culture and the arts: examples from Mindanao

  4. Women in civil society and peace work in Mindanao

  5. Gender and Development (GAD) on the ground: best-practice sharing

  6. Writing and publishing workshop for early career researchers

For questions, feel free to email: Prime Ragandang, primitivo.ragandang@anu.edu.au and shine choi, S.Choi1@massey.ac.nz

Oceania Hub Plenary

General Information about Conference Proceedings

Length of Sessions: All general sessions are 100 minutes long (1hr 40mins). Session convenors are free to structure their respective sessions as they see fit.

Paper Presentations: Each paper presenter has 15-20 minutes to present their work, followed by 20 minutes discussion/Q&A led by the moderator unless the session convenor or moderator communicates more specific instructions in advance. There is no centralised conference paper collection process. The session moderator who is functioning as the chair and discussant will be in touch with the presenters to circulate the papers among the panelists in advance.

Chair/Discussant Role: The session moderator will function as both the chair and the discussant in this year’s conference. It is the responsibility of the moderator to contact the paper presenters in advance (ideally two weeks before the conference), to circulate the working papers among the panellists. Email addresses of colleagues are found in the preliminary programme.

Registration Information

The preliminary programme is available here. All presenters will have to register by 10 June at the latest to remain in the programme. Conference registration will remain open for the duration of the conference for non-presenting participants.

If you need a travel stipend and have expressed this need in your submission, we will be in touch by 25 May for those who have been selected for funding. Please note that we are not able to fund the full cost of international travel and the stipend is likely to only help offset your expenses. If you do not hear from us, this is because we only have limited funds, and hope you can still participate virtually. If you need a stipend but have not expressed this need during submission, please email Khushi at the earliest at khushi.singhrathore@gmail.com

Registration Fee

The registration fee bands, including the fee waiver, is administered as an honesty system. Please select the appropriate band of fee for your circumstance.

Note: all transactions will be processed in New Zealand Dollars (amount charged in parenthesis)

  • 100 USD (145 NZD) fully employed academic

  • 50 USD (75 NZD) presenting student / under employed / scholar from the global south

  • 30 USD (45 NZD) non-presenting general public

  • 15 USD (22 NZD) non-presenting student

  • 0 fee waiver ((please use the Fee Waiver Registration form)

  • optional: Support a fellow scholar. We are accepting an open amount donation to make the conference as widely accessible and equitable.

Additional Registration Instructions

For the mode of participation, choose virtual if you are participating virtually regardless of whether your panel/paper is in a hybrid mode. If you are planning to attend the conference from one of the regional hubs, please also select virtual, and make sure you also register via the respective hubs.

Getting to the Conference

In 1975, Ewha Womans University launched one of the most exciting projects, the first Women's Studies Research Project, conducted by a team of male and female professors from different fields of discipline. Since 1990, the department has also offered Ph.D. degree courses. In 1995, Ewha Womans University strengthened its commitment to lead the institutionalization of gender/women’s studies in Asia by establishing the Asian Center for Women’s Studies. Since its establishment, ACWS has become an international champion in promoting and sustaining gender/women’s studies in Korea and the rest of Asia.

Visas

If you are attending the conference in Seoul and are not based in the country, you might need a visa or come through the visa exemption scheme. Check https://www.visa.go.kr/openPage.do?LLANG=EN&MENU_ID=10105; https://www.visa.go.kr/openPage.do?MENU_ID=1010201 for further details)

Accomodation

All the hotels listed below are near the conference venue (Ewha Womans University), but you still need to use public transportation, taxis etc.

Letter of Invitation

If you need a letter of invitation confirming acceptance on the program for visa and other official purposes, please email Khushi Singh Rathore khushi.singhrathore@gmail.com and we will make it available at the earliest.

Sightseeing in Seoul

Organizing Committee

  • shine choi, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand

  • Bina D’Costa, Australian National University, Australia

  • Ji young Jung, Ewha Womans University, Korea

  • Seo Yeon Park, Ewha Womans University, Korea

  • Swati Parashar, Gothenburg University, Sweden

  • Khushi Singh Rathore, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

  • Farrah Sheikh, Keimyung University, Korea

  • Ji Eun Kim, Ewha Womans University, Korea

Further questions? For Korea based questions, please email Seo Yeon at acwsewha@ewha.ac.kr, and for the rest, Khushi Singh Rathore at khushi.singhrathore@gmail.com

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