2016 Conference

Conference Keynote

ZIllah Eisenstein, "BEING PRESENT 2016: Finding New Feminisms Against Empire"

Opening Presentation

Breny Mendoza, "Decolonial Feminism and the Question of the Decoloniality of Democracy”

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 Decolonizing Knowledges in Feminist World Politics

University of Cincinnati

May 19-21, 2016

LInks:

• Final Program
• Paper Abstracts
• Pre-conference Workshop

 Decolonial feminist thought and praxis seek a de-centering of the West, including its epistemes, institutions, politics, and Westphalian world order, through centering the histories, lands, livelihoods, bodies, thoughts, emotions, and spiritualities of indigenous peoples colonized by white settler states past and present (Simpson 2015) as well as by Western gendered, racialized and heteronormative orders and the “neoliberal imperium.” (Agathangelou and Ling 2009). Latin American decolonial scholars have posited the “coloniality of power” and “gender” (Quijano 2000; Lugones 2010) in which the Eurocentric/non-Eurocentric divide under now global colonial capitalism structures all social, economic, and political relations into relations of domination and constructs the current gender system. Decolonial work in International Relations (IR) has ranged from reconfiguring IR’s origin stories in relation to the history of colonialism (Tickner 2014) and de-centering Eurocentric accounts of state security (Laffey and Weldes 2008) to more feminist- and queer-informed foci on indigeneities, the stateless, and groups, including nations, below and across states, with particular emphasis on decolonizing bodies, identities, and desires (Nayak and Selbin 2010).  Recognizing that white Western women have tended to be the beneficiaries of the coloniality of power, knowledge, and gender and that, as a result, white Western representations of feminism, feminist IR, and transnational feminism require decolonization, IFJP seeks submissions for this special issue, which arises from the Fifth Annual IFJP Conference held at the University of Cincinnati in May 2016 on its theme, that address decolonizing feminist world politics knowledges through any aspect(s) of the following questions:

• What constitutes decolonial feminisms? How are they imagined in different parts of the world?
• What constitutes decolonizing methodologies in feminist world politics and/or transnational feminist inquiry today?
• How do decolonizing projects de-center the state and the human in the Western liberal imaginary and with what implications for IR and feminist IR?
• How are decolonizing projects related to the de-centering of hegemonic masculinities, heteronormativities, homonormativities, and gender normativities? What does it mean to decolonize these de-centering projects?
• How are decolonial, postcolonial, and anti-racist projects (inter)related?
• What does it mean to decolonize feminist security studies?
• What does it mean to decolonize feminist global political economy inquiry?
• What does feminist decolonial inquiry mean for transforming world politics?
• What are decolonial challenges in transnational feminist inquiry?
• How are bodies, emotions, and minds as well as geographies, institutions, and structures colonized and decolonized?
• What are promising decolonizing movements and practices in various parts of the world?
• What are the implications of decolonizing projects for what lives (human and non-human) matter?