Gender and Practice Study Group

The next meeting is to be confirmed.  Watch this space for details!

Where do we stand?
How can the development community navigate current pressures to deliver development for women?

Date: 3 November 2011 
9.00-1.30, Amnesty’s Human Rights Action Centre in London

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Presentations

Feminism and the organised subjectivity of change
Helen Dixon

The corporate sector and development: How are development INGOs in UK relating to the corporate sector?

The ascendency of gender up the development agenda is a sure win for women’s rights advocates, but is our cause being championed in the way we intended? How well do dominant development approaches reflect realities for women on the ground and respond to what women themselves would like to see? And how can we – as UK based practitioners, academics, students and activists – be more vocal in our efforts to shape a gender agenda that is genuinely responsive to the challenges and complexities of women’s lives and struggles?

This meeting was designed to enable development practitioners, students, academics and activists to:
• look critically at dominant approaches to gender equality and women’s rights in the current aid
environment;
• better understand how these approaches fit – or clash – with realities for women on the ground and
what impacts they are having on the practice of women’s organisations in the global south;
• share frustrations, pressures and constraints to working on gender in the current aid environment,
and reflect on how to pursue a more critical approach in our work on gender to respond to the
concerns of women’s rights NGOs and work more effectively in partnership with them.

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’A perfect storm: what happens to women in the context of the perverse incentives of development aid funding’

A one-day workshop convened by the DSA gender policy study group and ODID

Date: February 5th 2010
Oxford University 

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Programme details

Contacts:
Tinawallace90@o2.co.uk or
Fenella.porter@btinternet.com

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'What makes a difference for women experiencing violence? A critical study of different approaches to tackling violence against women across the global south.'

Date: November 18th 2009
Friend's Meeting House, Central London
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'Feminist implications of the Global Financial Crisis'

Date: 31st March 2009

This meeting was successfully held on 31st March 2009 and thanks to all who came, and especially the excellent speakers: Deniz Kandyotti, Nikki van der Gaag, Pauline Wilson, Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson.

We need to think how best to build on this work and follow it up later in the year, perhaps with a special focus on lobbying/influencing work around setting the agendas for debates on women's rights and the impact of the crisis on gender inequality and women's position. meanwhile, thanks to all who made this an exciting meeting of practiitioners, activists and academics (and some people are I know all three!)

Papers from the meeting

Overview - T. Wallace

Discussion, Feedback and Action Points - T. Wallace

From Feminism to Gender Studies - D. Kandyotti

Gender Equality and the Economic Crisis (presentation) - D. Elson

Impact of Global Financial Crisis on Girls and Young Women - N. van der Gaag

The Food Crisis: From Strategy to Reality (presentation) P. Wilson

10 points for Tracking the Impact of the Financial Crisis on Women - D. Elson


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'Untangling the Knots: Revisioning Feminist Engagement with Development'

Date: Tuesday February 5th, 2009

The Friends Meeting House, London
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The drive to mainstream gender and make it acceptable to the bureaucracies of aid has ripped the heart of the commitment to promote women's rights and enable women to change their position in society that led feminists to engage with development. The political project of women mobilizing for change and empowering themselves seems to have got lost along the way. "Gender" became a password, then a catchword, and - some would say - it's now become a hollow buzzword, robbed of its political and analytical bite. And "feminism" fell out of view, a term considered too harsh and too confrontational by some, and too much of a throwback by others. So where are we now? Is it time to revive the F-word and rehabilitate the G-word and find a way to put both to use to further the struggle for justice and equality for all in an ever more unequal and violent world? What would it take to untangle the knots and revitalise a gender agenda that's run adrift?

An exciting discussion about future directions for feminist engagement with development and hear from a diversity of speakers, including Henrietta Moore from the LSE, Oxfam's Jo Rowlands, Zimbabwean feminist digital artist Tessa Lewin and a number of others working across the academy-policy-practice interface. Speakers will open a debate to be pursued in intimate small group discussions and plenary, as part of a process aimed at the creation of a space to imagine alternatives and think to the future.

The workshop was convened by Andrea Cornwall of IDS and Tina Wallace, Convenor of the DSA Study Group on Gender, Policy and Development Practice.
 
To keep discussions intimate and focused, the workshop had limited places.