The workshop is co-organized by the Institute for Gender and Women's Studies at the American University in Cairo.

Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa

This workshop seeks to bring together work that critically examines ways in which gendered subjects negotiate their life-worlds in Middle Eastern, African and South Asia urban landscapes. We welcome papers that address some of the following themes:

Does the city represent a site of personal autonomy and political possibilities for women and/or men ? At different moments public discourse in distinct national urban spaces has produced the city as both site of modern citizen-making and site of corruption/ pollution. How have different classes of men and women in distinct temporalities/ spatialities negotiated these tensions?

What are local grammars of urbanity and rurality? How is the 'rural' configured in the city in both popular and dominant discourses? In what ways are these discourses gendered -- and in what ways do gendered subjects negotiate senses of self/community with or beyond them?

How do women and men map the city differently? In what ways are women's and men’s interaction with various sites, routes and spaces within the city bounded by their gender? What other identities and circumstances allow them to circumvent various boundaries within the urban?

How does class, ethnic and racial boundary-making impact men's and women’s relationship to and experiences of various spaces within the city?

How do urban politics and policies reshape households and communities' relationship to the city? What political space is provided for gendered subjects to resist or renegotiate state sponsored attempts to re-order the urban landscape?

What sorts of different possibilities for women’s and men’s life-worlds do diverse urban models (e.g. megacities, provincial cities, agrarian market towns, pilgrimage cities) provide?

How do geographies of violence map gendered experiences of the city?

Program | Abstracts