National Council for Research on Women

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Fall 2003 Fellows

Ratna Kapur is the Director of the Feminist Legal Research Centre in New Delhi, India, which produces scholarly work, grounded in a post-colonial feminist perspective, on human rights issues, such as freedom of speech, religion and equality. She has served as a visiting faculty member at New York University Law School, the City University of New York Law School, Drake Law School, Dalhousie Law School, the National Law of India University, and Georgetown University Law Center. In March 2002, she served as a faculty member for the two-week Sexuality and Rights Institute funded by the Ford and MacArthur Foundations. Kapur has served as Coordinator of the Asia-Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development. She has also held Fellow ships from the Ford Foundation to conduct research on migration and women's rights, and on law reform in the area of women's human rights with a focus on trafficking, prostitution, and HIV. She has received grants from the Global Foundation for Women to conduct research on gender and the religious right, and on law reform in the area of women's rights. Her publications include "Un-veiling Women's Rights in the 'War on Terror'” in a special issue of the Journal on Gender, Law and Policy (Summer 2002), and "Post-colonial Exotic Disruptions: Legal Narratives on Culture, Sex and Nation in India,” in the Journal of Gender and Law (2001).

Kapur earned an L.L.M from Harvard Law School, a Masters degree and a BA in law from Cambridge University, and a BA from the University of Delhi in history. While a Fellow in the Program, Ms Kapur's project will be: "The Legal Regulation of Trafficking, Migration and Terrorism: Implications for Security and the Right to Mobility of the Transnational Subaltern Subject." She will look at the role of law, especially international law, in regulating cross-border movements and the impact of these regulations on women's security. She sees law as a site of discursive struggle where different visions of the world are fought out, and where meanings of gender, culture and sexuality are constructed.

Uma Narayan is the Director of Women's Studies and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College, where she instructs courses on women, work and globalization; feminist theory, social change, rights theory and human rights, and social justice and the state. Narayan received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Rutgers University in 1990, her MA from Poona University in India, and her BA from Bombay University in India. Her publications include: Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions and Third World Feminism (Routledge, 1997); Reconstructing Political Theory: Feminist Perspectives (co-edited with Mary L. Shanley, Polity Press and Penn State Press, 1997); and "Combining Justice with Development: Rethinking rights and responsibilities in the context of world hunger and poverty," with Radhika Balakrishnan, in World Hunger and Moral Obligation (edited by William Aiken and Hugh LaFollette, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1996).

Narayan's project during the Fellowship will focus on “Informal Sector Work and Economic Security: Women, Globalization and Economic Human Rights." Narayan will look at how women's disproportionate relegation to the informal sector results from colonial capitalist development and from contemporary aspects of economic globalization. She will explore how informal sector work reinforces and transforms gender relationships and affects women's security and its implications for feminist understandings of women's agency and citizenship.

Annick T.R. Wibben, a citizen of Germany, is a Watson Fellow and Co-investigator for the Information Technology, War and Peace Project in the Global Security Program at the Watson Institute, Brown University [www.infopeace.org]. She has taught a senior seminar at Brown on “Feminist Perspectives on Security/Global Violence” and has participated in an interdisciplinary seminar on “Technology and Representation” at the Pembroke Center. Wibben has held Fellowships from the UK Economic and Social Research Council and the University of Wales, and has been select ed to participate in the Women in International Security Summer Symposium and a Graduate Conference on “Regional Security in a Global Context” funded by the MacArthur Foundation. She received her PhD in International Politics from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth with a dissertation on “Security Narratives in International Relations and the Events of September 11, 2001: A Feminist Study.” She also holds a Masters in International Relations and European Studies from the International School of Social Sciences at the University of Tampere in Finland as well as a degree in economics from the University of Hamburg, Germany. Her publications include "Whose Meaning(s)? A feminist perspective on the crisis of meaning in International Relations” In: Meaning and International Relations, edited by Peter Mandaville and Andrew Williams, Routledge: 2003 and, most recently, “Feminist International Relations: Old debates and new directions” in the Brown Journal of International Affairs, Winter 2003/2004 (forthcoming). Wibben has presented numerous papers on gender and security, including "The Gendered Subject of Security: Theoretical Implications," "Narrating Security: The Need for a New Plot," and "What does Security Mean Anyway?"

Wibben's project for the Fellowship is: "Human Security Narratives: Formulating an Alternative Concept of Security." She proposes to study the origins and development of human security practices to undertake a conceptual critique and in order to locate spaces for gender sensibility. She also plans to investigate how human security can be an analytically useful tool to critique current security practices.

Marina Malysheva is the Program Coordinator at the International Republican Institute, Moscow, where she oversees their Networking Program for Building a National Coalition of Women NGO Leaders. She has also worked as the Leading Researcher at the Institute for Socio-Economic Studies of Population, Russian Academy of Science, and as the Project Director at the Moscow Center for Gender Studies. She received her PhD in Philosophy from the Russian Academy of Science Institute of Sociology, and her PhD in Economics from the Institute on Socio Economic Studies of Population. In 2002, she served as PI for an eight-month project on “Gender and Globalization” funded by the Soros Foundation and, from 1999 to 2001, worked with a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation on a project entitled “Dissemination of Gender Awareness among Educators, Policymakers, and the Broader Public in Russia.” Dr. Malysheva has participated in expert and consultative groups for the UN Division for the Advancement of Women and the World Bank, among other organizations. Her publications include Women, Migration and the State (in Russian, 2001), “How Do Women Cope with the Feminization of Poverty in Societies in Transition” (in English, 2000), and “Globalization of Gender Inequality as a Factor of Unsustainable Development” (in Russian, 2000).

While a Fellow of the Project, Dr. Malysheva will work on a project entitled Limits and Opportunities of Women’s Integration into the Global Governance. She argues that it will only be through women’s full participation in national and global governance and decision-making that the spread of capital can enable democracy in developing areas. She is also interested in the changing realities of and distinctions between socioeconomic classes in the face of globalized capital, and in examining how this new configuration hinders or opens space for gender equality.

Spring 2004 Fellows

Nira Yuval-Davis is a native of Israel. She is currently Professor of Gender and Ethnic Studies at the University of East London where she is presently engaged in research. She has been a visiting professor at Tel Aviv University, University of Umea in Sweden, Ben Gurion University and the Australian National University. Yuval-Davis holds a PhD from the University of Sussex in Sociology, and an MA in Sociology and a BA in Sociology and Psychology from Hebrew University. She is a founding member of Women Against Fundamentalism. Among her many publications are Women, Citizenship and Difference (edited with P. Werbner, Zed Books, 1999); Gender and Nation, and Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Ethnicity, Race and Class (edited with D. Stasiulis, Sage, 1995).

Her project for the Fellowship is on "Human Security, Feminism and the Politics of belonging of Israeli Feminist Peace Activists". She will examine some of the political and emotional dilemmas and tensions that exist for feminist political activists in Israel who are working against the Israeli occupation and for peace. She will analyze the ways the local, regional and global political economies and ethno religious power relations have constructed personal and political spaces for these women.

Oyewumi Oyewumi, a native of Nigeria, teaches in the Department of Sociology at SUNY, Stony Brook. She was previously Assistant Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. Oyewumi received the Distinguished Book Award of the American Sociological Association in 1998 and was a finalist for the Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association. She has lectured widely and has held a number of distinguished Fellowships, including at the Institute for the Study of Gender in Africa at the University of California at Los Angeles; the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota, and the Institute for the Advanced Study and Research in the African Humanities. Oyewumi has a PhD and MA from the University of California at Berkeley in Sociology, and a BSc in Political Science from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. She served as editor of the publication: African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood, Africa World Press, Trenton, New Jersey, 2003, contributing chapters on "White Women's Burden: The African Woman and Western Feminist Scholarship" and "Alice in Motherland: Reading Alice Walker on Africa and Screening the Color of Black". She is also author of The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Ms Oyewumi has contributed to Signs: "Family Bonds/Conceptual Binds: African Notes on Feminist Epistemologies, vol. 25(1), no. 4 (1), Summer 2000, and "DeConfounding Gender: Feminist Theorizing and Western Culture", vol. 23(1), no.4 (1), Summer 1998. Her article on "Multiculturalism or Multibodism: On the Impossible Intersections of Race and Gender in White Feminist and Black Nationalist Discourses" was published in the Western Journal of Black Studies, vol. 23, no. 3, Fall, 1999.

Her project for the Fellowship will be on "Democracy without Borders: African Experiences, Indigenous Structures and Cultural Forms in the Struggle for Social Justice". She plans to theorize democracy from the histories, social practices, values, experiences and social locations of African women and their potential for self-determination.

Ewa Charkievicz Pluta is presently a lecturer on gender and development at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, Netherlands. Prior to that she was a partner in Tools for Transition where she carried out policy research and coordination of NGO lobbying activities. She has served as the research coordinator on sustainable livelihoods for DAWN and is a member of the World Bank External Gender Consultative Group. She also served with the Central and Eastern European Network for Sustainable Consumption and the Production and the World Information Service on Energy, and ICUN, ANPED Working Group on Changing Consumption and Production Patterns. She has carried out extensive research on Gender and Social Security and Quality of Life in Central and Eastern Europe, on the feasibility of the Fair Wear Code of Conduct in Poland and on the debate on changing consumption patterns. Among her publications are: "Sustainable Development in a Neo-liberal Frame: the analysis of the shift in global governance from the Earth Summit in Rio 1992 to the World Summit for Sustainable Development, 2002"( a report for DAWN); Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development: Towards a Theoretical Synthesis (with Rosi Braidotti, Sabine Hausler and Saskia Wieringa, ZED Books, London, 1994), and Transitions to Sustainable Consumption and Production, Concepts, Policies and Actions ( with contributions from Sander van Bennekom and Alex Young, Shaker Publishing, Maastricht, 2001).

Her project for the Fellowship is on "Barbie Doll as a conceptual device for analyzing the global economy: an inquiry into the effects of neo-liberal modes of competition on social and environmental protection". She proposes to look at the Barbie Doll as a cultural and material product that allows mapping of the impacts of global production and consumption on women, the care economy, and the environment along all nodes of the global product chain. She will examine the psychosocial and environmental costs of the global economy to women and households and to the Global South.