Breaking Silos: building solidarities in gender research

As critical scholars and feminist researchers working on issues of gender and sexuality across the universities in London, we have often struggled to organize concerted, collective responses to the many interlocking crises we–and ever more disproportionately, the world–face: rising inequalities, ecological collapse, global desensitization to genocide, racism and xenophobia, forced displacement, right-wing nationalist upsurges, and “anti-gender” backlash. As scholars, we often produce knowledge that is disciplinarily and institutionally confined, which limits our connections to one another as well as our contributions to broader, sustainable social transformation.

The BREAKING SILOS Conference, celebrated as part of LSE Gender’s 30th Anniversary, proposes to create a space of solidarity and collaborative, localized, interdisciplinary knowledge-production that reaches beyond disciplinary and academic boundaries, and creates opportunities for collective learning and collaboration, as we address these mounting challenges. We extend an invitation to students and early-career researchers from all research disciplines in any of the universities in greater London, as well as London-based practitioners, activists and community organizers, to attend the conference on 3 May 2024 at the LSE Campus in Central London - exact location details will be sent to registrants closer to the event.

Programme: 

8.30 - 9.00am: Registration - with tea, coffee, and biscuits (Centre Building 1.05)

9.00 - 9.30am: Opening Remarks from Professor Sumi Madhok and Professor Bingchun Meng

9.30 - 11.00am: Session One (Centre Building 1.03 & 1.04)

• Panel 1A: Decolonizing Solidarities, Imagining Communities - Moderated by Ting-Sian Liu (LSE) 
  • Hannah El-Silimy (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) - At the Borderlines of Activism and Academia: the Limits and Potential of Community-Based Decolonial Feminist Research for Early Career Researchers
  • Kanwal Hameed (University of Exeter) & Esraa Al-Muftah (Qatar University) - Colonialism, Capitalism and Archives in the Gulf
  • Luana Paloma Sacristán (Independent Researcher) - Reimagining Transitional Justice From Abya Yala: A Decolonial Feminist Analysis of ‘Nature as a Victim of Conflict’
• Panel 1B: Breaking the Silence: Survivor-Centered Approaches to Sexual Violence - Moderated by Aynura Akbas (LSE)
  • Francesca Baldwin (University of Reading) - ‘Which Suffering Do You Tell?’: Building Solidarities Amongst Survivors of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence (CRSV)
  • Molly Ackhurst University of (University Greenwich) - Interrogating the Ethics and Risks of a Survivor-Led Feminist Politics
  • Kai Grygier (University of Sussex) - How do childhood sexual abuse survivors experience and resist stigmatisation? A survivor community led conceptualisation
  • Julieta Baker (Brunel University) - Abortion and Sexual Embodiment Across Cultures

11.15am -12.45pm: Session Two (Centre Building 1.03 & 1.04)

• Panel 2A: Digital Drives of Queer Desire: Fugitive Affects & Dangerous Complicities - Moderated by Luma Mantilla Garino (LSE)
  
  • Nikhil Dharmanaj (Cambridge University) - Homonationalist HCI: A Trans-of-Color Critique of Zionist Complicity within Grindr
  • Ekabali Ghosh (SOAS) - Kink and LGBTIQ+ Solidarities in India: a Tapestry of Desire and Resistance
  • Abel Guerra & Limichi Okamoto (LSE) - Death Becomes Them: Metaphorising Grief in (de)humanised Trans Lives
  • Tanvi Kanchan (SOAS) - “Instagram is like a karela”: Transnational digital queer politics and online censorship and surveillance in India
• Panel 2B: Abolition, Borders & Carcerality - Moderated by Lizzie Hobbs (LSE)
  • Anna Monro (LSE) - Criminality Beyond Crime? The Case of California's Three Strikes Law
  • Jaspreet Nijjar (Brunel University) - Female Masculinity and Transgressive Temporality: How Orange is the New Black Recontextualizes Prisoner Agency
  • Radhika Pradhan (LSE) - Home as a Prison: In-home Incarceration of Domestic Violence Survivors through the Legal System in India
  • Aine Bennet (Royal Holloway, University of London) - Exceeding homonationalism? Bisexual+ asylum and undermining bordering

12.45 - 2.00pm: Catered lunch (Centre Building 1.05)

• Digital art piece by Anna Rohmann (Goldsmiths University)
  

2.00 - 3.30pm: Session Three (Centre Building 1.03 & 1.04)

• Panel 3A: Labours of Coping, Caring, and Life-Giving - Moderated by Malena Bastida-Antich (LSE)
  • Carina Uchida (Oxford University) - Doing the Dirty Work: Social Reproductive Labour in Armed Rebel Organization
  • Sophie Legros & Chiara Chiaravoli (LSE) - Diverse motherhood experiences in contexts of violence in Antioquia Colombia
  • Daryn Howland (SOAS) - Reproducing Racial Capitalism: Interrogating Racialized Labour Migration and Social Reproduction in the Arab Gulf
  • Fathima Zehba (University College London) - Empowered Pathways: The Daily Mobility of Underprivileged Women Workers in Urban Space: A Case Study of Kochi, Kerala, India
• WORKSHOP: This is NOT a Book Club: Abolitionist Visions and Collective Organising
  • Led by the Abolitionist Book Club members (Baljit Kaur (she/her), Nadia Buyse (she/her/they/them), Charlotte Fraser (she/her), Katharina Hendrickx (she/her), Joy Stacey (she/her/they/them) & supported by the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies.

3.45 - 5.15pm: Session Four (Centre Building 1.03 & 1.04)

• Panel 4: Feminist Knowledges, Otherwise - Moderated by Senel Wanniarachchi (LSE)
  • Suraiya Asmau Maisutura Banu (SOAS) - Queer Intimacies, Matricentricity and the Home in Northern Nigeria
  • Daniela Meneses (Cambridge University) & Rachel Randall (Queen Mary, University of London) - Creative interventions in the archive: Recuperating photographs of wet-nurses in the Courret Archive
  • Blanca Larraín (Cambridge University) - From #Metoo to the feminist funa in Chile. Online public shaming as a feminist practice for social change: a critical analysis of current feminist movements in LA
  • Phoebe Martin (King’s College London) - The body as methodology in feminist research
• Performance Workshops
  • 15:45 - 16:25: Kinti Orellana Matute (Queen Mary, University of London) - Kari-warmi: an embodied cosmological reflection on ‘gender’
  • 16:25 - 16:35: BREAK
  • 16:35 - 17:15: Lina Ashour (SOAS) - Extra-phenomenal knowing and othered being
    

5.30 - 7.00pm: Evening Roundtable (Wolfson Theatre LG.01, Chen Kin Ku Building)

• Breaking the Silos of Solidarity: Palestinian Liberation and the Commitment to Resistance
  • Speakers: Howie Rechavia-Taylor (LSE); Sarona Bedwan; Akanksha Mehta (Goldsmiths for Palestine); Jasmin Paneswar (Goldsmiths for Palestine)
    
  • Moderator: Alia Amirali (LSE)
  • This roundtable is aimed as an opportunity for our communities to reflect on what we have learnt, personally, collectively and politically, from our varied forms of solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian liberation. In recent months, we have gained a much clearer understanding of the potentials, as well the limitations, of our solidarities with Palestinian people, whether by participating in resistive action within academic spaces, at street protests, in community-based organizations, or through social media. Meanwhile, we continue to witness how, across the world, support for Palestinian resistance is drawing an increasingly hostile--if not altogether violent--response from university administrators; all as many purportedly critical scholars, activists, and politicians stay silent in the sidelines. This roundtable discussion gathers scholars, activists, and organizers who are deeply committed to Palestinian liberation while working in various fields, and seeks to offer our communities a critical space of reflection about our commitments and solidarities with Palestinian resistance.

7.00 - 8.15pm: Reception (8th floor, Chen Kin Ku Building)

• DJ set/performance (titled ‘Black Creative Praxis’) by Christiana (Roni) Ajai-Thomas (she/her)