Posted by C3W Admin on April 9 2024
This seminar series aims to gather academics exploring women’s experiences —activisms, demands, and negotiations— and gender-related systemic transformations —health cultures, political participation, state-building, and development innovations— after WWII.
As part of the Connecting Three Worlds project, we focus particularly on the global tensions created by the Cold War, recognising that this period’s “East-West rivalry” partially contributed to the transformation of “women’s issues” political agendas around the world (Molyneux, 2001). The seminar considers the need to explore women-focused agendas, gender-based discussions and feminist perspectives about the health cultures produced by socialism and the impact of socialist internationalism in co-producing global health in the 20th century (Vargha et al., 2020).
The seminar series attempts to explore how leftist movements, initiatives, discourses, and practices contributed to opening spaces for gender-related transformations worldwide. As explained by Ghodsee (2018), “women’s committees in all socialist countries focused more on expanding state entitlements for women and families than on trying to challenge patriarchal culture in the home” (p. 23). Nonetheless, these dynamics contributed to global transformations. In that sense, this series propose to discuss what are the legacies that could be considered direct, indirect or unexpected consequences of this “expanding state entitlements for women and families” (Ghodsee 2018, p. 23).
For these online conversations, participants are asked —but not limited— to consider questions like how the practice of expanding state entitlements for women and families in socialist states resonated in the world? How these practices and discourses intersect with race and class in what now is being called “the Global South”? How do these practices and discourses challenge, transform, intersect or overlap with agendas coming from international organisations, global charities or the US government?
