Venue: JIAS and Zoom
RSVP on https://forms.gle/v3bPLMS2q1BTYfhh9 to indicate whether you will be attending in-person or online.
Email vanessak@uj.ac.za if you encounter problems.
In this Actuvirtual Symposium (in person and online) we gather together to discuss three recent books: Guerrillas and Combative Mothers: Women and the Armed Struggle in South Africa (UKZNP 2023) by Prof. Siphokazi Magadla; Textures of Terror ~ The Murder of Claudina Isabel Velasquez and Her Father’s Quest for Justice (UCP 2023) by Prof. Victoria Sanford; and Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India (DUP, 2022), by Prof. Srila Roy. The authors will be at JIAS in person to present their respective books, covering histories of political violence against women, women’s resistance against imperial violence, women’s participation in the Pan Africanist Congress and the African National Congress, forced displacement, endless pursuit of justice, depoliticisation of struggles for women’s rights and freedoms, and the shifting terrain of gender and sexual politics worldwide.
Speakers:
Siphokazi Magadla is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University. She teaches and researches on war and militarism in Africa; armed struggle in South Africa; women and South African foreign policy; and African feminisms, gender and citizenship. She is the author of the book ‘Guerrillas and Combative Mothers: Women and the Armed Struggle in South Africa’ (UKZN Press, 2023). She is the co-editor of the Journal Special Issue Thirty years of Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Revisiting Ifi Amadiume’s questions on gender, sex and political economy (2021) in the Journal of Contemporary African Studies. She serves on the editorial boards of the International Feminist Journal of Politics and the African Journal of Conflict Resolution. She is an academic mentor of the Social Science Research Council’s Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa Fellowship and the Harry Frank Guggenheim African Fellows program. She was awarded the Rhodes University Vice Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2018. She served in the High-Level Review Panel of the State Security Agency.
Victoria Sanford is Professor of Anthropology and Founding Director of the Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies at Lehman College. She is a member of the Anthropology Doctoral Faculty at the Graduate Center and an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity, City University of New York. She holds a doctorate in Anthropology from Stanford University where she studied International Human Rights Law and Immigration Law at Stanford Law School. She was a Bunting Peace Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University.
She is the author of Textures of Terror: The Murder of Claudina Isabel Velasquez and Her Father’s Quest for Justice (University of California 2023). She is also author of Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (Palgrave Macmillan 2003), Violencia y Genocidio en Guatemala (FyG Editores 2003), Guatemala: Del Genocidio al Feminicidio (FyG Editores 2008), La Masacre de Panzos: Etnicidad, Tierra y Violencia en Guatemala (FyG Editores 2009), Guatemala: Violencia Sexual y Genocidio (FyG Editores 2020 with Sofia Duyos Alvarez & Kathleen Dill) and co-author of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation’s report to the Commission for Historical Clarification (the Guatemalan truth commission). She is co-editor (with Katerina Stefatos and Cecilia Salvi) of Gender Violence in Peace and War ~ States of Complicity (Rutgers University Press 2016). She is also co-editor (with Asale Angel Ajani) of Engaged Observer: Anthropology, Advocacy and Activism (Rutgers University Press 2008).
Srila Roy is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Her long-standing research and teaching expertise is in the area of transnational feminist studies. Her latest books are the co-edited, Intimacy and Injury: in the wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa (Manchester University Press, 2022) and the sole-authored, Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India (Duke University Press, 2022). She is a co-editor of the journal, Feminist Theory, and Associate Editor of Sociology Compass.
Fazil Moradi is visiting associate professor at Faculty of Humanities, Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg (JIAS-US); associate researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences; and affiliated scholar at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes against Humanity at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, Graduate Center—CUNY. He is actively involved in collaborative research with medical scientists at the University of Gothenburg, focusing on the long-term effects of chemical weapons, and convenes the Actuvirtual Symposium at JIAS. Moradi is the editor of Memory and Genocide: On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation (co-ed. By M. Six-Hohenbalken and R. Buchenhorst, Routledge 2017); author of Being Human: Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq (Rutgers University Press, January 2024) and editor of In Search of Political Futures: Engaging Mahmood Mamdani’s Neither Settler Nor Native (Special Issue in Anthropological Theory, forthcoming 2023). His scholarly contributions also appear in Public Culture(2022); Palgrave Macmillan(2022); Critical Arts(2021); British Medical Journal(2020);Praesens Verlag(2020); Critical Studies(2019); PLOS ONE (2019); Routledge (2017) Rutgers University Press (2016); Journal of Higher Education in Africa (2010).