Concept Note for Student Seminar on 5th March

WOMEN’S STUDY CENTRE
JESUS AND MARY COLLEGE

ANNUAL STUDENT SEMINAR
Call for Papers


The Women’s Study Centre of Jesus and Mary College is hosting an undergraduate student seminar on 5th March 2020 (Thursday). We welcome papers on the broad theme “Women and Democracy”. 

Interested students should send an abstract of two hundred words (200 words) to jmcwsc@gmail.com by 16th February 2020.

Concept note: An understanding of women’s rights, both at the level of common sense as well as at the level of traditional academic discourses, almost always involves a discussion on how women constitute an integral part of representative democracy. While there is no single foolproof democratic model, it is crucial that political systems and processes acknowledge women as equal stakeholders in the decision-making that affects their lives. A series of socio-cultural, economic, and political structures and factors combine with each other to shape varied experiences of women's participation in the public sphere, and within the personal domain. Therefore, the experiential dimension of democracy has many layers to it. Consequently, it is crucial to problematize the common and usual ways of defining what adequate women's participation vis-à-vis democracy means. By looking at the relationship between women and democracy, through the lens of intersectionality, we hope to arrive at a critical and holistic understanding of women’s experiences. 

Some useful sub-themes include (the list is not exhaustive):

  1. Women and the vote
  2. The personal is political
  3. Legal reforms and modern democracies
  4. Black women and the civil rights movement
  5. Women against Apartheid
  6. Women’s experiences in socialist democracies
  7. Women writers and democratic aspirations
  8. Marginalized sexualities and democratization
  9. Women’s movement against draconian laws 
  10. Minority women in democratic struggles
  11. Women’s question in lower caste movements 
  12. Dalit feminism and the problems of representation
  13. Democracy, dynasty politics and women
  14. Democracies, armed conflicts and women
  15. Women and the question of religious practices in modern democracies

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