Catherine Eschle is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Her work looks broadly at feminism and social movement politics: she is interested in the theory and practice of Western feminism, on the one hand, and in the gender politics and role of feminism in a range of contemporary movements, on the other. With a recurrent focus on transnational organising and solidarity relationships, and on how activists rework political concepts and theories, her work bridges critical International Relations, political theory, gender studies and sociological social movement studies. With Bice Maiguashca, she has published extensively on feminism in the global justice movement and more broadly on feminist activism in and against neoliberalism. In recent years, she has pursued twin projects on the feminist politics of protest camps and on feminist resistance to the global nuclear order. She was co-editor of International Feminist journal of Politics, 2006-2011, and active on the executive committee of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies section of the International Studies Association, 2017-2022.
Feminism and Protest Camps: Entanglements, Critiques and Re-Imaginings
ABSTRACT
In this talk, Catherine Eschle will introduce her new edited collection that asks feminist questions of protest camps. An increasingly important social movement tactic, protest camps are set up by activists as a temporary home in spaces that are politically useful, symbolically resonant or otherwise important to a community, in order to facilitate action for specific political ends and often to prefigure an alternative way of life. Encampments can be spaces of radical democratic innovation as well as an integral part of struggles to (re)generate broader democratic institutions and processes. But they can also be sites of anti-democratic violence and marginalisation. Catherine’s groundbreaking new book bridges social movement scholarship and feminist studies, and draws on an array of case studies from around the world, to explore both how gender intersects with other social identities and forms of power to shape protest camp dynamics, and to document feminist mobilisation in mixed-gender and women-only camps. The book helps us see afresh both the limitations and the potential of the protest camp form and points to some important legacies of past involvement in camps for feminist theory and practice. Catherine will speak to these themes, and look through a feminist lens at the fertile, if fractured, relationship of camps to democracy.
DATE: 12:00 - 13:00 May 22nd, 2023 | LOCATION: Building 1467- Room 316
