"Sarah is currently working on a book manuscript that explores the growth of the global girls’ rights movement through a transnational network of actors centered in Nairobi and radiating out to places from New York City to Beijing. One of the project’s main arguments is that ideas about “girl power” arose in response to anxieties over growing rates of poverty due to the global economic collapse of the 1970s and Structural Adjustment Programs of the 1980s. Since the late 1970s, girls’ real and imagined sexual suffering has become emphasized in ways that have made the impacts of Structural Adjustment Programs and the global economic collapse appear to be the “natural” results of “African and Asian patriarchy” and a failure to fully utilize girls’ potential, rather than the effects, in part, of tangible economic policymaking and historical contingencies tracing back to colonialism and reinforced during times of economic crisis.
This manuscript is based on two years of full-time oral and archival research, mostly in Nairobi but also in Paris, Washington D.C., and New York City. Sarah’s research was conducted in a mixture of Swahili, French, and English. She draws from sources from non-governmental organizations, international institutions, national governments, think tanks, e-mail list serves, poetry, and music."
The junior research group Food for Justice examines normative questions of inequalities and justice, rights and democracy that arise in disputes surrounding the question “how are we going to feed the world?” There is a growing politicisation of the production, distribution and consumption of food, because food relations are structured by economic, social, political, cultural and environmental inequalities. Increasingly, citizens perceive the global food system as part of the historical causes of the ecological crisis and the persisting hunger in the world. Although reasons for that are long known (the use of food for profit, the gap between production and consumption, conflicts over land and water, exploitative labour relations, the energy matrix and waste generation), research on food security and bioeconomy tend to rely on the same, searching for technological fixes to a profit-oriented model exploiting living matter.
What is needed to deepen the debate is more knowledge about which food system citizens desire, which solutions are already there that address social concerns and how to redirect public policies towards a fair and sustainable food system. Combining theoretical perspectives on global inequalities with social movement research on food justice, Food for Justice will look at challenges and solutions both in Europe (with focus on Germany) and in Latin America (focusing on Brazil). On the one hand, major normative challenges will be identified in case studies of social mobilisation and critical consumption over food. On the other hand, the research will map and analyse social and political innovations such as agroecology and alternative food networks, as devised by civil society groups and public policies to achieve food security. In short, Food for Justice is about achieving global food security in a fair and ecological way. It looks into social mobilization targeted at injustices in the food system and into social and political innovations that address inequalities undermining food security such as class, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality.
Gender, urban space, sport, amateur football, Brazil
Short description
Sport is an important field for negotiating social conflicts and power struggles, including gender issues. Due to the visibility of many sports, changes in gender relations can effect the gender relations of a society. In the case of football, one of the most popular sports in the world, the urban space is the main scene for the negotiating processes.
In my PhD project I will analyze the negotiation processes between women and men in amateur football in the Brazilian metropolis Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and the access of women to amateur football structures.
Football plays an important role in the Brazilian society. Women and girls have been discriminated against as amateur football players in Brazil for a long time. Therefore, I will investigate how women currently gain access to amateur football structures in the Brazilian metropolis, how they negotiate their participation, and what part sports related organizations and public institutions take. I aim to draw conclusions on the positioning of women in the urban sports space in both cities as well as in the Brazilian society.
In order to approach this subject, I will examine the current literature, and do both archival research and intensive fieldwork in Brazil. Through participative observations and interviews, I will identify the practices, dynamics, structures and the different players in the women’s amateur football field in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The presence and the participation of women in the urban sport space and the concrete negotiating processes related to gender are at the center of my analysis. Additionally, I will consider the political framework in both cities as it relates to sports and will also examine the origins of potential inequalities.
Former cultural anthropological and sociological research on female and amateur football did not consider the important social significance of football in the Brazilian context. New dynamics in Brazilian women’s amateur football also make it an important social issue. Moreover, the Olympic Games in 2016 in Rio de Janeiro raise new questions about sports politics and gender inequalities that I will consider in my project.
John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies
Institute/Seminar
Institute of Islamic Studies
Field/Area of work
Graduate School of North American Studies
Subject group
Law, Economics and Social Sciences
Start
2016
Status
Ongoing
Short description
For more than half a century, postmodernism has been the dominant style in cultural production and criticism with its critical instances and subversive intents. It went from being a cultural variant with its deconstruction of notions of Truth, subjectivity, and humanism and destabilization of grand narratives to becoming a defining criteria of the post-war era. Skepticism towards language, constant questioning of the mechanisms of meaning-making and meaning-reception, and decentering of the self, have marked most of the literature produced in the sixties until the late eighties. Yet with the verge of the 1990s, many academic debates questioning postmodernism as a cultural practice started to gain force and to gradually announce its waning in favor of something still-undiscovered, yet new and existent.
A revivalism in the concepts of the human, self, community, affect found their way in most contemporary north American fiction. This project draws primarily on recently-published works by contemporary women writers: The Heart Goes Last and The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood, Gilead and Home by Marilynne Robinson, A Visit From Goon Squad by Jennifer Eager and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. My choice of these narratives is based on their common thematic concerns since they all share relatively close conception of the self, subjectivity and agency. These texts are, in fact penchant for re-investigating the value of the traditional and familial in addition to the social connections, of depicting the subject presence and challenges in contemporary contexts. They attempt at slowing down the pace of narrative in a hectic and culturally crowded time of short life circuits and to revive our pleasure in fiction as a cultural form drawing our attention to the provisional nature of all our surroundings. This choice intends also to broaden our circle of reference when it comes to contemporary fiction and to add to the usually referred to list of David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon.
