Gender and Global Justice: New Directions - 21st and 22nd May 2015

Gender and Global Justice: New Directions is a two-day conference to be held at the Centre for the Study of Global Ethics, Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham

Draft Program:

21st  May

Heather Widdows (Birmingham) ‘Why beauty matters? Beauty, ethics & justice’

Corwin Aragon (Concordia) ‘Epistemic Oppression:  A Relational Account of Epistemic Oppression’

Leif Wenar (King’s College London) ‘The Oil Curse and Women’

Sarah Clark Miller (Penn State) ‘The Normative Implications of Transnational Sexual Violence for Global Gender Justice’

Elisabetta Aurino (Kings College London) ‘Gender bias in dietary diversity in the lifecourse of children and adolescents in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, India’

Nicola Jones (Overseas Development Institute) 'Rethinking the 'Maid Trade': Experiences of Ethiopian adolescent domestic workers in the Middle East'

Public Discussion: 

In 1995, at the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the member states of the United Nations agreed to the most progressive platform to date regarding commitments to secure gender equality.  20 years on, it is a time of reflection on both progress that has been made and persistent inequalities that remain.  This public forum aims to assess the state of play in contemporary struggles for women's rights and gender equality, and to discuss priorities for public action in the next two decades.  The panellists will present their views, and then engage in a wide ranging question and answer session with opportunities for audience participation.

Panelists: Heather Widdows, John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics, University of Birmingham; Nicola Jones, Overseas Development Institute; Rhouba Mhaissen,  Founder and Director, SAWA for Development and Aid, SOAS; Bijayalaxmi Nanda, University of Delhi

22 May

Alison Jaggar (Colorado/Birmingham) ‘Other worlds are possible—but which are gender just?’

Noa Nagardi (Leeds) ‘Patriarchal structures and the duty to not harm’

Monique Deveaux (Guelph) ‘Is the cross-border trade in human eggs exploitative?’

Sheelagh McGuinness (Birmingham) TBC

Angie Pepper (York) ‘Global Gender Justice: An Ethics of Care or Cosmopolitanism’

Christine Bratu (Munich) ‘Adaptive Preferences and Deformed Desires’

Bijayalaxmi Nanda (Delhi) ‘Sex Selective Abortion and State in India: Dilemmas of Gender Justice’

To register, please email Scott Wisor at s.l.wisor@bham.ac.uk<mailto:s.l.wisor@bham.ac.uk.

Information and accommodation, location, and final program times will be provided on registering.

Please note you can register for the evening public event on the 21st without attending the full conference.

Changing Understandings of Body Image

This post is by Heather Widdows, who reports on the first workshop of the BeautyDemands network. 

The workshop took place earlier this month at Warwick University. It considered changing body image and looked at how ‘normal’, ‘healthy’ and ‘perfect’ function as concepts in the beauty debate. For instance, how they function as people perceive themselves and others in terms of what is normal and beautiful, and in terms of what women and girls (and to a lesser extent men) feel is expected of them. 

The papers given covered a wide range of topics, including, on choice, on revenge porn, on ‘tanorexia’, on skin-lightening, on feminism and beauty, on cosmetic surgery scandals, and from very different perfectives including, law, psychology, sociology, philosophy and critical theory. 

These were the types of issues which were discussed were:

• Whether and how choice or consent is relevant in the debate, for instance, can one ‘freely’ consent to cosmetic procedures or does social construction reduce the very possibility of choice. 
• The extent to which such ‘requirements’ are more demanding than in previous generations and over time. 
• The connection between these debates and previous feminist debates and the need to return to older discussions. 
• The relationship between the philosophical debate and the law and policy debates and how to create not only dialogue between but to use the different debates in ways which might be useful to inform policy and practice intervention. 
• Possible pathways to regulation in areas which are little regulated. 
• The relationship between health, beauty, sexual attractiveness and identity. 

Professor Heather Widdows to Speak at Two Events - 21st and 22nd November 2014

One of our own professors, Professor Heather Widdows, will be speaking at two events this weekend. The first on global health and the second on her new project 'Perfect Me!' which considers the dominant beauty ideal, its demands and implications.



Her first talk is on Friday as part of a conference organised in Birmingham's Law School by the Centre for Health Law, Science and Policy, in response to a presentation entitled Global Health Law, by Larry Gostin. Heather's talk is titled, ‘Global health justice and the right to health’. And in it she reflects on whether Larry’s broadly communal vision of global health justice is well served by making the right to health central to his project. She considers some of the reasons why rights-talk might be problematic in the context of health justice; namely, structurally, rights are individual and state-centric and politically they are oppositional and better suited to single-issue campaigns. She will suggest that stripping rights of their individualist assumptions is difficult, and perhaps impossible, and hence alternative approaches, such as those Larry endorses, based on public goods and/or security might deliver much, perhaps most, global health goods, while avoiding the problems of rights-talk.

Details of the conference can be found here:

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/law/events/2014/conference-global-health-law.aspx


You might also be interested in hearing Larry speak on ‘Ebloa: Towards an International Health Systems Fund’. This is a public lecture on Friday 21st November (5.30-7.30) – all are very welcome.

To register visit:

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/law/events/2014/ebola-gostin.aspx

 
Heather's second talk is on Saturday in London at Conway Hall in London. Her talk about beauty and happiness, is entitled, ‘More Perfect, More Happy?’. Here she will  consider whether and in what ways appearance and body image – being perfect – is connected to happiness. A current prevalent assumption is that those who are more perfect will be happier. Many women (and men) judge themselves and others on how much they ‘fit’ the dominant ideal, on how perfect they are, and their sense of self often follows from this. That being perfect connects to being happy is often assumed: ‘if I’m thinner, prettier, sexier s/he’ll love me more’ or ‘if I was ten pounds lighter, I’d be happier with myself and my life would go better’. This talk is part of her wider project on beauty and research for the book she is currently writing called ‘Perfect Me!’ (for Princeton University Press). The other two speakers are very impressive: Professor Lord Layard, (co-editor of co-edited the 2012 World Happiness Report), and Professor Elaine Fox (author of Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain).

For more information on this event go to:

https://humanism.org.uk/civi/?page=CiviCRM&q=civicrm/event/info&page=CiviCRM&id=62&snippet=2