Gendered Innovations in the Social Sciences

GENDERED INNOVATIONS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

7-9 November, 2016

Lecture Theatre 1, Hedley Bull Building (130)

Convened by Fiona Jenkins, Helen Keane, Marian Sawer, Rebecca Pearse

Australian National University

What impact does women's limited presence in key fields of research have upon our capacity to grapple with social and political change? And if gender is ignored as an analytic category, can the social sciences make a meaningful contribution to understanding or resolving issues of gender inequality in society?

This conference aims to compare the status of gender analysis and feminist research in different social science disciplines and to build persuasive arguments about how and why gender matters for these domains of knowledge. The conference will create a space for reflection about how gender or feminist research has enriched or sharpened the focus of the social sciences. Presenters from across the spectrum of social sciences will presentcase studies,raising epistemological issues and considerations for research practice and the organisation of disciplines. We hope discussions at the conference will take the project of gender equality in the social sciences forward.

Keynote speakers

Laurel Weldon, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Director of the Purdue Policy Research Institute at Purdue University

Catriona Mackenzie, Professor of Philosophy andDirector of the Macquarie University Research Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics

Sylvia Walby OBE, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, UNESCO Chair in Gender Research, Director, Violence and Society UNESCO Centre, Lancaster University

Paul Dalziel,Professor of Economics andDeputy Director of theAgribusiness and Economics Research Unit, Lincoln University, New Zealand

SCHEDULE

Monday 7 November

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Tuesday 8 November

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Wednesday 9 November

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KEYNOTE PAPERS

Women’s Absence from Positions of Decision-making Power: Feminist Conundrums in Defining the Problem of Representation

Laurel Weldon

9.30, Monday 8th November

This paper considers the best way to tackle the problem of women’s absence from positions of power using a feminist approach. First, this paper outlines a feminist approach to power, emphasising the feminist insight that power is a relationship, not a thing, and that power is ubiquitous. It is inconsistent with this approach to power, however, to see women’s absence from the top of the hierarchy as the ‘absence’ of women from power. Thinking about power in more complex ways gives us a better understanding of the nature of women’s exclusion from positions of political leadership and influence. It directs our attention to the multiple sites of power (pointing to women in social movements and bureaucracies) and helps to moderate our feminist expectations of feminist women who occupy so-called ‘positions of power’. It also suggests broader solutions to the problems of exclusion and underrepresentation that bedevil advocates for women’s inclusion in contemporary democratic politics.

Laurel Weldon is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and at Purdue University in Indiana. She was recently appointed the inaugural director of the Purdue Policy Research Institute (PPRI), a position she will assume on Feb 15 2016. Last year, Weldon held the O’Brien Residential Fellowship in the Center for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism in the Faculty of Law at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She is founding co-editor of the new journal Politics, Groups and Identities, a journal sponsored by the Western Political Science Association and she was founding Director of the Center for Research on Diversity Inclusion (2012-2015) and interim Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs (2013-2014) and (very briefly) Acting Provost (2014).

Professor Weldon’s work focuses on: the role of social movements in influencing public policy; on violence against women; representation and public policy; women, work and poverty; and on comparative and international research that is global in scope. She currently heads a major interdisciplinary research project on diversity and inclusion. She has won numerous awards, including, most recently, the Victoria Shuck Award from the American Political Science Association (APSA) (2012) and the Outstanding Professional Achievement Award for Scholarship and Mentoring from the Midwest Political Science Association’s Women’s Caucus (2015). She has consulted for international organizations such the UN and the World Bank as well as national, state, local and Tribal governments.

Feminist Innovations in Philosophy: Relational Autonomy and Epistemic Injustice

Catriona Mackenzie

9am, Tuesday 8 November

Philosophy is a striking outlier among the humanities for its gender disparities and for the resistance in some quarters of the discipline to feminist concerns. This paper examines two feminist innovations that challenge the methodological individualism that is the default paradigm within the discipline.

Relational theories of autonomy challenge the individualism of mainstream philosophical approaches to agency and autonomy: first, by explicating the complex social scaffolding required to develop and exercise autonomy; and second, by explicating how the internalization of gender and other forms of social oppression and injustice can threaten the autonomy of persons who are subject to such oppression.

The notion of epistemic injustice challenges the individualism of mainstream epistemology by drawing attention to the effects of social identity prejudice on knowledge practices. Examples include testimonial injustice, or discounting the credibility of a person’s testimony due to identity prejudice; and hermeneutic injustice, whereby aspects of social experience (e.g. the experience of sexual harassment) are rendered invisible due to deficits in collective understanding.

Although both relational autonomy theory and theories of epistemic injustice are gaining increasing traction, within and outside Philosophy, much philosophical work remains recalcitrantly individualistic and blind to the effects of social positionality on our agential and epistemic capacities.

Catriona Mackenzie is Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Research Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics, and Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University, Sydney. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Mackenzie is co-editor of several volumes, including Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self (Oxford University Press, 2000), and, most recently, Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2014). She has published widely in moral psychology, ethics, applied ethics, and feminist philosophy, and is currently working on a co-edited volume on Social Dimensions of Moral Responsibility.

Restructuring Gender Inequality in the Crisis

Sylvia Walby

4.30 Tuesday 8th November

How is the crisis restructuring gender inequality? The complex inequalities on which the financial crisis draws, and which the development of global finance exacerbates, intersect in diverse ways. The paper argues for a gendered conceptualisation of the crisis, not as ‘refamilialisation’ in which women are pushed out of production back into reproduction, but rather as a critical turning point in the trajectory of the public gender regime from a more social democratic form to a more neoliberal form. It analyses the varied gendered practices and institutions relevant to the different stages of the crisis as it cascaded from finance through the economy, the fiscal, the political and to violence. What constitutes the ‘crisis’ is contested. The construction of government deficits as if they entailed fiscal crisis to be treated as a state of exception is contested. The cascading of crisis from one institutional domain to another is also contested, since renewed democratic forces provide sites of resilience and resistance. The significance of feminism within the democratic struggle at each of the institutions affected by the crisis is often underestimated. This requires rethinking the understanding of ‘gender equality’ in the context of intersecting political projects. The theorisation of crisis is developed using complexity science, gender theory, and a reworking of the concept of social system, with implications for the theorisation of gendered institutions and gender regimes

Sylvia Walby OBE is Distinguished Professor of Sociology, UNESCO Chair of Gender Research, and Director of the Violence and Society UNESCO Centre at Lancaster University. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, UK. Her research has been funded by the European Commission, European Parliament, European Institute for Gender Equality, Council of Europe, ESRC, and the UN. Books include: Crisis (Polity 2015); The Future of Feminism (Polity 2011); and Globalization and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities (Sage 2009).

Gendered Innovation in Economics: Marilyn Waring and the United Nations System of National Accounts

Paul Dalziel

9.30, Wednesday 9th November

Economics is a social science where it is recognised that women are under-represented in research leadership roles; yet economics is also one of the disciplines that should most aid our understanding of how gender works in society and of the relationship between market and non-market activity. A branch of the discipline addresses this issue under the title of feminist economics, which is having some influence on the profession’s research agenda. This paper cites the example of Professor Marilyn Waring and her path-breaking book published in 1988, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (also published as Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth). The origins of that book, and the research it required, illustrate how gendered innovation in the social sciences may not fit the Popper-Kuhn-Lakatos model of paradigm change, but can emerge from the breaking of new ground by a researcher embedded within a community of activists grappling with major issues of social inequality. This has implications for how social sciences recognise research excellence. It also has implications for future economics research agendas focused on the wellbeing of people (rather than on gross domestic product per se), which cannot be gender blind to be effective.

Paul Dalziel is Professor of Economics and Deputy Director of the Agribusiness and Economics Research Unit (AERU) at Lincoln University, New Zealand. His research focuses on economic policy, including regional economic development. His work has been published in Cambridge Journal of Economics, Journal of Economic Surveys, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, and Review of Political Economy. He is the co-author with Professor Caroline Saunders of Wellbeing Economics: Future Directions for New Zealand, published by Bridget Williams Books in 2014. This address is based on a recent article by Saunders and Dalziel in Feminist Economics entitled ‘25 Years of Counting for Nothing: Waring’s Critique of National Accounts’.

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PANEL SESSIONS

All sessions at the conference will be held in Lecture Theatre 1, in the Hedley Bull Building, 130 Garran Rd, ANU.

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TRAVEL

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ACCOMMODATION SUGGESTIONS

On campus accommodation:

Hotels quite close to the ANU Campus:

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CONTACT:

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