ANU early career researchers and doctoral students are invited to submit abstracts for participation in a day-long workshop on Critical Approaches to Gender and Justice with Professor Sally Engle Merry on Wednesday 14 March 2012.

This workshop follows the highly successful workshop on Gender and Human Rights with Professor Sally Engle Merry in March 2011. It raises the broad question of what constitutes gender justice. Human rights frameworks have been the object of sustained criticism from feminist and post-colonial scholars. They have been attacked, for example, for being too Western in orientation, too limited in imagination, and for occupying too much space in emancipatory agendas. On the other hand justice grounded in local and customary law may actively discriminate on the basis of gender and sexuality and in the process of restoring harmony reinscribe patterns of male domination.

This workshop will thus address critical approaches to gender and justice, from a diverse range of disciplinary perspectives. It is co-convened by Hilary Charlesworth and Margaret Jolly.

Please submit a 200 word abstract by February 10 to Nicholas Mortimer: nicholas.mortimer@anu.edu.au. Successful applicants will be notified by February 17. Presentations will be 15-20 minutes with ample time for discussion.

Professor Merry is Professor of Anthropology at New York University and also an Adjunct Professor in both CHL and RegNet. Her award-winning book, Human Rights and Gender Violence (Chicago UP, 2006), analyses the application of international human rights laws about gender violence to local problems. Merry wrote the book, ‘to show the value of an anthropological understanding of the way the human rights system actually works. I also hoped to make it more comprehensible to non-experts, particularly given the Bush-era hostility to international law and human rights. In the course of the research, I was surprised to discover how the core anthropological concept of culture was being used and misused within global discourse. I hope this book will help other ethnographers studying the complicated space of local, national, regional, and international institutions and cultural circulation