Cultures of Crisis: Mapping Women’s Knowledge and Activism in the Asia Pacific

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash (detail)

Saturday 19 February 2022

This project is COMPLETED - Read the Project Report

The Asia Pacific region is predicted to have the greatest exposure to multiple and compounded climate-related risks. Historically and at present, women from the region have had to also contend with overlapping insecurities posed by global threats from health pandemics, armed conflicts, and hypermasculine governance. Consequently, they are on the frontlines of global activism signalling where, how and why these various threats intersect. This research aims to map how women’s local knowledge may serve as indispensable source for inclusive and durable solutions urgently required by global security agendas.

Aims

  1. This proposed research will generate a preliminary thematic mapping of how Asia-Pacific women’s traditional and everyday knowledge may serve as indispensable source for inclusive and durable solutions urgently required by global security agendas.
  2. Theoretically, this research will advance an innovative research agenda that re-signifies the importance of feminist approaches to epistemology and standpoint theory and ‘Third World’ transnational social movements for contemporary understanding of global threats and crises.
  3. It will serve as a precursor to a planned Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) research project.

Research Questions

What are Asia Pacific women’s traditional and everyday knowledge of crises and how have these been strategically translated as critiques of global security through women’s regional and global activism?
  • How do multiple simultaneous and intersecting crises generate gender-differentiated knowledge and activism in the Asia Pacific?
  • How can ‘cultures of crisis’ and specifically the perspectives of women and men from the crisis-prone region of the Asia Pacific inform ways of understanding and overcoming the intersections of multiple forms of crises globally?

Project Team: ANU researchers: Maria Tanyag (lead)

PROJECT UPDATES:

20 October 2021: Cultures of crisis: How the Asia-Pacific can lead global peace and security

Drawing on feminist and postcolonial approaches, this presentation seeks to examine how and why women’s regional networks in the Asia Pacific develop distinct perspectives and practices in responding to a multiplicity of crises.