International Women’s Day Symposium: Announcing Panel 2 — “Feminism and Intersectionality”

Coined by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, Intersectional Feminism concerns itself with issues around racial justice, identity politics, and policing. Oppression, according to Crenshaw, exists at an intersection: one’s identity can be oppressed through race, gender, sex, sexuality, class, ability, nationality, citizenship, religion and body type. In an article for UN women titled “Intersectional feminism: what it means and why it matters right now,” Intersectional Feminism is defined as “the voices of those experiencing overlapping, concurrent forms of oppression in order to understand the depths of the inequalities and the relationships among them in any given context.”

Such issues we will be exploring during our second panel of the day, Feminism and Intersectionality. According to our Academic Event Officer, the reason why this panel is particularly important is that “Feminism and women’s rights do not exist in a bubble. They are linked to equally complex issues to do with race, sexuality, and class, to name but a few, which have different ramifications depending on where you are in the world. So this panel will look to dig into those complexities and ultimately, aim to celebrate all women.”

We are delighted to be joined by important voices that explore such issues in their research: whether it is discussing inequalities in race, class, or gender through the lenses of the legal sector to securing and protecting social spaces for transgender people as a crucial aspect of the feminist struggle to engaging with and discussing cultural representation of Muslim identity in the West. The panel will be chaired by Professor Clare Lees (Institute of English Studies).

"Feminism to me means questioning the silences and the silences and the silencings that exclude women. And it means celebrating, and working with and for, 100% of humanity, not just 49%. Intersectionality means questioning the silences and the silencings that exclude all sorts of categories of humans, on all sorts of overlapping grounds. And it means celebrating, and working with and for, 100% of humanity, not just 49%."

Professor Sophie-Grace Chappell

Professor at Open University. Author of "Knowing What To Do Imagination, Virtue, and Platonism in Ethics"

We are thrilled to welcome the following panellists:

Professor Lisa Webley (Birmingham Law School) whose research concerns the regulation, education and ethicality and professionalism of the legal profession, and broader access to justice and rule of law concerns. She has been the Principal Investigator on several large research projects and has undertaken funded empirical research for public bodies and organisations including the European Commission; the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Trade and Industry. She is head of research in CEPLER.

Professor Sophie-Grace Chappell (Open University) works in feminist philosophy, political philosophy, ancient philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of religion, metaethics, aesthetics, philosophy of literature, or on the philosophy of personal identity. Her main current research project is, as usual for her, in ethics. With the support of a three-year Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2017-2020, £142,000), she has recently completed a new book, provisionally entitled Epiphanies: an ethics and metaethics of experience.

Dr. Ruvani Ranasinha’s (Reader in Postcolonial Literature at King’s College London) researcher interests are in postcolonial and contemporary literature and film, especially relating to South Asia and the South Asian diaspora with particular focus on gender, immigration, globalisation and the cultural representation of Muslim identity in the West. She has written three monographs on postcolonial and contemporary literature: Hanif Kureishi: Writers and their Works (Northcote House 2002). South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation(Oxford University Press 2007) is the first book to trace a literary genealogy of South Asian writing in twentieth-century Britain, and to historicise the emergence and development of Britain’s literary market for Asian writers. Contemporary South Asian Women’s Fiction: Gender, Narration and Globalisation (Palgrave 2016) is the first book to analyse a new generation of award-winning anglophone South Asian women novelists and to destabilise the dominance of Indian fiction by focusing on female authors from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as well as India. Dr. Ranasinha also the lead editor of South Asians and the Shaping of Britain, 1870-1950: a sourcebook (Manchester University Press, 2013).

Read about our First Panel, our Keynote Speaker, and book your tickets here!