A Discussion with Dr. Lila Abu Lughod
Please join us on Friday, November 26 at 7 pm for a discussion with Dr. Lila Abu Lughod, a professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University and author of Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories, and Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Her current works focuses on critiques of the universalist claims of liberalism and on the ethical and political dilemmas entailed in the international circulation of discourses of human rights in general, and Muslim women’s rights in particular.
Dr. Abu Lughod will lead a discussion around some of her work exploring the incommensurability between everyday lives and the social imagination of rights based on ethnographic fieldwork she conducted on transnational initiatives for Muslim women’s rights and on the everyday lives of some village women in Egypt. Through juxtaposing the social and moral relations in one case of ‘domestic violence’ in this village to another set of social relations that constitute new forms of cosmopolitan rights activism by the new Islamic feminists, Dr. Abu Lughod uses ethnography to question the adequacy of rights frameworks. Given the current geopolitical distribution of power, she argues that we must examine critically the intersection of rights work with forms of inequality, study closely what rights work actually produces in the world, and that we must be vigilant about the social locations and intellectual limits of rights work and rights talk.
The discussion will held at the Nasawiya House. For more information, please email n.moawad[at]gmail.com
Category: Featured, The Feminist House, Upcoming Events
