WGD Discussion Series

Paroma Wagle is an assistant professor of urban affairs and planning at the School of Public and International Affairs, Virginia Tech. Before joining Virginia Tech, Paroma was a Presidents’ Excellence Chair (PEC) Network Cultures Postdoctoral Fellow jointly appointed in the Departments of Geography and English Language and Literatures at The University of British Columbia. She received her Ph.D. in urban and environmental planning and policy from the University of California, Irvine. Her research has been in the areas of urban planning and policy, urban geography, environmental sustainability, urban climate justice, interacting human-environment systems, and inequalities in access to urban services, especially in water access.

Often, the conversations around gender and access to public services in the urban Global South view women as victims of broader urban inequalities and program beneficiaries to be empowered. While these conversations are quite relevant, there is also a need to highlight the role — as drivers of the city-making process — of women activists and leaders in urban transformative politics around water, housing, and sanitation. This talk shares the findings, observations, and lessons from a historical study of the contribution of women activists and politicians in Mumbai through different eras. It starts with the women leaders, who were active at the grassroots level during the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s in Mumbai (India) and were fondly called Tai (elder sister) by their constituents. The Tais engaged in radical city-making processes, opened space for common women to participate in politics and activism, and have had a large impact on how the city functions to date. The study also shares how recent women leaders and activists who have led large-scale movements, most notably the Right to Pee movement, have engaged in transformative politics. Tracking the work of various Tais against a backdrop of the history of Mumbai gives us deeper insights into how women have shaped the city and made it more inclusive. The story of the Tais is a story of women as active city-making agents. It presents us with an opportunity to learn from their struggles, experiences, politics, and modus operandi.

Tania Pérez-Bustos is a feminist scholar working on technologies and knowledge dialogues. Her current research interests focus on handmade textiles as technologies of knowledge and care, and how they are used by Latin American women and civil society in general. She examines the role of these technologies of care in cultivating community amidst Colombia’s transitions to peace.  She is co-founder of Artesanal Tecnológica and is a professor at the School of Gender Studies at the National University of Colombia. She is interested in transdisciplinary work from which to explore methodologies that enable transformative research and pedagogies. 

After the signature of the peace agreements (2016), possibilities of transiting toward other forms of nonviolent sociability in Colombia open. Various discourses highlight the need for civil society to get involved in reconciliation practices as mechanisms to collectively care for the peace process. These discourses, however, are seldom defined taking as a standpoint the complex ways in which reconciliation and the struggle for peace are carefully crafted locally. In this talk, I present three tales of healing, survival, and dignification that embody relations of coexistence and contradiction between violence and care. This, allow me to think through the complexities of reconciliation in contexts of fragile transitions towards peace. First, the story of women, victims of sexual violence in the midst of the armed conflict, invited by the artist Doris Salcedo to forge tiles using the melted weapons handed in by FARC, for the creation of an anti-monument that symbolizes the transformation of wounds of war into art. Second, the tale of the communities around Atrato river who continue memorializing how to fish, cook, and eat fish in the midst of a poisoned river due to illegal mining, this as a way to resist to cultural extermination and continue living in their territory. Lastly, the initiative “Ojo de la aguja” that seeks to embroider pañuelos with the names of social leaders assassinated after the signature of the peace agreement, as a way of exposing the massacre in order to end it, but inevitably failing in the attempt, since the temporalities of embroidery cannot keep the pace of the faster murder rate.

Kathleen Schroeder is a professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at Appalachian State University. She has an undergraduate degree in economics and a master’s degree in geography from the University of Texas at Austin. She earned her doctorate in geography at the University of Minnesota, where she studied under Connie Weil. She has extensive experience working on issues of gender and development both domestically and abroad.

Her research has focused in the Andes and particularly in Bolivia, where she uses a feminist-economic lens to examine issues of women and work. As a professor of geography at Appalachian State University since the 1990s, she has also explored questions of sustainability in rural Appalachia with an emphasis on food systems and access to food.

She has held leadership positions on her campus and in her professional networks since the early days of her career and has frequently served as the first woman to hold a particular position in her unit. Her ongoing collaboration with the American Association of Geographers’ Healthy Departments initiative includes mentorship, leadership development, and work to combat sexual misconduct and academic bullying.

Coming soon.