Past Events Archive

Often, the conversation around gender and access to public services in the urban Global South has been focused on women as victims of broader urban inequalities and program beneficiaries to be empowered. While it is a much-needed conversation, there also is a need to highlight the role played by women leaders in urban transformative politics around water, housing, and sanitation, and in the process of making a city. This talk shares the findings, observations, and lessons from a historical study of the contribution of women activists and politicians—fondly called Tai (elder sister) by their colleagues, followers, and constituents—in Mumbai through different eras. The talk shares examples from various movements and initiatives led by women leaders like the Anti-Price Rise Movement, ‘Annapurna’ (Goddess of Nourishment) women’s organization, Stree Mukti Sanghatana (Women's Liberation Organization), and the Right to Pee movement. The talk also shares examples of women politicians from different political ideologies and party affiliations. The Tais engaged in radical city-making processes by opening space for common women to participate in politics and activism, navigate public spaces more freely, take advantage of economic spaces, strengthen women’s space in labor movements, and facilitate access to public services.  Their activities have had a significant impact on how the city functions to date and have changed not only the political and policy landscape of the city but also spatial and urban planning in Mumbai. Tracking the work of various Tais against a backdrop of the history of Mumbai gives us deeper insight into how women leaders shaped the city and made it more inclusive. The story of the Tais is a story of women as active city-making agents, and it provides an opportunity to learn from their struggles, experiences, politics, and modus operandi.

Paroma Wagle is an assistant professor of urban affairs and planning, 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.

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.

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. 

• Office of the Associate Provost for the Arts, Diverse Voices and Perspectives Lecture Series
• College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Diversty Mini-Grant
• Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
• Department of Science, Technology, and Society
• School of Visual Arts
• El Centro-Hispanic and Latinx Cultural Center
• Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention

A special Women’s Month Event