Liberal Studies is thrilled to welcome NYU students, faculty, administrators, alumni, the public and other members of the NYU community to the latest installment of the Global Lecture Series, which each year brings an internationally renowned speaker to Washington Square Campus. Anthropologist and women and gender studies expert, Lila Abu-Lughod, will speak on Security and the Political Geographies of Gender Violence.

Over the last couple of decades, Violence against women (VAW) and subsequently, Gender-based violence (GBV) have emerged as powerful master categories in agendas of international governance and international law, increasingly folded into practices of state sovereignty and global security. What were once marginalized feminist concerns now sit firmly at the nexus of powerful global networks of institutions and practices that have recast development and humanitarianism in line with post 9/11 global security regimes. This lecture outlines questions we should be asking about the way this visionary feminist cause is playing out in global and local systems of power. 

• What are the politics and geographies of efforts to combat gender violence? 
• What are its modes and channels of operation? 
• How does the urgency of dealing with gender violence work out on the ground in different places? 
• And what effects does this convergence on VAW/GBV have on those who are the subjects of such violences?  

Based on a collaborative research project with feminist scholars working in the Middle East and South Asia, Abu-Lughod outlines some of the political and institutional circuits that gender violence traverses, consolidates, and animates, paying special attention to “the Muslim question” so central to these operations. She focuses in particular on the deployment of the master category in the work of securofeminists, governance feminists seeking a role in the dangerous business of what goes under the trademark of Countering Violent Extremism.

Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University where she teaches anthropology and gender studies. A leading voice in the debates about culture, gender, Islam, and global feminist politics, her award-winning books and articles have been translated into 14 languages. The books include Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society; Writing Women’s Worlds; Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt; and Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. Her most recent book, published by Harvard University Press in 2013, is titled Do Muslim Women Need Saving?  Abu-Lughod’s scholarship, mostly ethnographic and based on long-term fieldwork in Egypt, has focused on the power of cultural forms, from poetry to television soap operas; the politics of knowledge and representations of cultural “others”; violence and memory; and the question of liberalism and global projects of human and women’s rights. She has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a Carnegie Scholar, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. Her research has been supported by awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She taught at Williams, Princeton, and New York University before moving to Columbia University in 2000 where she has since directed the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality; the Middle East Institute; and the Center for the Study of Social Difference. She is on the board of the new Palestinian Museum in Birzeit and is currently working on a collaborative international project for Women Creating Change and supported by the Henry Luce Foundation on “Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence.”

Her favorite band is Overcoats.