International Gender Studies Centre

INTERNATIONAL GENDER STUDIES CENTRE

(formerly Centre for Cross Cultural Research on Women)

VISITING FELLOWS 2009-2010

Visiting Fellows of the Department of International Development, Queen Elizabeth House

Dr Leyla Pervizat MT 09 – Visiting Research Fellow
Profile	Dr. Leyla Pervizat was a Visiting Research Fellow at Queen Elizabeth House during Michaelmas 2000 when she wrote a pioneering research paper on honour killing in Turkey. Her (2005) Doctoral thesis in Political Science and International Relations “Honour Killings within the Context of International Human Rights Law: Conceptual and Legal Analysis, and Evaluation of Legal Cases in Turkey” is an analysis of 200 case studies she collected from four countries. She has thirteen years experience of working on human rights issues in Turkey and elsewhere for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the UN Human Rights Council and other UN bodies. She is currently working as a trainer in human rights for Amnesty International, Turkey and the Government’s Presidency of Religious Affairs (PRA), training religious experts and imams. Dr. Pervizat had been gathering data on Turkey’s contentious ‘headscarf problem’. Her findings indicate the existence of two perspectives and political positions on these issues: on the one hand, the (official-PRA) government’s stand on secularism and a ban on headscarf in public places, which is seen internationally as being progressive, inclusive and far reaching; on the other hand, the informal voices coming from various women’s non-governmental organizations and women’s lobbies based in Turkey. The later are perceived as being backward and conservative. They are also viewed as a threat to national security and to the democracy of the country. During her stay at IGS, Dr. Pervizat would like to analyse the above issues at the national and global level, and from a feminist perspective.

Dr Pnina Motzafi-Haller MT 09 – Visiting Research Fellow
Profile	Dr.Pnina Motzafi-Haller is Senior Lecturer at the Swiss Institute for Environmental Research and the Institute for Desert Research, Ben Gurion University. She is also editor of Hargar and is currently editing a book on Gender and Development with Dr.Abu-Rabia Queder. Her research interests include: international development, Middle-East and North African Scholarship and Israeli ethnography among marginalised populations (working class women, Mizrahim Bedouins). Her key concern is linking diverse areas of research and expertise to the study of social inequality. Her current research is concerned with social change among women at the social periphery and ‘cleaning labour’ in Israel. Her forthcoming book explores the dynamics of class and marginality among Mizrahi Bedouin women from the Negev, Arab-Palestinian women workers and former Soviet Union immigrant women. She has researched and written numerous papers and articles on women in African and India, where she is currently engaged in a cross-cultural collaborative field work with Prof. Nirupama Prakash, BITS University, India on Banjara nomadic women’s health and Bedouin women in Israel. During her time at Oxford, Dr. Motzafi-Haller proposes to develop the second phase of her research on Banjara nomadic women covering 3 regions in Rajasthan in order to continue her collaborative project titled ‘Gender, Citizenship and Health among the Banjara people in India’. She is particularly interested in exploring the links between citizenship, gender and maternal health. She wants to consult historical records at the Bodleian in order to understand the roots of their nomadic existence as pre-field work preparation for her planned research in Rajasthan.

Dr Helen Johnson MT 09 – Visiting Research Fellow
Profile	Dr. Helen Johnson is senior lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Queensland. Her research project seeks to examine the way in which Corporate Social Responsibility (CRS) is practiced by major corporations in the Pacific in relation to the construction of a major liquid natural gas pipeline in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Her field research findings indicate that women and young men in PNG are often sidelined from the potential benefits of key development projects despite the CSR framework in which transnational corporations must operate. Dr. Johnson’s research delves into the gender relations of power that pre-exist a project, that are impacted by it and that are enacted through it. The aim is to examine how gender and development theorists may critically evaluate the social impacts that are likely to follow a project as companies seek to responsibly manage change within and via CRS frameworks. During her stay in Oxford Dr. Johnson wishes to meet research groups working on similar issues as well as to continue incorporating her field investigations into a range of publishable articles.

Marianna Leite MT 09 – Visiting Research Fellow
Profile	Marianna Leite is an International Human Rights L.L.M. graduate from Cornell Law School. She is also a reproductive rights advocate. Her current research interest is the impact of Latin American policies on women’s access to basic reproductive health services and women’s reproductive rights. The project aims to raise awareness and promote government’s accountability in order to advance sexual and reproductive health and human rights in Brazil. The research involves monitoring and analysing public health projects in terms of women’s human rights, and takes into account trends in migration and religious beliefs. During her time at IGS Marianna Leite wishes to explore the history and context of promotion of reproductive rights in Brazil and how this intersects with feminist scholarship and critical debates on religious beliefs, female body politics, and reproductive rights. Sciences and the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University.

Sara K. Sanders HT 10 – Visiting Research Fellow
Profile	Sara K. Sanders is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, San Diego. Her main interests include ethnicity, transnational feminist networks, and popular resistance in the Third World. She has written several articles on Mexican women’s political consciousness and activism. As a Visiting Study Fellow, she would like to use her time to deepen her dissertation’s treatment of the role of Mexican women state developmental policies and mass education. In particular, she seeks to make use of recently-declassified state archival sources and memoirs that she collected as a researcher in Summer 2008 to test her hypotheses concerning the role of public institutions—particularly universities—as key spaces in which middle-class women’s political radicalization occurred. Through this research, she hopes to show that the expansion of the post-war Mexican state and its developmental agendas were important to the emergence of a feminist movement, as women’s access to university resources became an important platform from which to make broader arguments for rights and political inclusion.

Mung Lar Lam TT 09 – Visiting Research Fellow
Profile	Mung Lar Lam is a lecturer at the California College of Arts and instructor at the Art Institute of California. Her current research concerning Ironings, Stitchings, Chalkings and Needle makings, enquires into rudimentary textile traditions in domestic labor as historically performed by women. She examines the history of gendered materials and activities and the positioning of female labor in the work force. Due to an acute lack of academic materials and resources in these areas she wishes to avail herself of historical and contemporary sources available at the Bodleian and other Libraries in Oxford. During her time at IGS, she has specifically requested to work with Dr. Lidia Sciama whose writings and expertise on women’s labour and agency and gendered craft are extremely relevant to her own work as well as to the renewed debate regarding the role of craft in the contemporary study of domestic (female) labour.

Dr. Deidre Raftery TT 09 – Visiting Research Fellow
Profile	Dr Deirdre Raftery is Deputy Head of the School of Education and Lifelong Learning, at University College Dublin. She has published many books, chapters and articles, in the fields of history of education, and gender and education. She has delivered papers and guest lectures in Europe and North America. She was Visiting Research Associate at Girton College, Cambridge in 2005, and is now an honorary Life Member of Girton College Cambridge. Dr. Raftery’s current research interest is on the position of Irish women in the historical narrative on mission activity internationally as well as to contribute to the research on the gendered nature of work. She has already gathered data on the subject in France, Ireland, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore. During her time at IGS she would like to consult important published primary and secondary sources available at the Bodleian, especially its Japanese collection, Institute of Chinese Studies and Rhodes House Library. She would also like to rekindle her long time associations (dating back to the 1990s) with CCCRW/IGS and members who have written on the subject namely Cecillie Swaisland and Shirley Ardener as well as networking among others working on the same subject.