Abstracts accepted in English, Portuguese and Spanish.
Swagata Basu
This session aims to foreground the experiences of displaced women in cities of the Global South. Women and children comprise most of the displaced population, and yet debates on displacement continue to remain “ungendered” even though the costs of such projects are borne differently by men and women (Mehta, 2009) The process of gentrification continues unabated in urban spaces through the production of exclusive ‘sanitary’ places and relative displacement of poor and low-income neighbourhoods (Choi, 2016).
Being uprooted from homes and neighbourhoods lead to the experience of trauma and injustice arising from the sense of detachment from ‘place’ and the associated loss of bonds of kinship, memory, identity and being that displaced women in cities are subjected to as a corollary of urban renewal projects (Hatty, 1996; Bhaviskar, 2009). Critical Feminist intervention in global urban studies needs to document women’s struggles, strategies, and everyday desires seriously (Peake, 2016). Following this, the session attempts to document women’s struggles to produce a sense of place in cities across the Global South through their acts of resilience and feminist solidarities against a background of alienation and estrangement, lack of safety, security and loss of places of dwelling and livelihood.
REFERENCES:
Baviskar, Amita. “Breaking homes, making cities.” Class and gender in the politics of urban displacement: Displaced by development (2009): 59-81.
Choi, Narae. “Metro Manila through the gentrification lens: Disparities in urban planning and displacement risks.” Urban Studies 53, no. 3 (2016): 577-592.
Hatty, Suzanne E. “The violence of displacement: The problematics of survival for homeless young women.” Violence against women 2, no. 4 (1996): 412-428.
Mehta, Lyla. “A Gender Analysis of Forced Displacement and Resettlement.” Displaced by Development: Confronting Marginalisation and Gender Injustice; Mehta, L., Ed (2009): 3-33.
Peake, Linda. “The Twenty-First-Century Quest for Feminism and the Global Urban.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40, no. 1 (2016): 219-227.