Women of diaspora: roles and (self) representations

The ANU Gender Institute and the ANU Centre for European Studies are jointly organising a research workshop “Women of diaspora: roles and (self)representations”.

The aim of the workshop is to gather researchers, policy makers and community members, to explore the gendered dimension to migration across different ethnic groups.

In particular, it is to provide forum for discussion on the diversity of gender roles, behaviours and attitudes that emerge from migrant women’s self-representations,and challenge the understanding of their experience as collective and unifying.

The discourse used by humanitarian support institutions, refugee and migration researchers to talk to and about migrants, particularly women, has been changing in recent years to bring about the recognition of their strengths, capacity and independence (Forced Migration Online).

Yet, stereotypical images of migrant women are still promoted in various cultural, social and political contexts and restrict the ways in which women’s roles within and outside diaspora are perceived and understood.

Even critical approaches to life narratives – or other works of self referential expression – created by women migrants themselves often offer, to use L. Kischner’s words, “reductive and, at times, inaccurate reading of specific immigrant realities” (2008), endorsing distorted representations.

The workshop participants will draw on various primary sources (literary texts, life writing, visual images, oral history, memorials, performances, activism) to examine how women have been represented and how they represent themselves (their achievements, autonomy and agency).

The workshop will include individual presentations, group discussions, and planning the production of an edited book. Proposals for papers that are in early stages or works in progress are warmly welcome.

Please register by emailing: kasia.williams@anu.edu.au