Gender is Happening

Love Me Gender is the motto of a one-week extravaganza at the Gunda Werner Institute, the feminist branch of Heinrich Boell Foundation in Berlin: a rich succession of events around gender identity, policies and practice... A (German language) blog informs about panel discussions, film projections and workshops - including queer poetry slams and a three-day crash course in drawing comics (Title: Any Tool is a Weapon if You Hold it Right). I have joined a group of volunteer blog reporters to produce my impressions in English here and, eventually, in German on the official site. Tonight, workshop on masculinities. To be continued - this blog is going to be devoted to Love Me Gender for the rest of the week.

European Court ruling on domestic violence

Landmark Judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR)! On 9 June, Court members unanimously found that the State of Turkey had failed to fulfil its responsibility to protect the human rights of a woman whose violent husband had repeatedly attacked her and killed her mother. Remember the international law concept of due diligence, touched upon in my April 2009 posting? The Turkish government had failed to protect the applicant's human rights by allowing Turkish courts and police to maintain a laisser-faire attitude towards domestic violence. For full details, including a link to the complete judgement, try the international law blog IntLawGrrls! This judgement comes at a time when 47 European Ministers of Justice, united at a Council of Europe meeting in Norway, have formally committed themselves to take more effective measures against domestic violence. For information on that meeting, click here.

A plea for quality in M&E

Like the previous entry, this post is -remotely- inspired by Philipp Mayring's handbook on qualitative content analysis (in German, 10th edition 2008). Mayring is a professor of psychology --- now don't run away! Psychology can teach us a lot about assessing fuzzy development processes.
As shown in the post below, any scientific analysis rests on qualitative steps which determine what is important, how the "what" should be measured, and how the measurements should be interpreted. These steps are taken by researchers, i.e. by common mortals. There is no absolute truth (leaving aside religious beliefs) - there are only theories. Even theories that come with figures are just theories, to be confirmed or refuted in subsequent rounds of research.

Quantitative is qualitative, too...

Yesterday I read an advertisement for a body lotion scientifically proven* to better the skin of 80% of lotion users. The *footnote explained that, in a trial bringing together twenty women, 80% stated the lotion made their skin feel smoother. Does that sound scientific enough? In any case, it illustrates how you turn qualitative judgements (respondents' reported feelings) into "hard" figures, a procedure which as such is not "manipulative" but established scientific practice.

Direct democracy in Germany

At the tender age of 47 I discover that I can submit electronic petitions to my national parliament, or support existing protests against or suggestions for new laws. For Germans: Jede/r kann eine Petition beim Bundestag einreichen, bzw. bestehende öffentliche Petitionen unterstützen. Im Moment gibt es da 75, z.B. gegen die Besteuerung von Kondomen (wichtig gegen HIV/AIDS), zu Fragen des Arbeits-, Miet-, Sozial-, Steuer- und Verkehrsrechts und vielem mehr, was BürgerInnen im täglichen Leben beschäftigt. Politische Beteiligung auch zwischen den Wahlen. Hier ist die Petitionsseite - Registrieren dauert 3 Minuten.

Count your shoes

Since 2000, the German development bank KfW has organised public panel discussions on globalisation. In its 50th instalment on 16 June, three Africans and two Europeans, one woman and four men, discussed the topic "development is the future". Dirk Messner, Director of the German Institute for Devlopment Policy (DIE) emphasised the need to address climate change; Simon Maxwell from the British Overseas Development Institue (ODI) called for Europeans to unite their efforts in a common development policy and enhanced coherence between development and other policies. Francis Appiah (African Peer Review Mechanism APRM) reiterated the appeal for better co-ordinated, multilateral approaches. He said government officials in Ghana spent about 300 days a year in donor meetings of all kinds... Norah Uwaraga, ED of a consultancy bureau, pointed to the potential benefits of carbon emissions trading to the lives of "ordinary" Africans.

IDB, IDP and other acronyms

Consult the Aid glossary of Development Initatives, a consultancy bureau. It does not offer much on social science concepts, but helpful explanations of terms and acronyms around multilateral institutions, financial aid and the jargon that comes with huge programmes. The terms "gender" or "gender mainstreaming" do not appear, but maybe that means that everybody has understood what that is about by now? Or have they been mainstreamed away...?

Feminism and Religion

Yesterday, at the Religion Revisited conference (scroll down for more posts on the topic), I joined the workshop Religious Feminists - Allies in the struggle for Women's Rights. What is special about "religious feminism" as compared to "secular feminism" - and does it matter what kind of feminist you are?

Secularism, Citizenship and Gender Equality

...is the title of the opening lecture on Saturday at Religion Revisited (see post below) delivered by Deniz Kandiyoti from the London School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She explains how the meaning and practice of both secularism and citizenship derive from specific historical contexts. Turkey and India serve as illustrations for secularisms in crisis. A telling example is the near-religious cult devoted in Turkey to great secularist Ataturk. Illiberal secularism may affect women's rights just as negatively as religious dogma... In India, the key national dilemma - finding an integrative narrative in a post-colonial society divided by religious and caste cleavages - has produced a pluralism that accentuates rather than weakens the role of religion in public life, because it is a political pluralism, says Kandiyoti, not a religious one.

"Religion Revisited"

This is the title of an international conference at the Gunda Werner Institute (Böll Foundation) in Berlin, with the topic Women's Rights and the Political Instrumentalisation of Religion. The two-day event is part of the 11-country UNRISD research project Religion, Politics and Gender Equality, which will publish its final report in October 2009. Tonight, the opening panel brought together José Casanova (Sociology of Religion, Georgetown University, USA), Anne Phillips (Gender Institute and Government Department, London School of Economics, UK), Farida Shaheed (Shirkat Gah Resource Centre, Pakistan) and Agnieszka Graff (Warsaw University, Poland).

R2P and women in conflict

The feminist Gunda Werner Institut (Böll Foundation, Berlin) convened an experts' meeting on 27 May on the Right to Protect (R2P), a fairly new concept in international law, and its implications on women. The bottom line: R2P is innovative in that it places human rights above State sovereignty, traditionally held inviolable in international law. But this political concept does not come with new enforcement mechanisms: it is still the UN Security Council that determines whether a State has proven incapable of protecting its citizens' human rights, in which case R2P can justify military intervention.

Organisations in systems theory

Fritz B. Simon, psychiatrist-turned-management consultant (sic!) is a prolific author of highly legible books bringing together systems theory and real life practice. His Introduction to Organisational Systems Theory (my -slightly inaccurate- translation of the German title, Einführung in die systemische Organisationstheorie) is delightful to read, but so condensed that any attempt to summarise it would fail. I just want to share a couple of highlights...

"We Can" launched in the Netherlands

It's "We Can", tout court, not "yes we can": The We Can End All Violence against Women campaign has been launched in the Netherlands. Reaching beyond feminist circles, "We Can" attempts to make large numbers of women and men realise that the personal is political, and encourage them to undertake practical steps in their daily lives to end inequalities between the sexes and violence against women. People can take a pledge to become change makers on the campaign website (in Dutch), and download materials including the signature reproduced here. Don't speak Dutch? There is another informative site on "We Can" in the Northern hemisphere: wecanbc.ca, filled with material on the campaign in British Columbia, Canada. The campaign originated in South Asia: wecanendvaw.org

Communication on Gender-Based Violence

Better late than never - just discovered a 2003 resource by UNIFEM: Making a Difference - Strategic Communications to End Violence against Women, available from the UNIFEM site. Apart from lots of practical advice, it includes this amazing story from Eastern Europe:

A billboard campaign in the Czech Republic for Nokia ‘hands free’ telephone accessories showed a man molesting a woman now that his hands were ‘free’ from holding the phone receiver. To protest the ad, the Prague Centre for Gender Studies collected electronic signatures via their website and presented them to the Czech Advertising Standards
Council, the Czech State Administration Office and the Finnish headquarters of Nokia. The letter to Finland stated that this kind of sexist advertising contradicts Nokia’s brand identity. Within 14 days of receiving the letter, the Finns withdrew the billboard.
Adapted from a story told by Lenka Simerska, Bratislava Strategic Communications Workshop, October 2001.

Literature on Gender-Based Violence

These days I have been
--> going through heaps of publications on violence against women (VAW), many of which you'll find via the Siyanda portal. A few highlights: