Symposium to Address Homeland Security

The event is sponsored by UK’s Appalachian Center, Center for Research on Violence Against Women, College of Agriculture, College of Arts and Sciences, Creative Writing Program, Department of Sociology, Office of International Affairs, University Libraries, Women’s Studies Program, and the Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice.

Photo of Cynthia Enloe
Cynthia Enloe

Photo of Marilyn Hacker
Marilyn Hacker

Photo of Haideh Moghissi
Haideh Moghissi

LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 16, 2005) -- The University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences will bring internationally celebrated feminist scholars, artists and activists to campus April 12 to participate in the college’s yearlong interdisciplinary conversation on “Homeland Security.”

By looking beyond our own homeland to ask whose homelands and whose securities are at stake, the speakers aim to recast our thinking about terrorism in an all-day symposium titled “War, Terrorism, and Our Global Environment: Feminists Take on Homeland Security.

The program, organized by UK Women’s Studies Program, begins at 9 a.m. in Worsham Theatre in the UK Student Center and runs until 5 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Cynthia Enloe, professor of government at Clark University, is one of the leading thinkers today on militarism around the globe. Author of “Does Khaki Become You?: The Militarization of Women’s Lives (1988),” “Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (1989),” and most recently “Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (2000),” Enloe’s life’s work has emphasized how militarism affects women, the way militarism insinuates itself in the most mundane spaces in American life, and the links between the American military and the sex trade industry.

Marilyn Hacker is an award-winning poet and recipient of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Her recent poems have addressed the war in Iraq and conflict in the Middle East, and in 2003, she founded “Poets Against the War.” Her latest book is “Desesperanto: Poems, 1999-2002,” which appeared in 2003.

Haideh Moghissi holds an appointment in sociology at York University in Toronto, Canada, where she also directs a nationally funded research project: “Diaspora, Islam, and Gender: A Comparative Study of Four Displaced Communities from Islamic Cultures.” She has served as a frequent media commentator on women in Iran, Islamic feminism, and human rights in the wake of September 11. Her “Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis” won a Choice Outstanding Academic Books Award in 2000, and most recently she edited three volumes titled “Women and Islam: Critical Concepts in Sociology (2005)” for the Routledge Reference series.

Van dana Shiva, who has a doctorate in physics, focuses on pressing issues related to the global food supply, the privatization of water, and the degradation of the environment. She was one of the first to challenge the notion that globalization is a “natural” process that benefits everyone and has in fact termed it the “war on nature.” She is known worldwide for her leadership in Diverse Women for Diversity, an international movement of women concerned with the effects of globalization on agriculture, patents and biotechnology. Shiva also directs the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in New Delhi, India.

In the morning session, the audience will hear from all of the speakers. In the afternoon, small groups will form, each led by one of the panelists and a UK Women’s Studies faculty member. Attendees may join a group for more in-depth conversation. In the closing plenary session, all participants will reconvene to discuss local and regional issues and possible gender-conscious approaches to securing our homelands.