On 4 October Professor Emerita Raewyn Connell gave a wonderful  FRN seminar, ‘Decolonizing Gender: Settler Colonialism & Gender History’.

It was a topic close to many researchers’ interests and was made more lively by Raewyn’s use of scholars and activists to highlight the arguments.  Her discussion of the coloniality of knowledge showed that Western knowledge has long been imperial knowledge.  Thus the foundations of knowledge-getting reinforce colonial knowledge formation and are reproduced via the  fundamental bases of theory, method, and intellectual authority.   This has happened not just in colonial powers but also in colonised societies.  In turn, power inequalities are strengthened and enhanced.   In the modern globalised world, such inequalities are further embedded in the expansion of  transnational capitalism and neoliberal hegemony.

The seminar  was attended by 20+ academics from LHA, Business and Social Science, as well as a good number of HDR students.  Raewyn was very generous with her time and spent nearly two hours talking to staff and students.

More can be found about Raewyn on @raewynconnell AND www.raewynconnell.net

The references for the seminar were:

RWC 2015 Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale, Feminist Theory, 16, 1, pp.49-66

RWC 2014 Rethinking Gender from the South, Feminist Studies, 40, 3, pp. 518-539

RWC 2-14 Margin becoming Centre: for a world-centred rethinking of masculinities, NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, 9, 4, pp. 217-231

Di Kelly