8th Annual NNC Conference and PhD Course: A Multitude of Encounters with Asia - Gender Perspectives

One of the great challenges in increased relations with Asia through business, culture, life biographies, historical relations as well as ITC networks is to make the importance of gender visible. Encounters have become increasingly, mutually interrelated and perhaps even dependent in multiple ways. Economically encounters are wide-ranging with financial decisions made in one part of the world affecting the real lives of many in the other part of the world. In the political sphere the need for enhancing mutual understanding and tolerance grows every day. How can we understand these multiple links, interactions and encounters and how are they gendered? Some encounters are vividly obvious and others are less prominently visible, or perhaps consciously or unconsciously made obscure. How is knowledge of encounters being produced, by whom and for what purposes?

This conference on macro and micro level encounters with Asia, including encounters between Asia and the Nordic countries, takes the traveling of theories, concepts, ideas, practices, products and people as its starting point and asks

  1. How gender and gender relations play into, create, and are created in the course of a multitude of encounters
  2. How transnational feminism has produced knowledge in the context of globalization

Keynote speakers

  • Kathy Davis, Senior Research Fellow, Sociology, VU University, Amsterdam
  • Mary E. John, Senior Fellow, Centre for Women's Development Studies, New Delhi
  • Wil Burghoorn, Senior Lecturer, Social Anthropology, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg

The conference and PhD Course are organized by RIKK - Centre for Women’s and Gender Research & EDDA – Center of Excellence, University of Iceland, NIAS – Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and GAN - Gendering Asia Network