[DEBATE] : Fw: vacancy at WGD on gender, culture and development

[peter waterman]

Sent: Saturday, April 08, 2006 11:41 AM
Subject: vacancy at Women, Gender and Development on gender, culture and development 



Since the key focus of the WGD Specialization is the relationship between knowledge and power, we are interested in a dynamic and broad approach to culture that places power at the center of the conceptualization. Instead of approaching culture as bounded, coherent and distinctive, autonomous systems, we appreciate attention to culture as a mode of refiguring the terrains of domination, resistance and social transformation, as a site of multiple struggles of exclusion and domination, and a field that challenges the taken-for-granted meanings that are embedded in economic, political and social processes. Applied to development studies, the relation between gender and culture covers a wide spectrum of institutions, their rules, norms and social interaction. This means that while interested in identities and representations, we are equally interested in their material effect on livelihoods, forms and politics of ruling, and the multiple ways women and men become cultural and political subjects.

The positioning of the specialization within the Staff Group places development at the interface between the local and global. It means that taking stock of global inequalities requires analytical attention to the particular and localized contexts that shape multiple aspects of social life and production of knowledge, in which gender, culture and development intersect. 

The best candidate for this post will be one who looks at both cultural vocabularies and discursive practices, and at their material effects on global and local structuring of dominance and resistance in one or more of the following fields:

-     identities and representations

-       worlds of work; 
-       sexuality and the body;
-       violence and conflict;
-       space and place.






Dr. Dubravka Zarkov
Senior lecturer
Institute of Social Studies
PO Box 29776
2502 LT The Hague
The Netherlands
tel.:   + 31 70 4260 460 (general)
tel.:   + 31 70 4260 775 (direct)
fax.: + 31 70 4260 799