The Political of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations

Guest speaker: Nira YUVAL-DAVIS, Director of the Research Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB) at the University of East London; Visiting Professor at the Centre for Gender Studies, the University of Umea, Sweden

 

This presentation presents a theoretical framework with which to examine issues of identity and belonging as well of various hegemonic political projects of belonging, such as citizenship, nationalism, religion and cosmopolitanism, using Intersectionality theoretical approach as a major methodological tool to deconstruct and destabilize them

 

Biography:
Nira Yuval-Davis is the Director of the Research Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB) at the University of East London and a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Gender Studies, the University of Umea, Sweden. She has been the President of the Research Committee 05 (on Racism, Nationalism and Ethnic Relations) of the International Sociological Association, a member of the Sociology sub-panel of the British Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) of 2008 and the Research Excellence Framework (REF) of 2014. She is an editor of the book series ‘the Politics of Intersectionality’ of Palgrave MacMillan, a founder member of Women Against Fundamentalism and the international research network of Women In Militarized Conflict Zones. She is also currently a partner of an EU research programme on ‘Borderscapes’.

Nira Yuval-Davis has written extensively on theoretical and empirical aspects of intersected nationalisms, racisms, fundamentalisms, citizenships, identities, belonging/s and gender relations in Britain & Europe, Israel and other Settler Societies. Among her written and edited books are Woman-Nation-State, 1989, Racialized Boundaries, 1992, Unsettling Settler Societies, 1995, Gender and Nation, 1997, Warning Signs of Fundamentalisms, 2004, The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations, 2011.