Seminar: "Analyzing Gender Across Transnational Spaces and Migrations"

"Analyzing Gender Across Transnational Spaces and Migrations: Gendered Geographies of Power Framework"

Speaker: Assoc. Prof. Sarah J. MAHLER (Florida International University, Department of Anthropology)

Date: June 10, 2013
Time: 13:30-15:00
Place: Dolapdere Campus, Board of Trustees Room

Gender is widely acknowledged as one of the most important ways that people differentiate ourselves.  Much social science of the past several decades has been devoted to understanding gender but the majority of this research suffers from “methodological nationalism” – a frame of analysis limited to the nation-state.  Yet many people migrate across national borders and even if they do not, ideas and gendered images flow transnationally via television, the Internet, movies, etc.  Therefore, to understand gender transnationally we need analytical models that span social scales—such as from family life within localities and as lived by transnational migrants. Gendered Geographies of Power (GGP) is a multi-scalar framework developed especially to address the complexities of gender lived locally to globally.  In this presentation GGP will be discussed in detail and also through examples.

Contact: migcentre@bilgi.edu.tr / 0212 311 53 50

Biography:
Sarah J. Mahler is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and former Director of the Center for Transnational and Comparative Studies at Florida International University in Miami. She teaches in FIU’s interdisciplinary social science department – Global & Sociocultural Studies. For most of her career, her research and publications have focused on Latin American and Caribbean migration to the United States and the development of transnational ties between migrants and their home communities.  She and colleagues pioneered bringing gender into this transnational perspective. In recent years, she has returned to an early inquietude about enculturation, addressing the “nature” of culture by emphasizing how young children acquire culture and how this understanding can and should dramatically impact how we study and also do culture.  This perspective and many of its implications appear in her newest book Culture as Comfort (2013) and on her website: cultureascomfort.com.  She has also embarked on translating the book’s ideas into virtual and augmented reality applications—to aid people to overcome cultural inhibitions by practicing cultural discomforts in cyberspace.