Call for papers for Women, Gender and Research; Special Issue „Gender and Development +15 – from Policy to Practice“, spring 2011

We call for papers for an English special issue of Kvinder, Køn & Forskning which focus on one or more of the following aspects: present new research on current gender and development strategies; contribute to a critical revisiting of the key concepts and their application in development work; provide inputs and inspiration for researchers and practitioners; and/or reflect on the role of research and researchers within this area.

Kvinder, Køn & Forskning is an interdisciplinary journal on gender research in the fields of culture, society, nature, health, and technology. The journal is mainly aimed at researchers in the field of gender scholarship but may also be relevant for other researchers and students as well as for various interest groups et al. The aim of the journal is to reflect the depth and scope of gender research in Denmark. The articles deal with theoretical, methodological, and empirical issues. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning constitutes a forum for scholarly debate on theories, methodologies, and interpretations.

Theme editors: Lene Bull Christiansen, Diana Højlund Madsen and Lise Rolandsen Agustín

Deadline for abstracts: 1st of September 2010. Deadline for articles: 1st of November 2010.

Send abstracts and articles to sub-editor Michala Hvidt Breengaard: redsek@soc.ku.dk

Over the last decades, many scholars have tried to depict the gender perspective within development and foreign aid policies. The debates and arguments have ranged from the ‚women in development‘ perspective (WID), with its attempts to place women on the development agenda, over the ‚gender and development‘ perspective (GAD), highlighting gender power asymmetries, to the ‚gender mainstreaming‘ strategy, which aims to assess the gender implications of any given policy or policy proposal.

This special issue aims to critically review the current gender and development strategies. It focuses on the following issues:

1. the gender and development discourse in a theoretical perspective;
2. the strategy of gender mainstreaming; and
3. empowerment as ideology and practice.

Theoretical debates around the gender and development discourse have mainly been informed by postcolonial and deconstructivist critiques of the universalist aspirations in the global feminist movement, the western conceptualisation of ‚gender‘ and the evolutional underpinnings of ‚development‘. Taking this critical legacy as a point of departure, the special issue encourages contributions which critically examine the way in which gender and development strategies have been translated from policy into institutionalised practice as well as the role of gender research(ers) in this process. Has the ideological substance of the gender and development strategies disappeared in the process of institutionalisation? And to what extent can we perceive these strategies as ‚empty signifiers‘ in theory and practice? We wish to critically engage the question of whether gender mainstreaming and the empowerment strategy have fulfilled their transformative objectives. Has gender mainstreaming lead to ‚empowerment‘ or ‚depolitisation‘? Does empowerment imply a more ‚participatory/democratic‘ development? Analyses of the concept of gender mainstreaming also involve focusing on the role of local bureaucracies and the so-called ‚femocrats‘, as the strategy becomes translated from one institutional or geographical context to the next. In which direction will gender mainstreaming be shaped by the different actors embracing the strategy (i.e. the donor community, the national gender machineries and the women’s movements)? And how are institutions and organisations equipped to deal with the strategy?