Published: November 16, 2008
Paying Attention to Women Makes Us Smarter About the Iraq War
Ethics and The War on Terror
US academic Cynthia Enloe, Research Professor of International Development and Women's Studies at Clark University in Massachusetts, is to give a public lecture at the University of Leicester entitled: 'Paying Attention to Women Makes Us Smarter About the Iraq War'.
Professor Enloe's keynote talk on November 13 will be part of a seminar which is one of the final events in a series funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, entitled 'Ethics and the War on Terror: Politics, Multiculturalism and Media'.
The seminar's main focus will be gender issues related to the three main themes of the series: politics, multiculturalism and media. The two-day event will feature around 20 presentations from researchers and practitioners from around the UK.
Prof. Enloe is the author of ten books including The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire and Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link and she is currently writing a new book on women and the Iraq War.
'Most of the observers making judgements of the Iraq War, pro or con, pay almost no attention to women - Iraqi women, British women, American women,' Prof. Enloe explains.
'As a result, these assessments woefully underestimate what it takes to wage this war. Taking women seriously makes it harder to justify military violence in the name of women's empowerment and harder to minimize "collateral damage." Paying attention to women, in all their diversity, also reveals that wars take far longer to "end" than conventional wisdom imagines.'
The seminar series has adopted an interdisciplinary approach to ethical dimensions of the war on terror. It involves policy-related and practitioner participants as well as academics and research students
The ESRC research seminar series 'Ethics and the War on Terror: Politics, Multiculturalism, and Media' is coordinated by Gillian Youngs (University of Leicester), Simon Caney (University of Oxford) and Heather Widdows (University of Birmingham).
The talk by Prof. Cynthia Enloe takes place on Thursday 13th November at 5-6pm in the Rattray Lecture Theatre at the University of Leicester. It is co-hosted by the Department of Media and Communication and the Centre for Diplomatic and International Studies, and is open to the public and free of charge.
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