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Time Out: Sexual Politics and the Temporal Maps of International Development

When:
Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street

No booking required

Time Out: Sexual Politics and the Temporal Maps of International Development
Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in association with Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality (BiGS)

Speaker: Dr Tara Atluri, Visiting Fellow, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
Chair: Dr Kate Maclean, Birkbeck, University of London

Free event open to all: Book your place

This workshop will discuss the implications of ideological constructions of time, space, gender, and sexuality in an International development context.

In 2011, British Prime Minister David Cameron suggested that aid to countries in the Global South should be dependent on their institution of LGBTQ rights. Using a language of temporal 'progress' Cameron stated, 'I think we are all on a journey, and it is our job to help these countries on their journey...' Ideas of unified time were used to justify cutting aid to some of the poorest people in the world. Ironically, it was colonial law that first criminalized queer desire in many formerly colonized countries.

The workshop will ask who puts the 'progress' in 'progressive politics'? It will further discuss how sexualities are imagined temporally and spatially and how this impacts global politics, law, and economic policy.

Tara Atluri is a lecturer at the Ontario College of Art and Design University and is a Visiting Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and GEDS, Birkbeck, University of London (January - March 2016). Her current research interests include sexualities and urban space in India and she has recently published Āzādī: Sexual Politics and Postcolonial Worlds (Demeter Press, 2016)

Kate Maclean is Lecturer in Social Geography at Birkbeck. She is a feminist geographer who has worked on microfinance, rural livelihoods, the financial crisis, contraband and urban regeneration, mostly with a focus on Latin America. Her latest book is Social Urbanism and the Politics of Violence: The Medellin Miracle, published by Palgrave.

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