The IGS Community (based at Lady Margaret Hall) comprises a diverse group of academics from different disciplinary backgrounds who work in various areas of specialization. We consist of one Director and one Administrator, fifteen Research Associates and the occasional Junior Research Associate (a position for pre-doctoral scholars). Other IGS categories nurture linkages with academics across University faculties but also with scholars outside Oxford. We run a Visiting Research Fellowship programme at Lady Margaret Hall and often mentor and host Visiting Fellows through other partnered Academic Visitor programmes. Since 2012, we have been hosting a Gender in Burmese Studies programme, in response to the IGS Patron Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s request for IGS contribution to Burmese educational reforms. In 2015, we added a new programme, the Open Society Foundations-funded ‘Global Dialogues on Women’s Empowerment in Eurasia Contexts Programme’, which has a geographical focus on Central Asia and the (Southern) Caucasus.
As diverse as our community is we are bound by a shared assumption. This assumption holds that gender-critical turns have shaped – and indeed continue to shape – all of our academic enterprises.
Our Research Associates and Research Fellows conduct projects in Burma, China, Italy, Liberia, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Turkey, Tanzania, Britain, and beyond. Topics researched include political economy; climate change; forced migration and impact on family structure; the politics of aid and NGO involvement; faith-based humanitarianism; alternative feminisms; NATO and political masculinities; gendered memory and oral traditions; gender-based violence, and refugee crises.
IGS Research Associates whose area of study relate particularly closely to the study of War and Peace include Matthew Hurley, Fenella Porter, Angela Raven-Roberts, and Kerrie Thornhill.
Most recently, Research Associates and Friends of the Centre – Shirley Ardener, Fiona Armitage-Woodward, and Lidia Dina Sciama – edited a volume on War and Women across Continents: Autobiographical and Biographical Experiences with Berghahn Books (2016).
