COVID-19 and Gender Violence
The COVID-19 Pandemic and the lockdown measures that governments around the world implemented have also brought with them a spike in gender violence. This aspect intersects with the exacerbation of economic, racial, and political violence, among others. In this transnational dialogue between feminist activists and academics from Argentina, Ecuador, India, and Italy, they will address the multiple forms of violence that have crystallized in this global health crisis, and they will discuss the possibilities for action that feminism from different latitudes envision. Moderator: Martha Liliana Espinosa Speakers: Verónica Gago is professor of Sociology at the Instituto de Altos Estudios, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina, and she also teaches Political Science at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She has been visiting Scholar at the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, and is Assistant Researcher at the Argentinian National Council of Research (CONICET). Gago is the author of Feminist International: How to Change Everything (about to be published-Nov.2020 Verso), and Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Tinta Limón 2014, Duke University Press, 2017), and of numerous articles published in journals and books throughout Latin America, Europe and the US. She is a member of the independent radical collective press Tinta Limón. She was part of the militant research experience Colectivo Situaciones, and she is now a member of Ni Una Menos. Maya John teaches at the University of Delhi (India). She has been researching and publishing on the evolution of labour law in colonial and postcolonial India; the relationship between caste, gender and the labour market; the history of educational inequality in India; recent anti-rape agitations in India and gender-specific laws at the workplace. John is actively working with the Gharelu Kamgar Union, a union of domestic workers employed in Delhi-NCR. She is also active in unions of nurses, teachers and other sections of the urban workforce, and is associated with the women's organization, Centre for Struggling Women. Alejandra Santillana Ortiz is a Sociology graduate from Universidad Católica of Ecuador and has a master’s degree in Social Sciences from FLACSO (Social Sciences Latin American Faculty). She is currently a Ph.D. student at Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM) and she is working on her thesis about the political history of Ecuador´s Left-wing in the 70s and 80s. She is part of two work and debate groups of CLACSO (Latin American Council of Social Sciences): Gender, Feminism, and Latin American and Caribbean History Work Network, and Rural Development Critical Studies. Alessandra Spano is a PhD student and assistant to the chair of Political Philosophy at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, in Catania. Her research focuses are on Critical Theory, Marxism and Feminist Thought, especially gravitating toward female thinkers in the US. She has been actively involved in Non una di meno, the Italian network for Women’s strike, and is associated with Migrants’ Coordination and Precarious Dis/connections, collectives which organize migrant, precarious and industrial workers’ struggles, on a local and transnational level.
