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Symposium on Gender and Sexuality in Africa

This symposium will bring together researchers in political science and politics who focus on key questions emerging from Africa. The scholars and researchers presenting in this symposium will focus on sub-Saharan Africa but will address themes that affect the broader continent. Presentations will cover a variety of issues, including the role of gender and sexuality in political participation; the emergence of women as local, national, and international leaders; gender and sexual identity within and across formal and informal institutions; the relationship between human rights and women’s rights; discrimination in economic and social relations; gender and migratory patterns within Africa; and the gendered experience of conflict.
 
The symposium is intended to insert considerations of gender in the research on Africa ongoing at Yale, and to address the many critical issues raised by considerations of gender and sexuality in the African context.

The invited participants from outside Yale include:
Amanda Clayton, Vanderbilt University
Jessica Gottlieb, Texas A & M University
Amal Fadlalla, University of Michigan
Kara Ellerby, University of Delaware
Sanyu Mojola, University of Colorado
Crystal Biruk, Oberlin College
Lyn Ossome, Makerere Institute of Social Research
Josephine Akihire, Makarere University
Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, Babcock University
Sabrina Karim, Emory Univeristy
Graeme Reid (Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Yale and Human Rights Watch)
Basile Ndjio, Princeton University
Martha Johnson, Mills College
Amanda Robinson, Ohio State University

Yale participants include:
Inderpal Grewal (Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)
Luisa Lombard (Anthropology)
Alice Miller (Yale Law and Public Health)
Stephanie Newell (English)
Kathryn Lofton (Religious Studies)

Generously supported by the Hakeem and Myma Belo-Osagie Forum on Contemporary Africa and sponsored by MacMillan Center, the Council on African Studies, the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and the Political Science Department at Yale.