Women & War: A Feminist Podcast

Women in regions affected by war and forced displacement are highly visible in media accounts. Yet, their resistance against different forms of violence – from so-called domestic abuse to large-scale state violence – often goes unrecognized. Women & War is a platform to learn about powerful women’s struggles for liberation, justice and peace. The podcast amplifies critical contemporary feminist work in the field of war, violence, colonialism, and forced migration. The invited guests – who are engaged feminist academics and activists - speak about legacies of genocide, femicide, occupation, and invasion in the context of places like Armenia, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Palestine, Pakistan and beyond. In addition to providing background and sharing knowledge, the guests reflect on their own scholarship and discuss contemporary knowledge production on women’s resistance. Together, guest and host counter Orientalist and patriarchal narratives and instead center women’s practices of resistance and collective struggle, past and present. While offering historical context to contemporary wars and conflicts in the region, Women & War seeks to be a space to build transnational feminist solidarity.The podcast is not detached from political events and developments. In fact, recent developments such as the 2021 handover of Afghanistan to the Taliban or the Turkish state’s military operations in three parts of Kurdistan over the last years were among the events that sparked the idea to launch this project. These and other experiences discussed in the episodes illustrate why it is crucial to view gender as a central, rather than secondary question in our understanding of political conflicts.This podcast is hosted by political sociologist Dr Dilar Dirik, Junior Research Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre and Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. This project has been made possible through the University of Oxford's Public Engagement with Research Fund.

Episodes

#6 State Violence, Militarism and Gender in Pakistan

The arms industry is widely known to be one of the most corrupt and deadly sectors in the world. Often exempt from transparency and accountability, this industry produces the weapons and technology necessary for the wars that kill, disappear or...

July 01, 2022 • Episode 6 • 1:48:30

#5 Violence and Resistance in the Lives of Kurdish Women: From Dêrsim to Rojava

Historically, the Turkish state's relationship to women at the margins of its power has been characterized by violence and dispossession. Even as the Turkish Republic, founded in 1923, brought about progressive reforms in society, such as educa...

July 01, 2022 • Episode 5 • 1:21:17

#4 Palestinian Women's Struggles against Colonization & Patriarchy

Palestinian women have a long history of struggling on multiple fronts. Throughout the history of the Israeli occupation, women organized themselves politically, socially, culturally and also militarily in the national liberation struggle. They...

July 01, 2022 • Episode 4 • 1:01:05

#3 Theoretically Speaking: Capitalist Patriarchy and the Gendered War

This episode of Women & War does not focus on one particular context or region, but rather aims to give a sense of the ways in which feminists theorize war, violence, occupation, and colonization. How to connect everyday experiences and lar...

July 01, 2022 • Episode 3 • 1:27:38

#2 Women and Genocide: Insights from the Armenian Case

Knowledge production on genocide has historically tended to downplay or ignore the gendered logics that underpin the phenomenon. This has been challenged by feminist scholarship on war and political violence. The Armenian Genocide ...

July 01, 2022 • Episode 2 • 1:17:16

#1 Women's Struggles in Afghanistan: Hazara Women and the Return of the Taliban

In August 2021, the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan after the US administration under Joe Biden decided to pull out of the country after two decades. As entire infrastructures for politics, civil society, and public services collapsed,...

July 01, 2022 • Episode 1 • 1:18:58

#0: Introduction to Women & War: A Feminist Podcast

Welcome to Women and War: a feminist podcast. This podcast is created by Dilar Dirik, a political sociologist at the University of Oxford (Refugee Studies Centre & Lady Margaret Hall) and has been made possible through funding from the Univ...

June 30, 2022 • Episode 0 • 17:51