In 2007, the editorial team introduced the Gender, Place and Culture Annual Award for New and Emerging Scholars with funds supplied by Taylor & Francis. The award is targeted at emerging researchers in feminist geographies who are trying to establish research careers and create research momentum.
The editorial team of Gender, Place and Culture is pleased to announce the award winners of this annual award. This year the editors agreed to share the award between two candidates who both were deserving in terms of their financial need and the quality of their intended presentations. They are: Razan Ghazzawi, Postdoctoral Fellow at Forum Transregionale Studien EUME, Germany, and Nohely Guzmán N., Doctoral Candidate at the Department of Geography, University of California Los Angeles. They will use the award to present papers at International Studies Association and XIV SALSA Biennial Conference 2023.
Congratulations and best wishes for your continued work in the field of feminist geography!
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Title and abstract of Razan Ghazzawi’s paper:
Anti-militarization in Syria as a Queer Cartography
Drawing on ethnographic research with eight self-identified LGBTQ Syrian and Palestinian artists, students, activists, and asylum seekers in Lebanon, this paper centers queer and trans refusal to join the Syrian military in the context of counter-revolution as a queer cartography of protest in Syria. It looks at the intersection of queerness, feminist geography, militarization, and the ‘war on terror’ narrative in understanding the sexual politics of the Syrian war. Drawing on indigenous feminist geographies (Hammami 2014, Shalhoub-Kevorkia 2008) and cultural queer feminist geographers (Gopinath 2018), the paper presents an oral history narrative of LGBTQ Syrian and Palestinian asylum seekers in Lebanon who fled the war as fugitive runaways from the Syria Arab Military in the context of state repression against 2011 popular protests. In doing so, it explores queer cartographies of anti-militarization protests as a site for queer and trans protest and resistance against authoritarian military regimes following the Arab Spring. Finally, it critiques the colonial ‘war on terror’ narrative that advocates war logic as an emancipatory path for Syria, as claimed by queer colonial organizations and feminists in the west and diaspora more broadly.
Biographical note
Razan Ghazzawi (they/she) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Forum Transegionale Studien in the academic year 2022/23. They hold an MA in Gender, Sexuality, and the Body from the University of Leeds, UK, and an MA in Comparative Literature from Balamand University in Lebanon. They also received their Ph.D. in Gender and Sexuality Studies from the University of Sussex, Brighton. In their thesis “Pedagogies of Everyday Queer Protests: Rethinking Political Subjectivity and Violence in Syria and Lebanon 2011-2021,” they examine everyday queer and trans encounters at checkpoints, prisons, and queer asylum in the contexts of the “war on terror” and the “refugee crisis.” Ghazzawi is working on their first book monograph on anti-military and anti-carceral queer and nonbinary protest in Syria and Lebanon in the context of the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘refugee crisis.’ They are a former prisoner from the Syrian state and an award winner of Frontline Defender in 2012.
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Title and abstract of Nohely Guzmán N’s paper:
Embodied Territorialities: Amazonian Indigenous Girls’ Feminist Body-Mapping
and the affective geographies of Chinese infrastructure in Bolivia
World hegemony—increasingly disputed by China—has been widely analyzed in a macro-structural context, rather than in the lives and bodies of those who experience their effects in an intimate way. Although the rapid expansion of Chinese finance in Latin America has attracted the attention of academics and policy-makers, few have approached the territories themselves in which Chinese capital has settled. This work charts the experiences of indigenous girls from the Santa Ana de Museruna community in the Multi-Ethnic Indigenous Territory (TIM) in the Bolivian Amazon traversed by the construction of a highway built by a Chinese company. Drawing from feminist participatory mapping, I analyze three body-territory maps made by indigenous girls narrating the transformations they experience with the capitalist intervention of their territory. Through a community-centered approach, I explore the embodied intersections of gender, age, and race in their intimate connections with territoriality and global dynamics of power that are of interest to feminist geographies. This case informs the daily-life violence of indigenous women, girls, and communities impacted by Chinese capital, the renegotiation and restructuring of community life around the company and its workers, and both the hope and damage experienced in the body-territory in this process. I argue that these maps offer insights to the understanding of the complexity of the Chinese presence in Latin America from an indigenous feminist perspective, and highlight the need to destabilize top-down approaches that omit the spatial, bodily, and affective processes of the transnational capital now led by China.
Biographical note
Nohely Guzmán is a Bolivian PhD student and anti-colonial feminist organizer in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the co-founder of Jasy Renyhê, an ecofeminist organization based in La Paz, Bolivia. In 2021, Nohely obtained her Master’s degree in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Stemming from six years of work with Amazonian Indigenous communities, Nohely’s research centers on the intimate geopolitics of Indigenous women and girls experiencing the transformations brought by the construction of a highway by a Chinese company across their territory. Her work is rooted in Indigenous Latin American conceptualizations on embodiment, territorial kinship, and autonomous life-politics that set in motion epistemologies of cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) and senti-pensar con los pies en la tierra (feeling-thinking with the feet on the ground).
Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 