On Wednesday 22.2.2023, 16-18 (Helsinki time), Joanna Bourke will be the guest speaker in the Christina Research Seminar. This session will be chaired by Professor Marianna Muravyeva.
Joanna Bourke (Birkbeck): Sexual Violence in War
Abstract: Violence is an essentially contested concept. Never is this more the case than during war. Military conflict not only lowers the threshold at which interpersonal violence can take place, but it also dramatically alters the nature of that violence. In this talk, Joanna Bourke explores these issues in relation to sexual violence. She focuses on questions of language, ethics, the politics of representation, trauma, and gender. She concludes by asking what can be done to eradicate sexual violence during armed conflicts as well as civilian contexts.
Bio: Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck University of London, and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is also the Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College. Bourke is the Principal Investigator and Director of an interdisciplinary Wellcome Trust-funded project entitled ‘SHaME’ (Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters, which explores medical and psychiatric aspects of sexual violence). She is the prize-winning author of fifteen books, as well as over 120 articles in academic journals. Among others, she is the author of Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War, An Intimate History of Killing (which won the Wolfson Prize and the Fraenkel Prize), Fear: A Cultural History, What it Means To Be Human, The Story of Pain, and Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-Play are Invading Our Lives. In 2022, Reaktion Books published Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence (also published by Chicago University Press) and Oxford University Press published Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People. Her books have been translated into Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, and Greek.
The talk will be organized as a hybrid event. Helsinki-based participants can attend the talk on campus. It will take place in the University of Helsinki’s Main Building, room U3032. Remote participant can join the talk via Zoom.
Please register to the event via this form: https://forms.gle/ohuRetpbPCWZ9H7V6
Those who have registered to attend via Zoom will get the event link before the event.
We look forward to seeing you there!
The Christina Research Seminar is an open advanced seminar focused on interdisciplinary gender studies chaired by Professor Tuija Pulkkinen. The seminar is organized as part of the doctoral programme of Gender, Culture and Society (SKY) by Gender Studies, University of Helsinki.