Rethinking Transnational Feminisms: Political Economy, Geopolitics, and Feminist Solidarities Across Borders

The 2027-28 Pembroke Seminar

Seminar leaders: 
Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies Nadje Al-Ali
Professor of East Asian Studies Lingzhen Wang

Unsettling U.S.-centric theories and dominant conceptualizations, this seminar places transnational feminisms at the center of critical inquiry into both historical and contemporary global power structures. It advances a materially grounded and politically engaged transnational feminist framework that underscores the constitutive role of political economy, geopolitics, and sociocultural formations in producing various forms of inequality across borders. Over the course of the year, the seminar will attend to diverse genealogies, political struggles, and sites of knowledge production to conceive of broad social coalitions capable of challenging entrenched structures of power and (neo)imperial geopolitical arrangements. While attentive to multiple regions, the seminar will interrogate Eurocentric universalism by focusing in particular on Asia as a dynamic geopolitical site and method through which to rethink transnational feminisms.