The Department of Gender Studies
2013-2014 Public Lecture Series
presents
Dusica Ristivojevic
Gender Issues and International Politics:
The Case of One-child Policy and Chen Guangcheng
Thursday, September 12, 10 a.m., Popper Room
Mr. Chen Guangcheng is a self-taught Chinese lawyer and activist best known in the West for his campaigning against the violations of Chinese women’s reproductive rights under the so-called One-child policy. After spending four years in prison and two years in house arrest, he escaped his detention in April 2012, fled to the US Embassy in Beijing, and came at the center of diplomatic tensions between China and the West. After several weeks of intense negotiations, Mr. Chen and his immediate family managed to leave China for the US, where he settled as a visiting scholar at the School of Law at the New York University. However, in June this year, as the NYU explained, his fellowship has expired and he was asked to leave its premises. Mr. Chen and his family left for Taiwan.
This talk will use the biography of Chen Guangcheng to address the question of what happens with gender issues, social activism and the involved individuals when they become the outspoken “stakes” in international politics.
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Dušica Ristivojević holds a PhD in Comparative Gender Studies from the Central European University. Her dissertation “Gender and Internationalization in China: The case of Nüxue bao (1898)” examined the ways in which gender played a critical role in China’s forcible inclusion into the Western-generated modern world order. She is currently engaged in a comparative research of (the lack of) communication and cooperation between the social activists in China and abroad at the turn of the twentieth and the turn of the twenty-first centuries. Her main research interests include the dynamics of China-West encounters, social and ideological changes in modernizing/globalizing China, and the politics of women’s and human rights. As a recipient of the Chevening Fellowship Dušica was a visiting graduate student at the Oxford University, and had spent extended research periods at the Peking University and Academia Sinica. She was a Lecturer in International Development at the Dong-a University in South Korea, and has published her articles in the Journal of Chinese Studies, Zhongguo Yanjiu and Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies.