"Gendered Citizenship: Understanding Gendered Violence in Democratic India," a talk presented by Natasha Behl, assistant professor, at the School of Social & Behavioral Sciences, Arizona State University.

Prof. Behl explains why the promise of democratic equality remains unrealized, and identifies potential ways to create more egalitarian relations in liberal democracies and the discipline of political science. This intellectual endeavor has demanded that she cross disciplinary boundaries and challenge epistemological and methodological norms in political science to understand the gendered and raced nature of politics as a practice and political science as a discipline.

She uses interpretive and feminist methods to examine what are often assumed to be neutral concepts, objective methodologies, and universal institutions, and demonstrate that these very concepts, methodologies, and institutions are gendered and raced such that they determine who enjoys democratic inclusion, who commands academic authority, and who is most vulnerable to violence. Her scholarship, teaching, and service seeks to make marginalized individuals central to the process of theorization, working to make societies and institutions, including the academy, more inclusive.

Gendered Citizenship: Understanding Gendered Violence in Democratic India, is published with Oxford University Press. Behl's research is also published in Feminist Formations, Space & Polity, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Journal of Narrative Politics, and Journal of Punjab Studies.

Sponsored by the JD Lewis Memorial Lectureship Fund