Bringing real change for women

by Ayesha Khan

February 12, 1983, protesters being attacked by the police at the famous WAF demonstration in Lahore. Photo credit: Rahat Ali Dar

These thoughts were recently part of a talk I gave at IBA to a class of undergraduate Social Science students on issues in women and development.

The 1995 World Conference on Women held in Beijing, recognized that women’s empowerment was a social justice issue, valuable in its own right and not primarily a tool to further the goals of development. Feminists from around the world had been lobbying for years within the UN, their own governments and with other international organizations, to have their language of social transformation, the goal of feminism, adopted by the Conference.

Roma left us!

by Hussain Bux Mallah

Many ethnographers believe that a critical analysis of one’s own position in society and with respect to one’s research subjects is a good place to start work. My work at the Collective on social exclusion and marginalization spurred me to examine my own family’s narrative about its past and its position in the hierarchy of occupational and kinship groups in its surroundings.

Hamza Alavi can lead you out of crisis

by Hassan Zaib Abbasi

Hamza Alavi (1921 - 2003) Photo Credit: http://tinyurl.com/qf4b2hb

Commentators in electronic and print media churn out analysis after analysis: dissecting events, building their theses, and offering speculative explanations of political happenings. One need only catch a glimpse of a television channel and it becomes clear that Pakistan is in crisis. Not because the state faces imminent danger of collapse but because of the frequency of seemingly unexplainable events whose true meaning always remains just slightly out of grasp despite, or perhaps because of, the efforts of numerous “analysts”.