Women's Rights to Land and the Challenge of the Commons

<strong>Centre for the Study of Social Systems School of Social Sciences</strong> <strong>CSSS Colloquium</strong> <strong>Prof. Nivedita Menon</strong> (Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, JNU) a talk on <strong>Women's Rights to Land and the Challenge of the Commons</strong> Date : <strong>October 29, 2015</strong> <strong>Abstract: </strong>Bringing women into the ambit of individual property rights has long been one of the key issues in feminist practice and scholarship. This paper focuses on land ownership and the growing recognition that in the face of large scale land acquisitions for corporate globalization, the only real challenge to capitalist ambitions is posed by collective ownership of land and strong assertions of the commons. This paper attempts to think through what this recognition would mean for feminist understandings of individual land rights for women. Bio Data: Nivedita Menon, Professor at Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, is the author of Seeing like a Feminist (2012). Apart from research papers in Indian and international journals, her previous books are Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law (2004); and a book co-written with Aditya Nigam Power and Contestation: India after 1989 (2007). She also has two edited volumes Gender and Politics in India (1999) and Sexualities (2007); and a book co-edited with Aditya Nigam and Sanjay Palshikar Critical Studies in Politics. Exploring Sites, Selves, Power (2013). She is a regular commentator on contemporary issues on the collective blog kafila.org (of which she is one of the founders), and active in democratic politics in India. She also has translated fiction and non-fiction from Hindi and Malayalam into English, and from Malayalam into Hindi, and received the AK Ramanujan Award for translation instituted by Katha.