Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

argues that the normative construction of participatory democratic governance is predicated on familiar
circuits of colonialism and emergent forms of global racial capitalism. The paper analyzes how affirmative
relations of power of youth empowerment can limit alternative possibilities for collective action and
understandings of democracy.
PANEL SESSIONS 5
5A Negotiating the Imagined “Home”: Personal Experience, Diasporic Communities and Media (Chair, Jane
Rhodes)
Alifa Bandali Rethinking Feminist Homes: The Use of Personal Experience in Non-profit/NGO Work in the
Malaysian Context
The idea of “home” in feminist texts have been taken up to examine personal experience, location and
positionality. Feminist homes have been used to not only consider feminist politics, but also a politics of
location. I use the concept of the feminist home to convey what home could mean for women in nonprofit/NGO
work. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a women’s human rights
organization in Malaysia. It examines the tensions between working from a universal feminist framework
and how the women I interviewed situate their feminisms both inside and outside of their work. I suggest
that their embodied feminisms are entrenched not only through their personal and collected histories, age,
nationality and ethnicity, but also in their occupational location. Their renditions of feminisms are tangled in
a politics of location both professionally and conceptually in their “feminist homes”. This paper utilizes
Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s and Biddy Martin’s “What’s Home Got to Do with It?” to situate women’s
experiences in non-profit/NGO work from their critique in the power and appeal of “home” as a concept
used in feminist literature.
Shima Shahbazi That’s Where Home Is: Transnational Memoir Writers and Decolonizing the Epistemologies of Home
For transnational and diaspora writers, home is not just a geographical location, but also a political and
historical perspective which defines their identity. Home as a concept enriches writing, especially for
minoritized groups. This paper draws on Linda Hutcheon’s “postmodern historiography” (2003) to examine
transnational women writers’ narratives of history. I explore the voices of women minorities in these works
and the capacity of transnational women writers to express a critical, reviewing and revisiting perspective of
history and representations of “home.” I draw on the memoir The Orange Trees of Baghdad written by
Leilah Nadir – a Canadian born Iraqi writer. I argue how Nadir’s micro-narratives of the Iran-Iraq war, the
Gulf war and the American occupation of Iraq enable a critique and questioning of grand-narratives in
history that are defined by dominant discourses of power and represented in the media. Linda Alcoff’s
readings of the concepts “experience” and “testimony” allows for an analysis in the representations of
microhistory from the Iraqi women’s perspective. Leilah Nadir’s memoir attempts to decolonize the
imaginary of “Iraq” in the minds of both Iraqis and non-Iraqis, as both “Home” and “non-home.”
Ehsan Golahmar
about Refugees
Our Home Is not Yours: A Social Semiotic Reading of European and Australian Cartoons
Cartoons are multimodal texts used vastly in different kinds of media today. The multimodality of these texts
paves the way for researchers in the fields of media and cultural studies to employ semiotic frameworks for
126