Anne Runyan, Ph.D.
anne.runyan@uc.edu
University of Cincinnati
Address: Department of Political Science, University of Cincinnati, PO Box 210375
City: Cincinnati, OH, Ohio - 45221-0375
Country: United States
About Me:
Anne Sisson Runyan, PhD in International Relations from The American University, is Professor of Political Science and Faculty Affiliate and former Head of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Among the progenitors of the field of Feminist International Relations and a recipient of the Eminent Scholar Award from the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the International Studies Association, she has authored, co-authored, or co-edited Global Gender Politics, Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium (4 editions), Gender and Global Restructuring (2 editions, 3rd in progress), and Feminist (Im)Mobilities in Fortress(ing) North America, and she has published widely on feminist world politics and transnational feminisms in journals and edited volumes. She is currently Vice President-Elect of the International Studies Association, a former chair of the Committee on Women in the Academic Professions of the American Association of University Professors, and serves on several editorial boards. As a former associate editor of the International Feminist Journal of Politics, she organized and hosted its fifth annual conference on "Decolonizing Knowledges in Feminist World Politics" and guest-edited the special issue arising from it. She is currently working on a book on gendered nuclear colonialism arising from initial research conducted as a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in North American Integration at York University, Canada and co-directing a gender study for the City of Cincinnati as part of a Cities for CEDAW (UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women) initiative. She has received multiple external and internal awards and grants, taught in the US, Canada, Mexico, Egypt, and The Netherlands, and guest-lectured widely. She directs the Feminist Comparative and International Politics doctoral concentration in Political Science and formerly directed the Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati.
Research Interests
Gender and Politics
Political Economy
Political Violence
Human Rights
Energy And Climate Policy
Feminist International Relations
Feminist Security Studies
Indigenous Feminism(s)
Globalization
Gender And Politics
Countries of Interest
Canada
United States
Mexico
My Research:
Anne Sisson Runyan has devoted the past thirty years to theoretical and empirical work on how gender (in relation to other power relations such as class, race, nation, and sexuality) discursively and materially shape global political economy, security, and governance assumptions, practices, and priorities, and how these shape and (re)produce gender and other inequalities. She has engaged an array of feminist and critical theorizing and in a range of methods, such as participant observation, discursive, NGO and elite interviewing, and survey research, to conduct this work. She has also worked collaboratively with scholars and activists in several parts of the world to develop feminist critiques of and approaches to international politics as well as transnational feminist practices and pedagogies. Her current work on the impact of the nuclear fuel cycle, and particularly nuclear waste, on indigenous peoples and women and their resistances this as well as how local jurisdictions can enact international women's and human rights conventions also have particular policy implications.
Publications:
Journal Articles:
Nuclear colonialism, or the exploitation of Indigenous lands and peoples to sustain the nuclear fuel cycle from uranium mining and refining to nuclear energy and weapons production and the dumping of the resulting nuclear waste, occurs in many parts of the world and has generated considerable protest. This article focuses on a contemporary and ongoing case of nuclear colonialism in Canada: attempts to site two national deep geological repositories (DGRs) for nuclear waste on traditional First Nations land in Southwestern Ontario near the world’s largest operational nuclear power plant. Through histories of the rise of nuclear power and nuclear waste policy-making and their relationship to settler colonialism in Canada, as well as actions taken by the Saugeen Ojibway Nation (SON) and white settler anti-nuclear waste movements, the article explores how gender is at work in nuclear colonialism and anti-nuclear waste struggles. Gender is explored here in terms of the patriarchal nuclear imperative, the appropriation of Aboriginal land through undermining Aboriginal women’s status and the problematic relationship between First Nations and white settler women-led movements in resistance to nuclear waste burial from a feminist decolonial perspective
The article begins with a question about the value of revitalising the equation between sexual/intimate violence and terrorism in the current neoliberal/post-feminist political and epistemological landscape. We argue that the intensifying international interest in sexual violence, and an accompanying hyper-visual imagery, is implicated in the cauterisation of critical thought about sexual violence. We offer the more mobile and expansive concept of sexed violence to “unthink” dominant narratives that reproduce heteronormativity and white, Western hegemony. Through an analysis of the film Unwatchable, we consider why non-white raced bodies consistently materialise as less “comprehensible” as violatable than white bodies. We further suggest that a move to sexed violence can help to think more critically about both sexual violence and feminism.
In this article we explore questions about feminism and violence to constructively complicate understandings about this relationship. Feminism is conventionally positioned as oppositional to direct and structural violences, importantly so, as this has been seen key to feminism's viability as a constructive knowledge project. Yet there are increasingly persistent concerns about epistemic, juridical and other violences circulating around feminism, which render feminism's role in the production of oppositional knowledge and politics suspect. This is especially the case where western feminist ideas have been problematically taken up in neoliberal global policy making and for militarized human rights interventions. As feminist international relations scholars troubled by such associations, we investigate – via an exploration of three provocative feminist texts – how feminism is perceived to be both violated and violating by its contemporary imbrication in the violences of neoliberalism and global governance. We further suggest that metaphors of feminized corporeality, which infuse representations of feminism in these texts (especially in its western homogenized governance form), inhibit the destabilizing potential of feminism through its harmful associations with the ‘failing’ female body. This bodily shaping of feminism, which we examine by following a ‘trail of blood’, tells us something important about the relationship between feminism and violence, about recurring discursive and theoretical closures around feminism and about the possibilities for reinventions of feminism to unsettle the violent degradations, which feminists insistently reveal and decry.
Books Written:
Accessible and student-friendly, Global Gender Politics analyzes the gendered divisions of power, labor, and resources that contribute to the global crises of representation, violence, and sustainability. The author emphasizes how hard-won attention to gender and other related inequalities in world aff airs is simultaneously being jeopardized by new and old authoritarianisms and depoliticized through reducing gender to a binary and a problem-solving tool in global governance. The author examines gendered insecurities produced by the pursuit of international security and gendered injustices in the global political economy and sees promise in transnational struggles for global justice.
Since the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) tensions concerning immigration trends and policies, which continued to escalate at the turn of the millennium resulted in revised national security policies in Mexico, Canada, and the United States. These tensions have catalyzed the three governments to rethink their political and economic agendas. While national feminist scholarship in and on these respective countries continue to predominate, since NAFTA, there has been increasing feminist inquiry in a North American regional frame. Less has been done to understand challenges of the hegemonies of nation, region, and empire in this context and to adequately understand the meaning of (im)mobility in people's lives as well as the (im)mobilities of social theories and movements like feminism. Drawing from current feminist scholarship on intimacy and political economy and using three main frameworks: Fortressing Writs/Exclusionary Rights, Mobile Bodies/Immobile Citizenships, and Bordered/Borderland Identities, a handpicked group of established and rising feminist scholars methodically examine how the production of feminist knowledge has occurred in this region. The economic, racial, gender and sexual normativities that have emerged and/or been reconstituted in neoliberal and securitized North America further reveal the depth of regional and global restructuring.
Divided into Sightings, Sites and Resistances, this book examines: the disciplining politics of race, sexuality and modernity under securitized globalization, including case studies on domestic workers in Hong Kong heteronormative development policies and responses to the crisis of social reproduction and colonizing responses to AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa migration, human rights and citizenship, including studies on remittances, the emergence of neoliberal subjectivities among rural Mexican women, Filipina migrant workers and women’s labor organizing in the Middle East and North Africa feminist resistance, incorporating the latest scholarship on transnational feminism and feminist critical globalization movement activism, including case studies on men’s violence on the Mexico/US border, pan-indigenous women’s movements and cyberfeminism. Providing a coherent and challenging approach to the issues of gender and the processes of globalization in the new millennium, this important text will be of interest to students and scholars of IPE, international relations, economics, development and gender studies.