Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our symposium, hegemonic narratives, global,
national and local dynamics of memory politics and post-conflict societies.
Today, we organised with my colleague Johan Amis.
My name is Jesse Barton Rojava, and I'm a postdoctoral research fellow at the Oxford Department of International Development.
My main area of focus is transitional justice memory, and I have a regional expertise in Southeast Europe.
My colleague Yohanna is a post-doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute and the Czech Academy of Sciences,
and she mainly focuses on the dynamic relationship between collective identity and cultural collective memory, especially in Central Europe.
I really warmly want to welcome you all to our session, which is going to be very long.
We have two sessions today, morning and afternoon with very distinguished speakers,
and we're very, very pleased that a lot of them have joined us from all over the world.
I suppose that is the upside of the current crisis that we are actually able to invite speakers from Australia,
the United States without any additional cost, apart from sometimes timing issues.
Our aim today is to study the sociopolitical aspects of memory,
especially how Barry's dominant or so-called hegemonic narratives are used and misused at the international, national and local levels.
I think we've all seen that interpretations of memory have resurfaced again as an important resource,
both for political actors as well as a mobilisation resource for that is being used in the public sphere.
Today, we will discuss various cases from Northern Ireland Central Zero all the way to Brazil, as well as Afghanistan,
which we will hear about in a little bit more and in the next session, just a few housekeeping emails for today.
And just to help you with the organisation, all of the attendees and we I can now see that there are 52 people online already.
Thank you very much for being on time. So all of you are muted,
which means your mikes are off and your videos Arnold seen or you can see currently
are them are the speakers are the panellists for during the panel sessions,
you're not able to necessarily chat with the panellists.
However, I would encourage you to ask questions in the Q&A through the Q&A function, which you have at the bottom, at the bottom of your screen.
From experience again, I'd encourage you to ask the questions as soon as you can,
because we do tend to have tend to get all the questions at the end of the panel,
and then there's not enough time to actually answer the questions because obviously we need to read them,
engage with them and then pose the panellists the questions.
I would also encourage you during the coffee break and the lunch break when you actually will have the chance to chat you down,
to chat to the panellists, to ask additional questions or if you have any clarifications.
You can also use the chat function. But we will explain this as we go through the day and through the morning.
I also want to encourage you to follow us on social media if you're using Twitter.
We have a Twitter hashtag for today, which is pagina, which is heat and air.
We will post it in the comments so that you can see it. And also, you can follow me on Yohanna, on Yacine or Yohanna.
This again, we will post it as well as our department and our sponsors.
And let me say here that I really want to thank our sponsors with money. In the end, we didn't really need, but we are.
We're still very grateful that they were willing to sponsor us if this event was going to go offline.
And that is the the founder of my Fellowship Economic and Social Research Council.
We want to thank the Max Planck Institute, the Czech Academy of Scientists.
Obviously, I want to thank very much my department at Oxford Department for International Development that has helped with this organisation,
and we want to also thank South East European studies. Oxford, who is who's always been very supportive of all of our, of all of our work.
Before we go into our first keynote and before you, Hannah actually tells you a little bit more about how we designed this programme.
I'd like to give the floor to the head of Department of International Development in Oxford,
Diego Sanchez, Uncle Jack, who's a very distinguished researcher.
It mainly works in the Global South and Latin America on issues such as inequality or industrial policies,
and I ask him just to say a few words of Welcome to all of you joining us from around the world.
Diego to the floor as the floor is yours on the virtual floor is yours. Thank you, Jesse.
Oh, sorry. Wait, wait, wait a minute.
OK, I'm here. Thank you very much. Yes, and thank you also for the distinguished part.
I have to say that I don't feel distinguished attorney and even less in this time anarchist.
But I I very much appreciated. I am very happy to be here and to to actually have the invitation to say the first few words,
I have to say that I'm very sorry that I cannot say the words actually with you,
all of you in Mansfield Road, because that would be much nicer and discussed.
But it's actually a great opportunity anyway to welcome you all and to celebrate all the work that Jesse and Joanna have done.
So as some of you will know, our department is very much concerned with the politics of development and
thinking about the politics of development from a multidisciplinary perspective.
So if you think about some of the topics we do that goes from how people experience development to how
global and local actors interact to have problems at frame and reframe based on political calculations,
or how we can build more inclusive and stable institutions.
And I think and Jesse and Diana will correct me by that, partly what we will be actually discussing in many ways today,
focussing very much on the role of memory in the way framing takes place and frame means are used, but also used in conflict societies.
Of course, the issue of conflict and post-conflict itself has been at the centre of the department.
I entered when I came in 2008. France is a theworld had to send their own conflict and horizontal inequalities.
But also, George has done a lot of work in in terms of conflict and conflict, in a very different perspective than France is revealing our diversity.
And he has also supervised all kinds of doctoral students doing some of this work.
John Gledhill, that's now post-conflict work.
And of course, this year we were fortunate to have Jesse for the whole year, bringing many of these issues to year as well.
And the conference doesn't just build on our unique tradition.
Spoke for itself, including, for example, in the other side of my life in the Latin American frontier.
And yesterday, Sosa from abroad there, say there's a second reason that I was glad just to gave me the opportunity to actually have the floor at the
beginning and is that these countries very much chose the role that postdoctoral fellows playing academia in general,
but clearly in our department. I think one of the reasons I was very happy to become part of the parliament is very much to assist
and support and even mentor the number of early career academics that we receive every year.
And that leads to all kinds of benefits from us,
from the research to the dynamism to the commitment to communicate better and more original ways again.
This conference is a good example to the promotion of the late I know very well, and I participated in all kinds of discussions at the moment of how,
and these times are uncertain for everyone, but obviously, particularly for early career academics.
I don't want to start the conference with a pessimistic bent,
but obviously from high prices to a difficult labour market to growing demands from
our time like this is largely higher there than it was just three months ago.
But I am one of the people convince an academic and a set of determined that the academic world will
only be successful if we are actually able to create a spaces for early career academics to succeed,
to grow, to create these kinds of conversations, and for all of us to benefit from their ideas that have been dynamism on their teaching experience.
So I was glad to see the conference.
I was glad that just gave me the opportunity to welcome you all,
and I promise at least some of you that we will be able to receive you at some other moment,
hopefully soon in Mansfield Road as well, where we will give you both.
Not very good sandwiches, which is UK style, but also maybe it much better being there, which is also expressed.
So thank you very much and good luck with the whole conference.
Thank you so much, Diego. That was really nice of you and thank you for bringing in the current crisis a little bit in the picture.
I know we brushed over it a little bit. Thank you.
And so now I'd like to finally hand over to Yohanna,
my colleague Johan Avis and a very good friend of mine who is currently in London but otherwise based on Max Planck and the Czech Academy of Sciences.
She will not only say a few words about the programme today and how we designed this conference.
She will also introduce our first keynote speaker that I know everyone's already waiting for.
Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Jesse.
Good morning and warm, welcome to our all, our distinguished panellists and to the audience.
We are very excited that this event, despite the current situation, is taking place today as originally originally scheduled.
Even though online and not in Oxford mentioned,
it was in early autumn when Jesse and I got together to organise and discuss the possibility to
organise an event to bring together different scholars whose work inspires us in one way or another.
And to discuss the topic we both are very passionate about, namely the politics of memory and the memory of politics.
We wanted to reflect on how the past is being constructed for political purposes,
especially in the context of different geographical locations and on different levels of society.
And by doing so, we really ultimately wanted to further explore the intrinsic and dynamic relationship between memory politics and power.
So first, meet in each panel, we wanted to have several countries and at least two different continents represented.
The reason being that while we appreciate the uniqueness of each case study,
we also very strongly believe that there are certain common dynamics that there are certain shared features,
which will become more obvious through juxtaposition.
Secondly, the symposium is divided into three panels, each exploring different nexus between memory,
power and politics on different levels on international, national and local level.
Again, we are very much aware that all these three levels interact simultaneously and that they are mutually reinforcing.
But for organisational and for analytical purposes, we think that this distinction works particularly well on this occasion.
So it's enough about the underlying ideas and logic of the symposium.
And now please let me introduce our first keynote speaker to Jassal.
Fernandes such as that is a professor of political, political economy and sociology at the University of Sydney.
Her work explores social and cultural movements, black popular culture and migrant workers with a focus on the Americas.
In her book Curated Stories, The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling, about which she will tell us herself shortly.
Soochow Brown looks at the uses of storytelling in a range of global movements,
including campaigns by migrant domestic workers and undocumented youth.
The book was published by the Oxford University Press and Sujata.
The Virtual Floor is yours. And Newt.
OK, thank you. Thank you so much to Jesse and Joanna for pulling all of this together, especially given the challenges of the current situation.
Just as one of those examples of one of the challenges my internet went out to this morning and I was told it could be up to 48 hours.
So I have a temporary modem and we're all keeping our fingers crossed, hopefully that it goes off without any hitches.
But you will know in case there's something that that that fits the modem playing up.
But thank you very much. Again, I'm very excited to be a part of this conference and thank you also to the Department of International Development.
All right, so I'm going to share my presentation.
So Malala Yousafzai grew up in the northwestern SWAT district of Pakistan, about 50 miles from the Afghan border.
She was the daughter of an educator who ran a chain of private schools in the area when
the militant Taliban group took over the SWAT Valley and banned girls education in 2008.
The 11 year old Malala was enlisted to write a blog underpinning for the BBC, recounting her experiences.
She wrote about she spoke about education rights to American officials and to grassroots organisations.
As Malala began to address national and international media, our identity was revealed and she received numerous death threats.
On October nine, 2012, she was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman while returning home on a bus after taking an exam.
She survived after numerous rounds of reconstructive surgery and rehabilitation and went on to complete her schooling in Birmingham, England.
In the wake of her shooting, Malala has been the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including the Nobel Peace prise.
She has received honorary citizenships and doctorates, was featured by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world,
has met with many heads of state and has been the subject of a documentary.
He named me Malala. She has been organised as the girl who was shot by the Taliban for wanting to go to school
in the geopolitical crosscurrents of American military intervention in the Middle East,
a rising wave of protest from the Arab revolutions and criticism of the surveillance of Muslim populations in Western countries.
Malala's story was one that could provide reassurance and comfort to a Western public that America was doing the right thing.
Media pundits, politicians and advocacy organisations worked to create an image of Malala as a symbol of women's rights under attack by the Taliban.
A situation requiring Western military intervention in constructing this narrative about
Malala talk show hosts and marketing teams glossed over Malala's opposition to the war,
and they ignored her indictments of American intelligence agencies as having fostered the idea of jihad and arming the Taliban.
She is presented as a deserving, empathetic subject, non-confrontational compared to the angry Muslims who dominate Western media coverage.
The refashioning of Malala's story has become possible within an emerging culture of storytelling
that presents carefully curated narratives with predetermined storylines as a tool of philanthropy,
statecraft and advocacy. Contemporary life is saturated with such initiatives,
from the phenomenon of TEDTalks and humans of New York to the plethora of story
coaching agencies and strategists that have emerged to sustain this culture.
It is no coincidence that the rise of this curated storytelling takes place in an era of Facebook,
which a New Yorker article notes is a medium that promotes the quick and cavalier consumption of others.
Just as Malala is depicted as a typical teen in the film, giggling at a picture of Brad Pitt,
the popular stories in the news feeds and timelines of social media and those that are accessible,
history's ambiguities and political struggles are raised in an effort to create warm and relatable portraits of others who are just like us.
Curated storytelling has extended deep into contemporary social life and political culture and institutions.
The Harvard lecturer and political strategist, Marshall Ganz,
was called upon in 2007 to provide storytelling workshops for Barack Obama's election campaign
and his public narrative trainings have since been used widely by advocacy organisations,
nonprofits, NGOs and immigrant rights groups. Tell Your Story has become an inspirational mantra of the self-help industry.
Narrative research centres have emerged to look at the benefits of storytelling in a range of areas,
from treating depression to helping new immigrants build community.
Philanthropy organisations and foundations produce storytelling manuals and also trainings to their grantees in non-profit storytelling.
The Department of Defence sponsors a project known as narrative networks looking at the strategic implications of narrative for defence missions,
and the US State Department has used story workshops as a means of cultural diplomacy in places like Afghanistan.
What is behind this contemporary boom of instrumental storytelling?
What accounts for the wide diffusion of a storytelling model as a set of globally available trainings, toolkits and protocols?
While most of the literature about storytelling has focussed on the multiple gains to be had from telling stories.
My work takes a more critical look at the storytelling boom alongside a broader shift to neoliberal and financialized economies.
Storytelling is being reconfigured on the model of the market to promote entrepreneurial self making
and is leveraged towards strategic and measurable goals driven by philanthropic foundations.
Curated personal stories shift the focus away from structurally defined axes of oppression and
help to diffuse the confrontational politics of social movements and the conditions to stories.
Reproduce dominant relations of power. And when can they be subversive?
What are the stakes and for whom? In the crafting and mobilisation of storytelling, rather than being the magical elixir we imagine,
might curated stories actually inhibit social change?
Most of the scholarly and popular literature on storytelling extols the virtues of a prototypical and universal storytelling model,
but it does not address the circuits of capital within which stories circulate
or the situation of storytelling within broader neoliberal transformations. In my book, Curated Stories, The Uses and misuses of Storytelling.
I use the concept of the political economy of storytelling to discuss the remaking of storytelling in a context of neo liberalism.
The concept refers to two intertwined activities.
The first is the production, circulation and consumption of stories that are mobilised towards an end,
such as the building of political capital of organisations and bolstering electoral goals and the aims of imperial statecraft.
Stories are structured through protocols and workshops to provide soundbites that can easily be delivered in a newspaper interview.
Voter recruitment drive or illegal hearing. This embedded from the social networks and everyday life of the storyteller.
These stories are circulated in legislative and electoral campaigns and online forums.
A political economy of storytelling is concerned with the conditions of the production of stories within neoliberal orders.
The second activity involves the deployment of stories in processes of subject making.
Scholars of literature have shown how, under liberal modernity,
the story form provided the technology by which social outsiders acquired the capacity to become citizens subjects.
However, I draw on a thickly on coin accounts of neoliberal subjectivity to understand how in a neoliberal era, as Nicholas Rose argues,
subjects of role of role as specified in a new way quote as active individuals asked
to enterprise themselves to maximise the quality of life through acts of choice,
the individual is seen as an active agent in the fabrication of their own existence.
Curated storytelling as a means of producing neoliberal subjects guided by principles of upward mobility, entrepreneurship and self-reliance.
Those who participate in the self making also have class aspirations of upward mobility due to their educational opportunities,
niche position in the economy or their access to structures of funding.
Yet, despite the desire for individual personal advancement, the majority of those who tell their stories are not able to improve their conditions.
This is one of the contradictions that could work to unravel the project of neoliberal subject making.
In my talk today, I want to present a case of curated storytelling from a study of the online Afghan women's writing project,
the IWW p, a series of online creative writing workshops conducted by US based mentors with Afghan women in English.
In March 2010, the Dutch government pulling out from the US led war in Afghanistan.
The CIA released a confidential memo calling for targeted manipulation of public opinion using stories by Afghan women.
The subheading of the memo why counting on apathy might not be enough refers to the indifference amongst the public in Germany and France that
allowed these countries to send more troops a strategy that might not be sustainable if there were more Afghan civilian casualties or public debates.
Rather, the memo calls for the circulation of stories by Afghan women to humanise the military
intervention and build support amongst Western European women for the war effort.
The CIA memo points to the uses of storytelling and imperial statecraft,
with geopolitical strategy and intervention pursued not just through military aggression and economic pressure,
but justified by emotional accounts of oppressed Afghan women victimised by the Taliban.
In May of the previous year, a former staff members in the U.S. Embassy in Kabul had set up the IWW.
The stories composed in the workshops at edited and published on their website, and judging by the comment section I read,
mostly by women in the U.S. and other Western countries such as Canada and Australia.
The project was partly funded by the US State Department, which is not surprising given its resonances with the memo.
The support for these initiatives reflect an embrace of soft power strategies within US foreign policy,
as articulated by the political strategist Joseph Nye,
quoted in Today's Information Age success is the result not merely of whose army wins, but whose story wins.
The idea of Afghan women speaking for themselves and telling their stories without mediation
is central to the mission of the AWP in the history and mission statement on the website,
A.W. found a measure. Hamilton says that in trying to learn about Afghanistan, she found that quote,
the voices of women were primarily available only through the media or their men.
We heard little from them directly. End of quote.
The project is aimed at allowing Afghan women to have a direct voice in the world,
not filtered through male relatives or members of the media, and to put.
At a reading of the Alaskan Women's Poetry in Los Angeles in May 2014,
executive director of the IWW Laurie Nowak emphasised the UNmediated nature of the story.
She said it doesn't go through the media, it doesn't want to prove something that it has been might have said.
The stories go through the channel and equip. The stories go through the channel of channels of IWW P and a published on the website,
where people around the world can read them and says, No, it you know, right?
Then that's what the women in Afghanistan are really thinking.
End of quote This discourse of both intercity is central to the project, but these are true stories by real Afghan women.
But such language conceals the ways in which the stories are strongly mediated through the framing of the workshops.
The selection of the writers, the requirements of funding bodies and the structure of the workshops.
All of these factors shape the voice of Afghan women that appears on the website.
The case of the IWW illustrates the uses of storytelling in imperial statecraft,
telling and publishing stories by Afghan women is a way to amplify certain moderate voices within
Afghanistan at a time when the US was facing growing resistance to its role in interventionist wars.
Those Afghan women who oppose U.S. intervention campaign against the US supported warlords in
the parliament and seek to promote self-determination and economic independence for Afghanistan.
A further marginalised, politically grappling with and analysing empirical details required suturing of the coin account of neoliberal
subjectivity with Maxine and Gramsci accounts of class formation agency and contradiction through telling their stories.
Afghan women did not only present themselves as individuals strivers,
but they were encouraged to see themselves in class terms as part of a new and elite class strata.
Gramsci and frameworks that focus focus on processes of class formation give us the tools to
understand how these actors were integrated into strategies developed by dominant groups.
I use Scrunches concept of transforming small to discuss how storytelling was part of a broader
strategy in the Obama era to draw Muslim populations and others into projects of advocacy,
civic education and electoral participation, and to absorb and demobilise mass antiwar and migrant rights protests.
The focus on class strategies allows us to locate agency not simply within an order of reason,
but in the actual actors themselves, all acting according to their own sets of logics and constraints within a shifting field.
A.W. WP mentors encouraged Afghan women to use their stories to promote voting in the controversial national elections in Afghanistan in 2014,
rather than mass mobilisations that could put pressure on the government and challenge the broader conditions of exploitation.
Storytelling activities narrowed the field of action to the voting booth and Legislature,
thereby reducing the range of independent actions available to groups at a time of growing concern
about the role of the US as human rights violator and aggressive both domestically and abroad.
The stories were also used to promote the image of the US as a benefactor nation.
Afghan women and the readers of Best Stories often reinforced images of the US as a global crusader for women's rights
by tying stories to electoral campaigns and by reinterpreting them through the lens of nationalist mythologies.
A range of groups participated in a process of transport mismo that absorbed and diffused the discontent being oppressed,
being expressed globally and domestically to what American supported neoliberal and imperialist policies.
The grouchy lens allows us to understand not just how power is produced,
but also the contradictions inherent in class strategies that can enable forms of resistance.
Sometimes these tensions crystallise into overt critiques.
The WP had a few writers and readers who criticised the US government for killing Afghans with impunity while claiming to help the country.
Afghan writers pointed out the opportunism of Western human rights and feminist networks,
which glorify a few cases of Afghan women attacked by the Taliban while ignoring others.
And one reader objected to the whole enterprise of Westerners trying to read Afghan women's stories
online with no context and no sense of their own implication in the abuses that take place.
The tensions, criticisms and refusal refusals show the process of neo liberalisation through storytelling as much more
contested and flexible than supplying accounts have allowed for the concept of neoliberal governments.
It is crucial to understand how certain kinds of curated stories have emerged in tandem with a free market economy,
but this government itself is open to challenge and reformulation.
Although neo liberalism may be ascendant, it is not seamlessly reproduced.
Disaggregating actors logics and class processes through my empirical investigations has been one
way to show the contested and contradictory ways that neo liberalism is created and recreated.
Thank you. And you so much for this wonderfully thought-provoking presentation, I really enjoyed the richness of the examples.
So we have now approximately 12 minutes for Q&A.
And while members of the audience gather these fools and post the questions through the Q&A function,
let me take advantage of my role as a chair and go for it.
What is it about stories that makes them so relatable?
What is it about stories that makes them also such a powerful tool?
How to influence others? So I think the powerful thing about stories is that they they speak to us emotionally.
They speak to us emotionally, individually, personally.
We hear a story and it's different to hearing a whole series of statistics which just tell us, you know what has happened?
Give us a narrative about it.
But they don't connect us with that narrative through our emotions, through our through our feelings and on a very individual sense.
And I think that's both the power and peril of stories, right?
Because the problem I'm kind of sort of outlining with the way stories curated stories have
come to be used is that it's precisely that individualised problems that are structural,
that are collective and that are broader than the individual, but by by sort of coming to see this in terms of, you know, the evil Taliban, the evil,
the evil patriot, Afghanistan, Afghan men in the household treating his daughter in a particular way.
We have a much narrower sense through these kinds of stories of actually what's happening now.
I don't think that this is intrinsic to stories themselves, and I think we can think of many examples of very powerful stories that that can pay
attention to broader structures that can get at the at the sort of depths of problems.
But there are also stories out also vulnerable to being used in this way.
And here we have a question from Olga grappling, the question is,
I wonder if some of the books of Khalid Hosseini are actually based on Afghan woman storytelling, especially a thousand splendid songs?
Thank you. You know, that's a really interesting question, I haven't read any of his books,
and I I'm not sure if the question is asking if his storytelling is similar to the kind of storytelling found in the Afghan women's project or,
you know, where that storytelling is coming from.
But unfortunately, because I haven't read any of his books, I can't really compare it to the IWW project.
But but I think that would be a really interesting thing to do is to actually sort of look at some of these narratives within literature.
Someone like Lila Apple-Google has done that in her book on.
It's called I Think Muslim Women Worth Saving.
She looks at popular narratives of Afghan women and compares them to to these kind of these kind of narratives.
These are more coming from official institutions. But unfortunately, since I haven't read it and I'm not too sure that.
Thank you. In relation to the structure and the theme of this of this symposium.
It is possible to say that the stories. Function slightly differently on international, national and grassroots level.
Is there something specific about each of these levels and something which always strikes here?
So one of the things that I argue in my book is that what's so interesting about
what I'm calling curated stories is that they seem to follow a global template.
And one of the things that I do in the book is I trace the origins and the emergence of this global template,
and I trace the origins of them to the sort of human rights commissions of the 1980s,
the truth commissions in Latin America and South Africa in various places where
where a more sort of radical social movement storytelling that we might think of.
You may have heard of Rigoberta Menchu in Guatemala or or people who told stories with the aim of sort of trying to foment radical social change.
How through the process of the truth,
commissions in the 1980s that get shifted into eventually a more kind of what I'm talking about neoliberal storytelling that curated storytelling.
And so I'm sorry, I've forgotten the question.
You can remind me the question, right? My question was really about the three different levels which we were imposing.
Yes. So, so, so so what I'm interested in in looking at this global template.
So and so out of these truth commissions,
we begin to see this this type of curated storytelling adopted beyond that and going into all kinds of movements.
And so I look at in the US, for instance,
I see one of the master templates coming out at the time of the election in 2008 of Barack Obama that his election strategists
came up with a template and then that template after he was elected was kind of dispersed and used by immigrant rights groups,
environmental groups, all different kinds of organisations. And and it was kind of manufactured on a national level and then global level.
So some of the same protocols and trainings used in the US began to be used all over the world.
And and one of the things I'd look at is I look at the similarities between them and there is quite a bit of similarity.
So in terms of these different levels, I'm interested in how one case can become nationalised.
It can also go to the global level to Afghanistan, right to Australia, where I am.
But then how it's also interpreted and used at the very grassroots level.
Thank you so much. We have two more questions. First came from Alex Martins.
So what do you think the long term psychological and otherwise effect of this type of storytelling as imperialist
statecraft are on populations both in countries experiencing conflict and in Western countries that perpetrate the wars?
So I think there are sort of in effects in both of those contexts, so one.
So if we take, for instance, the IWW p,
I think that the effect that it has had is to kind of encourage the formation of these what I call these neo liberal subjectivities.
So these kind of entrepreneurial subjects, the young, upwardly mobile Afghan women who's educated, who aspires to sort of be western right,
who aspires to Western concepts of marriage, of personhood, of being a career woman and in writing these stories.
And there were very select group that these women are selected from US educational institutions within Afghanistan.
So they were already an elite literate, educated sector of the population, upwardly mobile friendly to the United States.
But the women who were doing this and you know,
these stories are not being read by the majority of people in Afghanistan because they're in English, right?
So that's right away tells us who the audience is.
The audience is mostly the women writing the stories would develop, developing a sense of themselves as Western oriented entrepreneurial subjects.
And then the women in Western countries. And it's really interesting how the women who were reading these stories in Western
countries and commenting on these stories are themselves developing a concept of themselves.
The psychological as this and said, developing a sense of themselves as living in a post-feminist society because they read the stories of the poor,
oppressed Afghan woman in this conflict zone being oppressed by the Taliban.
And they say,
I'm so lucky that my society has resolved issues of patriarchy that I no longer have to deal with a man treating me that way that I can go out,
wear whatever I want, be sexually liberated, wear a bikini at the beach.
I want to express love to my partner without any threat that I'm going to be killed, right?
So. So it's having a psychological impact for the women reading these stories and thereby coming to think of themselves
as somehow having superseded feminism that superseded patriarchy and living in a post-feminist society.
Thank you, Katherine Gilbert is asking, can you say a little bit more about the specificity of women's voices in these curated stories?
Are women's stories curated differently to men's stories?
I mean. Um, yeah, you know, I guess I'm just trying to think because so in this chapter of the book I did, you know it was it was all women,
so there wasn't really any men's stories attached to compare them with because it's the Afghan women's writing project.
And I'm trying to think actually, most of the chapters in my book are looking at women's stories.
One of the things that I do is I compare Afghanistan with Venezuela, for instance, and I look at storytelling in Under Chavez.
Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in the early 2000s, which I, which is another place where I did quite a bit of field research.
And now I guess we could refer to Venezuela as a conflict zone as well.
Even though the time when I did my field research, there was not at that point something would be considered a conflict place.
But there I looked, for instance, at the stories of that the narrative of Hugo Chavez himself.
I looked at his autobiography and I think to me,
what was interesting was that the men's story and the way in which it's told is told very much in an epic format like there wasn't so much about.
And I guess I should be a little careful here because I did find men's stories in Venezuela that were not
told in this epic format that were also very particular and specific as compared to the epic narrative,
which which we saw with someone like Chavez who talked about, you know, his his spiritual awakening, his ideological awakening, his,
you know, reaching a point of consciousness changing and then the next minute sort of entering into his historic role in the world.
And and I think when I'm looking at a lot of the women's stories that were more focussed on the
everyday normal focussed on the domestic sphere that one were more focussed on the aspects of the body.
And like I said, there were men's stories in Venezuela found like that as well.
So I'm not sure that that's, you know, necessarily a fixed gender distinction that I want to make.
But I am, you know, curious that there are certain ways in which stories can also be kind of masculine ized or feminised as well.
Well, there's another very fascinating question, but I'm afraid that the time is up as the first panel is about to begin.
So we will send you two questions later so you can maybe answer in writing if it's possible.
Thank you again for joining us today. Many thanks to the audience as well for your attention and these challenging questions.
And Jesse, over to you. Thank you.
Thank you very much, thank you for the presentations, the Sujata.