Published by the journal Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East“(Volume 30, Number 2, 2010, pp. 214-217), written by Ashwini Tamb and Alissa Trotz.
Gita Sen is a professor of public policy at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore (IIMB), India, and an adjunct professor of global health and population at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her work includes research and global and national policy advocacy fueled by ground-level work to enhance gender equality and equity in poor communities. As a founding member of the South-based network Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), she has strong links to many organizations in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Asia. She is the author and editor of a number of publications including “Gender Inequity in Health: Why It Exists and How We Can Change It” (special supplement, Global Public Health, 2008) and Engendering International Health: The Challenge of Equity (MIT Press, 2002).
The University of Toronto’s feminist state theory symposium featured a special plenary on DAWN. This plenary, sponsored by South-South Encounters, highlighted the work of DAWN as a trailblazing network of feminist scholars, activists, and policy advocates located in Africa,
Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The event featured founding member Gita Sen. Before Sen’s arrival from Bangalore, we posed a series of questions to her, including how DAWN members are positioned with respect to their individual states, how to think about
feminism and feminists’ thorny relationship with states in the global South that are in the midst of navigating structural adjustment programs, and how DAWN engages with an emergent neoliberalism. Sen’s responses are highlighted below in the form of an interview.