Part of the Multi-disciplinary Gender Research Seminar Series

*Please note that this seminar will be held in-person in S1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DP, and online via Zoom. If you would like to attend in-person no registration is required. If you would like to attend online please register your place in advance. Registration will close at 9.00am on Monday 16 November 2026.

Worlds of Women Beyond the 'West': Moral Geographies of Pan-Asian Sisterhoods, c.1930-40

In this talk, I offer a historical account of how Indian and Chinese women political leaders forged lateral, gendered anti-imperial solidarities against both British and Japanese imperialism in the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on women’s organisational reports, correspondence between conference delegates, and records from the first and only All-Asian Women’s Conference, held in Lahore in 1931, I reconstruct the historically specific, changing notion of the "Asian woman" political subject and how this identity was used to forge solidarities in a changing international order in the 1930s-40s. In doing so, the talk traces the emergence of worlds of women beyond the West and the political projects they envisioned in a gendered, imperial international order still in flux.

Dr. Shruti Balaji is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge and College Research Associate, King’s College, Cambridge. She is a theorist and historian of International Relations with an interest in anticolonial women’s international thought formation in the twentieth century. She received her PhD from the London School of Economics and has previously co-edited Millennium: Journal of International Studies and co-coordinated the Doing International Political Sociology London Seminar Series. Her published work has appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas and Global Studies Quarterly.

The UCCGS Gender Research Seminars offer academics and graduate students an opportunity to present their work-in-progress to a multi-disciplinary audience interested in gender, in a friendly and informal atmosphere. Seminars are held on specified days during Michaelmas and Lent and everyone is welcome to attend.

The seminars are organised and chaired by Sigal Spigel. If you would like more information about this series, or are interested in presenting your work at a Gender Research Seminar, please visit the Centre's website at:

https://www.gender.cam.ac.uk/Events/genderseminars (https://www.gender.cam.ac.uk/Events/genderseminars)

Privacy Statement: https://www.polis.cam.ac.uk/events/privacy-statement-registering-event

Description supplied by the event organiser.