Workshop: Understanding Harmful Cultural Practices

Event Date: 

Monday, March 19, 2018 - 12:00am

Event Location: 

  • Alumni Hall of Mosher House

Event Contact: 

Recent years have witnessed increased international commitments to eliminate cultural practices deemed harmful to women, particularly female genital cutting, child marriage and intimate partner violence. Addressing an urgent need to share insights across disciplines, this two-day workshop brings together evolutionary and cultural anthropologists, demographers, sociologists, political scientists and economists, working to understand the origins and drivers of so-called ‘harmful cultural practices’. Invited speakers will share their recent work questioning and informing current efforts of the international development sector, and government and multilateral agencies seeking to discourage harmful behaviors and promote female empowerment. Discussion sessions will focus on cross-cutting issues such as context-dependency in the evidence for harm, the motivations and interactions of multiple actors that maintain ostensibly harmful practices, methodological considerations when working with sensitive research topics, and the evaluation and design of behavior change initiatives.

The workshop is generously funded by the UCSB College of Letters and Science and the Broom Center for Demography. Image: Taken from a poster advertising the dangers of early marriage in Mwanza, Tanzania.

Please see the following link for more details: https://davidwlawson.wordpress.com/2018workshop/