Book talk: Reproducing Revolution: Women's Labour and the War in Myanmar
Associate Professor Jenny Hedstrøm, Swedish Defence University
In this talk, Jenny Hedström explores the Kachin revolution in Myanmar from the perspective of female soldiers, female activists, and women displaced by the violence in northern Myanmar. Hedström argues that the household is an inherently gendered, militarized, and political space that impacts, and is in turn impacted by, the external conflict with which it coexists. In this context, women's everyday labour—the gendered work of childcare, farming, fighting, and forging connections both across households and between the household and the army and the nation—is key to revolutionary survival. Hedström calls this labour militarized social reproduction, and in her new book Reproducing Revolution she demonstrates that such labour is critical to the military effort, and that warfare itself is shaped through everyday domestic action.
Jenny Hedström is a scholar of war, gender, and political violence whose work traces how war is lived, sustained, and contested in everyday life. Since 2021, she has worked at the Swedish Defence University, where she is employed as an Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in War Studies. Trained in international relations and development studies, she brings a feminist political economy lens to the study of war, with particular attention to women’s labour, social reproduction, and militarisation in Myanmar and other conflict-affected settings.
Dialog on the situation in Myanmar: Kim Aris in conversation with Audun Aagre
Kim Aris is a UK-based activist that advocates for democracy in Myanmar and freedom for Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners. Audun Aagre is a longstanding Myanmar activist and former leader of the Norwegian Burma Committee.