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Chair: Dr Amanda Chisholm, Senior Lecturer in Security Studies / Researcher in Gender and Security

Speaker: Dr Maria Tanyag, Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the Department of International Relations, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University

Discussant: Professor Shirin Rai, Department of Politics and International Studies and the Director of Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development (WICID).

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, health workers and women’s rights service providers worldwide experienced severe depletion and mortality rate. In many cases, they were even subjected to discrimination and vilified by their own governments and local communities. One of the most striking paradoxes of the COVID-19 pandemic is why at time when our collective need for care is most profound, that the very sources and providers of care were not only egregiously neglected but also assumed self-renewing. While clearly a global phenomenon, this pandemic paradox is even more perplexing in the case of the Philippines – a country whose competitive edge in the global labour market is built on nationalist quality of care.

This discussion Dr Maria Tanyag charts feminist explanations for the depletion of care in times of crisis by drawing on pandemic experiences in the Philippines. She presents preliminary evidence from an online survey and key-informant interviews with health workers and women’s rights service providers in the country. Learning from the perspectives of carers reveals important insights on the gendered logics of crisis defining who is owed care, when, how and why.

About the speaker 

Maria Tanyag

Dr Maria Tanyag is a Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the Department of International Relations, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University. She was awarded her PhD from Monash University in 2018. Maria received first class honours for both her MA (Research) and BA Honours in Political Studies from the University of Auckland, New Zealand; and a BA in Political Science magna cum laude from the University of the Philippines-Diliman. She was selected as one of the inaugural International Studies Association (ISA) Emerging Global South Scholars in 2019, and as resident Women, Peace and Security Fellow at Pacific Forum International (Hawaii) in 2021.

FTGS Global Voices Seminar Series

This seminar is part of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies (FTGS) Global Voices Seminar Series. 

At this event

AmandaChisholm

Reader in Gender and Security