Sociologist Mary Osirim to Lecture on
Effects of Globalization on Women in Zimbabwe

Professor of Sociology Mary Osirim will wrap up the Center for International Studies' lecture series on women in the new global economy next Thursday, April 26, with a talk titled "Enterprising Women: Coping With Economic Crisis and Globalization in Urban Zimbabwe." The talk, which is free and open to the public, will take place in Dalton 300 at 4:30 p.m. Refreshments will be served.

Professor Osirim will talk about her research on the effects of economic globalization on women in Zimbabwe, particularly those in the microenterprise sector. Based on fieldwork conducted among entrepreneurs in crocheting and knitting in urban Zimbabwe, her study documents the negative effects of globalization on their enterprises during the 1990s. Using a feminist political economy paradigm, Osirim considers the experiences of these women against the backdrop of the economic and political development of Zimbabwe from the colonial to the post-independence periods.

Osirim, who serves as an advisory committee member for the Africana studies program at Bryn Mawr, has focused her teaching and research on gender and development, race and ethnic relations, the family and economic sociology in Sub-Saharan Africa, the English-speaking Caribbean and the United States. During the past 20 years, she has conducted fieldwork on women, entrepreneurship and the roles of the state and nongovernmental organizations in the microenterprise sectors in urban Nigeria and Zimbabwe. She has also focused much of her attention on local, national and transnational organizations to support women's microenterprises and to meet their strategic gender needs in the current phase of globalization.

She has many publications in these areas and is currently working on three books: Enterprising Women: Identity, Entrepreneurship and Civil Society in Urban Zimbabwe, African Voices on Gender Research and Activism in Africa, co-edited with Akosua Adomako Ampofo, Josephine Beoku-Betts and Wairimu Njambi, and Global Philadelphia: Immigrant Communities, Old and New, co-edited with Ayumi Takenaka.

<Back to Bryn Mawr Now 4/19/2007

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