Research

“You’re many years late, how happy I am to see you”
— Anna Akhmatova

1997 Indonesian women scholars, Ottawa

Dr. Rosalind Boyd’s primary research interests are in two dominant areas: gender issues within the democratic development process and international labour struggles. For over three decades, her research has examined the inclusion of women in the transition from oppositional struggle to management and/or transformation of the state, notably in Uganda, Rwanda, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and South Africa.

1990 Kiboga, Ugandan women groundnut cultivation

Her other research activities cover critical studies of economic globalization, poverty, human security, militarism, women workers, child labour, informal sector, refugees, environmental degradation, labour migration, human rights, HIV/AIDS, knowledge systems, and resistance literature.

She is now completing a book on women and democratization under the National Resistance Movement (NRM) in Uganda (primarily in two phases, 1986-1996; 1997-2006), a country in which she has worked since 1987. She is also working on a narrative relating to her close relationship and access to historical members of the NRM.

 

1990 Ugandan women in Kiboga, Uganda

See her collection of Ugandan documents below and her seminal article “Empowerment of Women in Contemporary Uganda: Real or Symbolic?” which appeared in Women, Feminism and Development edited by Huguette Dagenais & Denise Piche (McGill-Queen’s Press, 1994) as well as earlier versions in Review of African Political Economy (1989) and Labour, Capital and Society (1989).
Uganda Documents from 1987-2005
uganda archives

Dr Boyd was also the Director/Principal Investigator of the innovative research program “Gender and Human Security Issues” (GHSI) previously based at McGill in cooperation with the Women’s Centre of Montreal and several other organizations, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) under their program of Community-University Research Alliance (CURA). This research-action program (2000-2005) built on her earlier work with women in conflict situations, especially her research in Uganda and El Salvador which resulted in the publication Are We At the Table? Women’s Involvement in the Resolution of Violent Political Conflicts (1994).

2000 Ugandan-based EASSI Interns, Kampala

The GHSI research involved a team of researchers from universities and communities in an alliance locally and globally in order to examine different issues related to women and armed conflict, the aftermath of war for societies, human rights, peacebuilding, political reconciliation and trauma. The primary focus of this research was on the Great Lakes region of Africa with comparative work from various other regions where military conflicts continue to disrupt societal development. See her article in Development in Practice Gender and Human SecurityCDIP150115(England, 2005) for a fuller description of this research.

2000 Rwandan Women’s Organization

From this research, she has also published the edited volume The Search for Lasting Peace: Critical Perspectives on Gender-Responsive Human Security (Ashgate, 2014). The book addresses the gender-based violence that women experience in war situations and the ways in which women are demanding to be “at the table” in resolving conflicts as they assert new initiatives for lasting peace (including UN Security Council Resolution 1325). See The Search for Lasting Peace (2)_2014_50 for more details.

Other past projects include