Applications are open for Desmond Tutu Reconciliation Fellowship Award 2019. Gender relations are fundamental to all human experience. Across human history, gendered identity has rested on the biological significance of sexual reproduction between male and female.  Gender is a fundamental basis of potential difference for productive and meaningful relationships between people. However, it has also been a basis for the erasure of difference through the exercise of power. Also,  the limitation of freedoms and possibilities, and the force of violence.

Moreover, Over many years, the relationships between men and women have been subjected to critical scrutiny. More recently, the very concept of ‘gender’ is facing deep challenges. While the nature of the questions asked, and the conclusions reached, have varied greatly in relation to different cultural, religious and ethnic frames, the process of questioning itself has been a global phenomenon. Further, In many cases, profoundly progressive changes have resulted.

Benefit

• Successful candidates may hold the status of Fellow for life and use the initials FGR after their names in public recognition of their Fellowship of Global Reconciliation. An award of AUD $10,000 will be made with the Fellowship, to be invested in the furthering of the Fellow’s work.

Eligibility

• Open to an individual or individuals who has/have helped foment active conversations and practice across different gendered positions. She, he or they could be a person who has worked creatively to resolve situations of gender-based violence. Also,  someone who has contributed, through re-making gender relations, to forming new possibilities in fields. Additionally,  that may go beyond gender issues narrowly conceived. The nominee may work in one of many capacities, from community activist to engaged social thinker;
• The nominee for the award may be a person who has provided leadership in the ethical reworking of the relationships between genders, or who have contributed significantly to advancing both the awareness of the need for gender dialogues and the fashioning of new practices associated with them;
• Ideally, this person will be someone who works with others in ways that have both local and wider consequences. It will be a person whose imaginative vision has the potential to shift current paradigms and change the way that people behave through their actions in a diverse range of settings. Further, It will be an individual who is courageous and effective and stands as an inspiration to others. It will be someone who contributes to the building of a safe inclusive space. Along with promoting debate as open exchange and marginalizing declamation and denunciation;
• The person they are seeking is, like previous Fellows, an individual who has found a way to negotiate across the borders posed by difficult cultural and political differences.