New Deadline for Submissions: 30th December, 2020
All submissions and enquiries should be emailed to: info@feministafrica.net
Guest Editor: Akosua Keseboa Darkwah
The year 2020 will go down in history as the year when the whole world was dramatically altered in quite substantial ways. Unlike our previous experiences with pandemics such as the Spanish flu of a century ago, the highly integrated nature of our societies in contemporary times has meant that the pandemic has taken on very different forms both in terms of its spread but also in terms of our knowledge and discussion of the pandemic. While Africa has been spared the worst in terms of infections and deaths comparatively speaking, this pandemic is just one in a series of health crises of massive proportions that the continent experiences periodically. The Ebola outbreaks that occur in different parts of the continent sporadically are examples of such in more recent history.
As with previous epidemics/pandemics, COVID-19 is the subject of much global discussion from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. There are also a number of working groups around the world exploring the meaning and impact of this pandemic from a gender perspective. What this pandemic has meant for African men and women, however, has not been the subject of much discussion. Earlier issues of Feminist Africa have brought new perspective to other lethal challenges, notably conflict and militarism (FA #10), gender and violence (FA #14), to show that even as women have struggled under the weight of extremely harsh and repressive conditions, they have also been powerful mobilisers for peace in different parts of the continent, even while others have laboured at great risk to keep their families and communities alive. The women of Africa are therefore collectively both the best prepared and the worst prepared for yet another crisis. At great cost, we have accumulated the most experience with surviving man-made disasters, yet these same conditions ensure that the majority of African women still live precarious lives. Although both men and women have suffered the consequences of the pandemic, in their responses, our patriarchal states have not always been attuned to the circumstances of women. How then, have women responded to the state’s inadequacies in addressing their current needs? What herstories and cultural repertoires can we draw on to survive and overcome the latest round of crisis? What improvisations have been created? What hidden memories and time-worn strategies have been re- activated?
This global pandemic presents an opportunity for us to ask broad conceptual as well as more localised questions about crises from a feminist perspective. We invite papers that explore among others: the colonial history of pandemics, feminist political economy perspectives on the policies that have framed past and present epidemics in the African region; the innovative practices that women on the continent have used to deal with these crises; movement building in this period, women’s responses to the inadequacies of state efforts at addressing fallouts from the pandemic, women’s contributions to the global conversation(s) about the nature of our world post COVID- 19. We invite submissions from both the social sciences and humanities. The deadline for submission of full papers is 30th December, 2020.
Direct all enquiries and submissions to: info@feministafrica.net Download the FA style guide at: https://feministafrica.net/about-feminist-africa/