It is imperative for those doing social justice work to go through their own personal journeys of liberation. Realising our feminist visions of what our communities and the world could and should be is not possible without these journeys – feminist popular education plays an essential role in sparking and nurturing this journey.
Category: Archive
Pan-African Popular Education in Motion: A Conversation with Towards Feminist Consciousness Collective
Towards a Feminist Consciousness is a pan-African queer feminist col- lective founded in 2017 as a safe and liberating space to discuss, theorise, and organise around issues of feminism and liberation, deconstructing them in light of our contexts where systems of oppression intersect: colonialism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, capitalism, racism, and exile
Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa by Naminata Diabete. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020.
“At the time when I was naked, I felt so powerful… the power even to hit a policeman…” (43). Naminata Diabate in Naked Agency interrogates expressions of resistance that women engage in across Western, Eastern, Southern, and Central Africa and beyond. This resistance, predicated on defiant disrobing, exposure, and shaming, she terms “naked agency”. Diabate…
Critical Engagement with Public Sociology:A Perspective From the Global South, edited by Andries Bezuidenhout, Sonwabile Mnwana, and Karl von Holdt. Public Sociology series. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022.
The book looks at the long tradition of critical engagement in research done over the last forty years at the Society,Work and Politics Institute (SWOP), a research institute with a long history of working with movements and communities across South Africa, doing what it calls critical engagement. According to the book’s editors, critical engagement is…
Feminist Africa Volume 3, Issue 2 (2022): Revisiting Gender in Rural Livelihoods and Development Interventions
This issue of Feminist Africa revisits rural women and agricultural livelihoods, focusing on the persistence of contexts that compromise their ability to benefit from development interventions. An accumulation of studies over the years have set out to unravel the hindering factors. Some such studies, premised on the economic efficiency argument, push for greater attention to…
A Magnifying Glass and A Fine-Tooth Comb: Understanding Girls’ and Young Women’s Sexual Vulnerability, by Mzikazi Nduna. Pretoria: CSA&G Press, Centre for Sexualities, AIDS and Gender, University of Pretoria, 2020.
by Jamela Robertson While reading this monograph, one could not help but be taken back to relive experiences as a young woman living in different communities across South Africa. From the outset, the author stirs up memories of adolescent questions and confusions around whether one had free will, through which one made decisions and choices…
Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation, by Oluwakemi M. Balogun. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020.
by Sharon Adetutu Omotoso While reading this monograph, one could not help but be taken back to relive experiences as a young woman living in different communities across South Africa. From the outset, the author stirs up memories of adolescent questions and confusions around whether one had free will, through which one made decisions and…
Working with Rural Women to Secure Resource Access – Akua O. Britwum speaks with Fati Abigail Abdulai
Akua Britwum spoke to Fati Abigail Abdulai from Ghana, in a virtual interview on Sunday the 2nd of May, 2021. Fati Abdulai is the Director of Widows and Orphans Movement (WOM) of Ghana. She has held her position since 2013, when Fati’s mother, the founder of the WOM, retired. Fati had been supporting her mother…
Improving Rural Women’s Access to Productive Resources: Are the Low Hanging Fruits Too Low to Make a Difference?
by Faustina Obeng Adomaa The percentage contribution of rural deprivation to national poverty is high. In Ghana, it is above 70%, and rises to about 90% in the northern parts of the country (FAO and ECOWAS, 2018). Poverty is a rural phenomenon and women in rural areas are the face of poverty, especially less resource-endowed…
Gendered Terms of Incorporation and Exclusion in Rural Mozambique: Unpacking Pre-existing Inequalities and Mechanisms of Compensation
by Natacha Bruna Existing literature focuses primarily on the general impacts of land grabbing and their compensation mechanisms. However, pre-existing structures of inequality heavily condition and differentiate the outcomes of land expropriation and compensation mechanisms. With this in mind, this article addresses the differen- tiated impacts of such mechanisms on diverse segments of the rural…