Decolonial Feminist Research Articles

Feminist Community Psychology and the Advancement of Women in South Africa

In this presentation, I offer a brief personal reflection of my entry and introduction to psychology. I start from positionsing myself to highlight how we do not come into institutions of higher learning and our disciplines as empty vessels but with histories that shape how we view the world. Drawing from social justice scholars and my earlier work, I point to how psychology needs to shift from locating ‘problems’ within individuals but instead acknowledge the structural imbalances that contribute to individual and collective dis-eases facing society. I go on to call for a decolonial feminist psychology that acknowledges the multiple oppressions faced by people in many formely colonised nations such as South Africa, with a particular focus on women. I further show how visual methodologies such as embroideries offer the potential for epistemic justice and decolonial possibilities by centering community members as co-constrctors of knowledge. I conclude by highlighting how hope carries the potential for psychological healing.

Intersectional perspectives on land relations of oil palm plantations: A decolonial feminist approach on Indonesia's bioeconomy

Indonesia's oil palm plantations, a critical sector for the country's bioeconomy, have attracted significant attention, especially due to the climate crisis. While the government sought to expand the national industry through boosting biodiesel policy, the European Union (EU) imposes a ban on imports of deforestation-linked commodities, including palm oil. Facing this development, this article seeks to analyse Indonesia's oil palm plantations from the perspective of land relations. Current research suggests that state incentives for a societal transformation towards a bioeconomy tend to exacerbate rather than reduce existing global social inequalities in the agricultural sector. While this critique is built mainly on studies that focus on land-labour relations in a broader way, the studies fall short of developing a more complex and sufficiently historicised perspective on the (re-)construction and (re-)configurations of intersecting categories of inequalities. Drawing on decolonial feminist approach on intersectionality, this article attempts to develop an analytical framework that considers the intersection of inequalities as historically mutually constructing social relations for the study of changing land relations in the context of the expansion of agro-industrial biomass production. The article shows how control over land access and use is reconfigured, perpetuating intersectional social inequalities. This paper argues that a just socio-ecological transformation must incorporate these complexities of social inequalities in order to change them. The aim of the paper is to urge the necessity of intersectional perspectives on social changes in the context of the bioeconomy.

Feminist Theories and Activist Practices in Organization Studies

This piece reflects on the untapped potential of feminist theories and activist practices to address vital organizational issues and societal challenges such as inequality, sustainability and care for the environment. While we recognize and briefly review the progress on gender issues in organization studies achieved over the last decades, our focus is on identifying the critical and underutilized strands of feminist thinking offering fresh responses to these problems, including decolonial feminism, feminist ethics of care, posthuman feminism and ecofeminism. By way of illustrating our theoretical arguments, we discuss how five different papers recently published in Organization Studies address some of these issues, including the uncovering of hidden entanglements of power and performativity in a global bank and in the beauty industry by paying attention to body and affect, the underrepresented struggles of women in the Global South as they disrupt gendered practices through consciousness raising, contesting gender regimes at organizational social events and, finally, how the social media operate at the intersection of gender and occupation. We conclude by outlining future directions for research as we discuss the contributions of anti-racist feminist theory and decolonial feminist practice to completing the unfinished project of social change while making our scholarship more reflexive and inclusive.

Singing Feminist Ch'ixi+Art Music from las Rajaduras: Renata Flores, Isqun , and the Fractured Locus

Abstract: With music album Isqun , nine in Quechua and meaning mirror of the soul, Quechua singer Renata Flores aims to trace the journey of Indigenous women from the Andes in Peruvian history: the Inca era, colonialism, independence, and Republic. Combining sounds of the Andean countryside and the beats of Latin rap, trap, and hip-hop, her nine songs written in Quechua and Spanish represent a decolonial turn towards undoing westernized epistemologies of knowledge. This article explores Flores's potential contributions to decolonial feminism through the lens of Gloria Anzaldúa's theoretical framework of Nepantla (in-between), María Lugones's fractured locus, and Catherine Walsh's decolonial insurgency. The author argues that Flores's feminist ch'ixi+art music and songs "Chañan Cori Coca," "Beatriz Clara Coya," "María Parado de Bellido," and "Rita Puma Justo" not only reclaim spaces for the language of Quechua in contemporary Peru, but also contribute to remapping Indigenous women's herstories of resistance, disobedience, survivance, and empowerment. Ultimately this article illustrates how Flores's feminist decolonial pedagogies of interweaving memorias cortas and memorias largas denote an action of creation and intervention, opening paths to resignify historically excluded Indigenous women in Peru.

Touching Variables: Decolonial Approaches and New Tools for Ecological Data Visualization

Abstract In this article the authors activate decolonial feminist art history as a transdisciplinary protocol for organizing quantitative data. In foregrounding precolonial calculation tools as the basis for a new data visualization method, they present questions about how scientists might negotiate multiple interrelated variables in their research, opening more possibilities for narrating complex causes and effects of anthropogenic climate change and facilitating discussions about the relationship between climate change and settler-colonialism through visual means. While data science has historically prioritized Cartesian and Euclidean geometry as the most efficient tools for data visualization, the authors draw on Indigenous calculation tools that allow for more visual and semantic flexibility than the x-y axis.

Lebensraum, geopolitics and race—Palestine as a feminist issue in German-speaking academia

Palestine continues to be a contentious issue in and for Western higher education particularly in Germany and, by extension, in German-speaking academia. In this article we take figurations of Palestine as an analytical lens through which to trouble German-centric epistemologies, understandings of history and their applications inside academic structures. We specifically tackle the silence on and ideological erasure of Palestine in German-speaking academic environments and read this erasure as colonially constituted and stemming from a German Lebensraum ideology, ruling over space and race ‘through science’. We propose to understand contemporary erasures of Palestine through this transnational and transhistorical space-race-and-education-nexus. First, we delineate Lebensraum ideology and its policing barriers and apply it to today’s structures of higher education and the territorial exclusion of Palestinians from those structures by way of education. Within this epistemic nationalist framework—which evicts politicized Palestinians qua Palestinians as (too) political—we discuss how Palestine has become a central tool for the maintenance of white academia, and as such is a decolonial feminist issue relevant for the investigation of power structures in higher education and German political discourses. We finally discuss our theoretical approach vis-à-vis commentaries from and by Palestinians in German-speaking higher education. The authors situate their personal and professional experience on the inside, outside, and on the margins of German academia. In a political landscape that disavows BDS on campuses, brands solidarity with Palestinians as anti-Semitic, and a state doctrine that calls for an uncritical and ‘unconditional support of Israel’, this article is of crucial importance to understand modern knowledge production in Germany and Europe. Our methodology is based on literature reviews, new feminist theorization around issues of silence and solidarity, and preliminary (auto-) ethnographic explorations of Palestinians in and out of German-speaking academia.

Bicycling for mutual aid: centering racialized and 2SLGBTQ+ cyclists in Toronto

ABSTRACT Within the context of a (post-)COVID-19 pandemic world, there is an urgent need to critically explore how bicycle-related activities may contribute to an environmentally sustainable and equitable world for vulnerable populations. In recent years, mutual aid projects have surged globally, with scholars pointing to the COVID-19 pandemic as a key driver of communities being forced to respond to the unfolding social and environmental crises, alongside state abandonment. In this paper, we discuss how cycling has been taken up by communities disproportionately harmed by colonial systems. Using a decolonial feminist participatory action research approach, the authors collaborated with The Bike Brigade, a non-profit bicycle delivery organization that partners with mutual aid organizations. Using arts-based methods and semi-structured interviews, we draw on the perspectives of 2SLGBTQ+ and racialized cyclists who volunteer with The Bike Brigade. A key theme of the research was the unique way in which research colleagues used bicycles to participate in community care by embodying mutual aid values: community thriving, resource reallocation and solidarity. Thus, this paper puts forth mutual aid as a potential framework for understanding radical mobility practices to foster community care.

Counter-mapping the archive: a decolonial feminist research method

The past decade has seen a growing interest in the ‘turn to history’ which has coincided with a counter-reading of the archive as a means to trouble contemporary practices of governance. In this article, I explore what a decolonial feminist approach to the colonial archive can look like through the development of a research method that involves counter-mapping. This method included the use of participatory interviews, carried out between 2019–2020, that involved asking interviewees to annotate colonial maps of Cairo, and the co-creation of an alternative map. This method presented a decolonial space where I, the researcher, and the participants, co-investigated the spatial securitisation of urban sites as ‘security threats’ and ‘dangerous communities’. In doing so, we co-examined how certain security ‘truths’ constructed by the colonial archive transcend the colonial/modern continuum in new postcolonial forms of securitisation in Egypt. Securitised spaces on the map were, instead, reimagined as spaces of emancipation and life. At the same time, the gendered differences between participants also point to the coloniality of gender in Egypt. In light of this, I thereby also discuss the troubles of representative methods, and the need for an intersectional feminist approach to decolonial research methods.

“Our Action Plan was Completely Changed”: Adapting, surviving, and collaborating through participatory action research during the Covid‐19 pandemic

AbstractThis article discusses a participatory action research (PAR) team's response and adaptation to the COVID‐19 pandemic amid multiple crises in Puerto Rico. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a PAR collaboration, the article: 1) examines four key dilemmas that emerged during the study, 2) emphasizes the significance of reciprocal partnerships anchored in solidarity, and 3) underscores the vital role of a decolonial feminist approach in sustaining and maintaining the projects at the onset of the pandemic.

Whose city? (De)colonising the bodies of speculative fiction in Lauren Beukes's Zoo City

This article explores the (de)colonisation of the body and body boundaries in contemporary South African speculative fiction, paying particular attention to award-wining author, Lauren Beukes's, second novel, Zoo City (2010). I will apply Lara Cox's (2018:317) argument that 'Haraway's cyborg resembles the liminal view of identity presented by queer theory, which seeks to blur strict divisions between sexual and gender categories, dissolving binary oppositions such as woman/man and heterosexual/homosexual', to my reading of Zoo City. By centring the novel around Zinzi December, a resident of 'Zoo City' (the marginalised underbelly of Johannesburg), and situating the novel in the cradle of humankind, Beukes reacts against South Africa's colonial history and its colonisation of the body by blurring the animal-human boundary and challenging the colonial construct of body binaries. The novel can be read as a decolonial feminist text as it re-writes South Africa's apartheid history and critiques its division, separation and bodily segregation. Furthermore, I explore how fictional bodies are imagined and constructed in the text; I ask what kinds of boundary-breaking bodies predominate; and consider their thematic, narrative, and political significance in the postapartheid imaginary in relation to speculative fiction. I examine how new boundaries (particularly between 'normative' society and 'Zoo City') are formulated. Zoo City pulls into focus Kristeva's (1982) notion of the abject body as a central to its concerns, while also bringing attention to Foucault's (1992) notion of the 'disciplined' body. It foregrounds questions about the formulation and destabilisation of identity, with a particular focus on the construction of female identity. This article builds on the critical literature on the dystopian post-apartheid state by examining Zoo City's depictions of marginalised people and its construction of the body and body boundaries, as well as by extending the examination of representations of the body in speculative fiction.

Social entrepreneurship in sport: a peripheral country perspective.

For the past decade, scholars have been working towards developing a robust theory of social entrepreneurship in sport (SES). However, SES theory remains void of peripheral country perspectives and thus perpetuates the Eurocentric views of entrepreneurship. This paper used a decolonial feminist lens and Whittemore and Knafl's methodology to conduct an integrated review of SES literature written in or about a peripheral country context. The review examined how scholarship from and about this context had considered geographical and culturally specific perspectives in the development of SES theory. A total of n = 1971 papers were retrieved, with only n = 12 providing relevant peripheral country context. This scarcity of literature indicates that the current theory of SES lacks peripheral country perspectives. Many papers in this review (n = 5) are written by authors in or from a peripheral country. Their contributions to SES literature revealed the decolonial feminist approaches that centralize alternative perspectives and added plurality to the definition of SES. The findings revealed the nuanced theoretical approaches to SES and highlighted the gaps in this context. The review shows how, despite the rise in social enterprises that focus on gender equity and the economic inclusion of women, gendered studies were still very scarce.

Women's Place in the Andes: Engaging Decolonial Feminist Anthropology By Florence E.BabbBerkeley: University of California Press. 2018. 304 pp.

Women's Place in the Andes: Engaging Decolonial Feminist Anthropology By Florence E.BabbBerkeley: University of California Press. 2018. 304 pp.

Decolonising feminist explorations of urban futures

ABSTRACT How do decolonial feminist urban imaginaries of urban futures begin to interrogate twenty-first century urban life? The urban futures signaled in this special issue highlight three dimensions of urban imaginaries. The first connects the privatization and commodification of urban infrastructures to state-based and capitalist discursive efforts to make the urban. The second concerns temporal convergences of past, present and future in visions of the urban that reproduce the recursive logics of coloniality by re-mapping the landscapes of urban inequality and dispossession through encounters with sedimentations of colonial and neocolonial formations. Third, authors take up the everyday as a site of struggle through which women’s negotiations and placemaking practices offer alternative urban imaginaries. These articles are based on papers given at the 2019 “Feminist Explorations of Urban Futures” conference organized by the transnational feminist research project, “Urbanization and Gender in the Global South: A Transformative Knowledge Network” (GenUrb).

Trapped in Ceuta: Reflexive tactics and methods in Participatory Filmmaking among cross-border women

Abstract Recent scholarship has promoted reflexivity in migration research using visual participatory methods. However, the perspectives of cross-border workers living as undocumented migrants in borderlands have been understudied using these methods. Adopting a reflexive approach to Participatory Filmmaking (PF), this article critically engages with the co-production of knowledge amongst thirteen Moroccan cross-border women living and working irregularly as domestic workers in the Spanish city of Ceuta, North Africa. Empirically grounded in a 3-month PF workshop conducted during the closure of the Moroccan–Spanish border following the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown, it explores the application of specific methods and tactics of data collection and analysis based on researchers’ and participants’ reflexivity to reveal some of the local colonial legacies that emerge when approaching this methodology from a Eurocentric gaze. To this end, I first established an ongoing, transparent dialogue aimed at unlearning, from the participants’ perspective, how to critically interrogate each facet of PF’s data collection and analysis. In this endeavour, decisions about the rationale for recruitment, practices, visuals, and technologies employed, participation, consent, and canons of technology and representation were negotiated to produce reflexive autoethnographies while avoiding exposure. Secondly, I consider specific reflexive tactics and methods of co-analysing data with participants to challenge specific categorizations while embracing decolonial feminist views. In doing so, I argue for a more reflexive approach to PF to redress existing power inequalities at the intersection of technology, representation, and voice at the heart of borderlands. It can be achieved by transforming methodological analysis into decolonial action and response.

Re-centring the Mothers of Rwanda’s Abducted “Métis” Children

ABSTRACT In April 2019, the Belgian prime minister publicly apologised for the segregation, deportation and forced adoption of thousands of children born to mixed-race couples during Belgian colonial rule in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. Known as the “métis”, the children were rarely acknowledged by their white European fathers. The apology took place against a backdrop of increasing calls for accountability for colonial crimes as well as a small amount of emerging research on the métis’ experiences. Yet, what is striking in both public discourse and academic scholarship is the lack of attention paid to the mothers of these children. Starting with a discussion of Kazungu, le métis, an autobiographical docudrama by Rwandan-born filmmaker Georges Kamanayo Gengoux, and moving through an analysis of Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse’s recent novel Consolée, this article uses a decolonial feminist approach to suggest that, although the missing mothers’ voices have been silenced by colonial history, creative works by Rwandans can offer new spaces for repositioning the mothers at the centre of their own history.

“I Am Very Sexy, Sexy, Sexy”

Abstract This article focuses on the story of one transfeminine (transgen, in local parlance) wedding singer, Shabu, identifying through interviews, observation, and song analysis the possibilities of self-expression for transgens as well as for cisgender women who attend these performances. How have they carved out agency for themselves amid Kashmir’s territorial conflict over its sovereignty? The article demonstrates how Kashmiri gendered futures are intimately tied to courageous and innovative performances in women’s spaces, even within pronounced systemic constraints. Shabu’s songs concern women’s agency, gender dynamics and roles, family relationships, and gender presentation both in and outside women’s familial household and community/kin networks. The songs both embody accepted tradition and open doors to innovation, protest, and political commentary. The digital life of these performances on YouTube has contributed to their dissemination and popularity. This article addresses questions arising from shifting contexts of transgens’ wedding-song performances and contributes to the body of analysis of digital folklore through decolonial feminist and queer folkloristic lenses.

Experiences of migration from Turkey to Germany: the female guest worker in contemporary documentaries

ABSTRACT This article examines two documentaries that go beyond the audio-visual canon representing the guest worker from Turkey to Germany. Look, Listen Carefully (Özlem Sarıyıldız, 2021) and Gurbet is a Home Now (Pınar Öğrenci, 2021) provide a platform for migrant women to reveal their stories, expanding the sphere of representation of guest workers. Indeed, men’s labor is always at the forefront of the historical guest worker migration narrative, while women’s labor in the factory and domestic sphere has largely ignored. Moreover, the documentaries hold a mirror to the ongoing migration from Turkey to Germany. Both filmmakers are women and new wave migrants from Turkey to Germany, referencing a migration resulting from the growing authoritarian context in Turkey over the last ten years. The filmmakers examine the history of migration to understand their own position in Germany, engaging with the subjects of their documentaries to forge intergenerational links between migrant women. I argue that these documentaries are decolonial feminist works; they expand the sphere of representation of female guest workers, working against their historical invisibility, centralizing their voices, and contextualizing the power dynamics that have shaped their experiences.

Questioning development from Black feminisms in Ecuador and moving towards a Black feminist political ecology in the Americas

This article critically explores tensions concerning development from contemporary feminist thought and praxis in Latin America. In Ecuador, development is seen as an outdated and irrelevant theoretical framework from a variety of feminist perspectives, including feminist political ecology and decolonial feminisms. Nevertheless, development discourse and practices persist and are central to public policy with a gender focus throughout the country. This results in tensions between governmental and autonomous feminist perspectives that are present in local spaces, such as the province of Esmeraldas in Northern Ecuador. Drawing on research conducted with Afro-Ecuadorian peer researchers, including interviews, oral histories and social-cartography methods, this article will demonstrate how Afro-Ecuadorian women are challenging dominant ideas and practices of development from the emerging ideas of Black feminism in Ecuador and moving towards a Black feminist political ecology in the Americas.

Dancing with decolonial praxis: LBQ women and non-binary people’s subcultures in Lusaka, Zambia

ABSTRACT This article explores the subcultures and experiences of LBQ (lesbian, bisexual, and queer) women and non-binary individuals in Lusaka, Zambia, against the backdrop of draconian anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and rising homophobia in Africa. Drawing upon decolonial feminist methodology, the study investigates how these marginalised communities navigate hostile environments where their sexual orientation is criminalised and stigmatised by both the state and society. It begins by discussing the intersection of colonialism, religious influence, and cultural contexts in perpetuating discriminatory trends. It delves into the clandestine world of queer parties and activism in Lusaka, examining the everyday practices of decoloniality undertaken. The research methodology employed intellectual decolonisation to engage participants in the co-creation of knowledge and alternative narratives of Zambian citizenship and womanhood. By showcasing the resilience and resistance of LBQ women and non-binary individuals who form supportive networks, the article challenges the dominant construction of Zambia as a nation built on cisgender heteronormative and conservative religious values. It illuminates the vibrant subcultures and community formations that emerge despite legal barriers and patriarchal interpretations of traditional culture. The article contributes to a living archive of queer African experiences and expands the understanding of Zambian identities beyond conventional norms. It underscores the transformative potential of decolonial methodologies in challenging exclusionary notions of nationhood and fostering a more inclusive and diverse society.

Nonbinary Epistemologies: Refusing Colonial Amnesia and Erasure of Jotería and Trans* Latinidades

Abstract: The author reflects on the experiences of teaching a Trans* Latinx studies course, where students initially expressed discontent with the syllabus for lacking legible trans subjects. By engaging with decolonial methodologies and theories, the author highlights the limitations of “looking for” (Lugones 2020) trans in traditional archives and theories. The author discusses the importance of embracing the nonsense within the pluriverse of affective belonging and recognizing the possibilities that emerge within the nonsensical and nonbinary theoretical subjectivities that challenge conventional understandings of transgender phenomena. Engaging with U.S. women of color feminist theorizing—rooted in Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and decolonial feminisms—the author discusses the importance of nonbinary thinking practices in confronting the epistemology of ignorance in trans studies. Drawing upon the works of various decolonial and trans* of color scholars, this paper explores the complex diasporic relationality of jotería as a way of existing within coloniality, offering a critical lens to examine the diverse dimensions of queer and trans Latinx life. Nonbinary thinking, in this context, is essential for learning from, alongside, and within oppressed trans of color knowledge, theories, strategies, and ways of existing grounded in particular cosmologies, geographies, histories, and cultures. It also represents a vital political strategy for avoiding and refusing discursive colonization.