Feminist Practice Research Articles

Small Group Learning Communities as a Prototype for Intersectional Black Feminist Praxis in Higher Education

Through the creation and analysis of Small Group Learning Communities (SGLC) at a predominantly White university in the U.S. South, this study investigated how SGLCs operationalize intersectional Black feminist praxis via dialogue, liberation, and ethic of caring. The racialized and gendered organizational dynamics that govern institutions of higher education make it an ideal site for such an intervention. Through an instrumental case study of 13 SGLCs, we uncover how SGLCs served interrelated, but separate purposes: (1) affirmation, mentorship, and professional development among “Black women-focused” SGLCs; and (2) epiphanies of intersectional oppression and nuanced Black girl representation in educational settings among “Black women-affirming” SGLCs. Findings suggest that SGLCs are innovative prototypes for understanding, studying, and implementing intersectional Black feminist praxis. We submit that SGLCs can advance broader social justice and liberation agendas. Moreover, findings may inform efforts to center Black women in higher education.

“Taak op, wats yu (s)touri?”: Dancehall storytelling and Tanya Stephens’ grassroots feminism

In (re)considering the viability of Jamaican dancehall and reggae artist Tanya Stephens’ rejection of the label ‘feminist’, this paper uses her song, Wats Yu (S)touri, from her 2004 Gangster Blues album to trace several critical grassroots performativities which address popular forms of Jamaican grassroots women’s activism. These modes of activism are regarded as reflective of traditional feminist practices which carry over to dancehall. The paper is primarily concerned with the context of Stephens’ music, specifically regarding whether some of her storytelling practices conform with the vernacular tradition of taakin op (a strident retort). It offers a reading of feminism against Stephens’ claim, suggesting that dancehall practices like taakin op are also linked to longer histories of Jamaican grassroots performativities which extend beyond the dancehall itself. The aim is to understand how Stephens’ feminism, albeit disavowed, enlarges ideas about dancehall as a subversive hi/story of post/colonial Blackness in Jamaica. Accordingly, specific attention is paid to themes of romantic love, work and ‘gyangsta feminism’, a coinage following the title of a track on the same album.

#Winemom culture

Experts trace a congruent trend, pinpointed as originating around the 2010s (Grose, 2020) and only accelerating in the pandemic and its aftermaths: the rise of social media activity relating to parents’ performances of their substance abuse – what this paper defines as “#winemom culture” – with a broader social tendency, a general increase in “rates of high-risk drinking” that lead to such outcomes as “long-term health damage” and “dangers to family” (Macarthur, n.d.). I interrogate the ethics of moralizing against #winemom culture under COVID-19 culture and its aftermaths through exclusively quantitative metrics or surface-level analysis. As with anything coded according to the “momification of the Internet” (Dewey, 2015), such cultures are often disregarded, seen as superficial or in receipt of unchecked judgments. I trace the following question: What can #winemom culture reveal about how parents are processing and communicating within this moment? And begin from the premise that there are as-yet undetermined drivers motivating what appears to be a “zoning out” (Heyes, 2020) in the mediation of #winemom culture production. This project then opens into an analysis of how to actually study digital feminist practices in this current moment, one that is defined by methodological crises surrounding the increasing complexities of enacting justice in social media research. This paper thus serves as a methodological disquisition for feminist researchers attempting to perform ethically just social media research.

Gut as teacher

This paper reports on a short course for working class people, in Cape Town, South Africa. It outlines how a ‘gut pedagogy’, that is, a practice of teaching through the body that takes the digestive system as ‘teacher’, is the starting point for ‘reading the world’. The journey of food as life and energy-giving substances from the world, through the body, back into the world, illustrates how systems are entangled with each other. The gut pedagogy is deliberately centred within a part of the body that mediates between inside and outside, yet is rarely spoken about. The practice is rooted firmly within feminist popular education that re-connects what has been separated – body and mind, humans and more-than-humans, the gut and the brain. Feminist practice respects and surfaces different ways of knowing, both rational and gut instinct. The paper shows that we can learn from our bodies, if we listen: about health, about the interconnectedness of all life, about the need to respect life and work together to maintain our planet.

Documentary as Memory Archive and Feminist Practice

This essay reflects on the significance of documentary filmmaking in the context of Latin American documentaries, in general, and Chilean films, in particular. It also reflects on how Latinas’ diasporic memories of place affect identity and how we think of the past through language and images. Feminist film activism is a way to build an archive of women’s lives and voices revealing how gender shapes them. The short documentary La chispa en la pradera (Spark in the Meadow, 2023) displays feminist activism and feminist memories that cut across different generations of women fighting for equality and justice in contemporary Chile.

Deliberative democracy in feminist theory and practice: The case of the Unitary Feminist Assembly of Seville (Spain)

Feminist democratic theory has questioned and added complexity to the Habermasian deliberative model. In this article, we conduct a case study on the Unitary Feminist Assembly of Seville through participant observation and ‘active’ interviews. We reflect on the development of the field by discussing six key findings that capture a number of resolved issues in feminist theory. The aim is to verify the presence and relevance of the debates formulated by feminist theoreticians in the assembly and, above all, to check if these debates about deliberative democracy among feminists have a real reflection on feminist practices. We concluded that the concerns feminist theoreticians express about the conditions for the debate are shared, to a greater or lesser extent, by the activists who, moreover, implement measures to enhance participatory equality albeit with important pending challenges.

“How Can You Be a Feminist if You’re Always Online?” Online Activisms, Ambivalence, and Dis/Connection

Digital presence and participation are often imagined as essential for contemporary feminist practices and identities. However, feminist engagements with digital and social media platforms can be tempered by drawbacks and tensions. This leads activists and everyday feminists to the need to negotiate digital dis/connection in their everyday lives. This article explores the affective dimensions of social media dis/connection in feminist contexts, grounding it on 22 in-depth interviews with people engaged with online feminisms and activisms in the Portuguese context. The article foregrounds the relationship between digital activisms and different affective ambiences, both internal and platform-driven. It explores the pressures felt by activists, the sense of disillusionment that paradoxically co-exists with discourses of political potential of social media, and, finally, practices of partial or temporary disconnection that emerge as means to negotiate the affective ambivalences of digital activism.

Holding ourselves to account: The precarity dividend and the ethics of researching academic precarity

This article uses critical reflexivity as a method to document and analyse the ethical dilemmas that emerge when researching academic precarity across the permanent/precarious divide. With our project on long-term academic precarity as a case study, and as people who experienced long-term academic precarity, we take as the starting point other researchers’ silences on their positionality and about who does the work in the production of research on academic precarity. Although our small, unfunded project was driven by feminist ethics and transformative feminist praxis, there were some ethical issues we did not foresee, nor could we resolve. We focus on three main ethical dilemmas that arose as moments of discomfort, triggering extensive reflection and discussion: (1) authenticity and subjectivity, (2) disclosure of employment status and (3) complicity in and benefit from the precarisation of academic work, or what we term the ‘precarity dividend’. The article seeks to push the boundaries around how researchers hold themselves to account in the process of knowledge production. We suggest that precarity and especially the precarity dividend must become an inherent ethical consideration in all social scientific research design. It is a call for social researchers to make explicit – in writing, in ethics reviews and in presentations of their work – the labour process and labour conditions of all those involved.

Pieces of me, letters from us: collage-making as embodied reflection in autoethnography

ABSTRACT Using letter-writing as a research conversation, this paper discusses collage as a reflexive feminist method useful in qualitative fieldwork, particularly autoethnography. The paper is primarily presented through letters written between friends – the two authors of this paper – with an interest in collage as an art practice. The letters discuss the value of making collages in Samantha’s research process, aiding her generative reflection on the emotionally difficult situations she encountered during an ethnographic project. We contribute to literature on collage as research method by foregrounding the embodied character of physically making collages as a process, showing how the body knows more than we think in our research encounters. We conclude by calling for what Moira Ferguson calls a ‘polemics of the heart’ through letter-writing and collage as feminist practice that might soften the patriarchal structures of the academy.

“Queer Errantry” In The Work Of Cristina Rivera Garza

In this essay I consider two books by the Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza – Había mucha neblina o humo o no sé qué (2016) [There Was a Lot of Fog or Smoke or I Don’t Know What] and Autobiografía del algodón (2020) [Autobiography of Cotton] which conjugate journeys to sites in Mexico where agricultural and industrial labour played a critical role in the country’s post-revolutionary reconstruction. I illustrate how these works not only spotlight the long-term effects of dispossession, transnational migration, and “slow violence” but also articulate an epistemology of what I call “queer errantry”. Drawing on ideas from Edouard Glissant, Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Sara Ahmed, I argue that, in the context of significant environmental and gender violence in Mexico and its “visceraless” state, for Rivera Garza travel and pedestrianism function as acts of relation, forms of reckoning with the rapid acceleration of capitalist modernity. As a way of reading and representing the world, “queer errantry”, I suggest, comprises a decolonial feminist praxis of orientation and remembrance.

Can Trauma-Informed Yoga Center Intersectional Feminist Praxis? The Case of a UK Community Yoga Organization.

This article discusses the tensions around trauma-informed narratives and mind-body practices, which may obscure social inequalities. We present the evaluation of community yoga programs and explore how trauma-informed yoga can be part of the healing process of women subject to interlocking systems of oppression. The study showed how the sociocultural location of participants shaped their engagement with normative yoga discourses and practices. Yoga was perceived as a practice that improved the sense of healing and well-being, and created relational spaces during COVID-19. The article also discusses the value of embodied self-inquiry as an intersectional feminist tool for researchers and practitioners.

Accounting for <i>Hijab</i>: Interrogating the Post-Secular

This article questions the idea of the ‘post-secular’ as a category for understanding Indian women’s experience of religion as an existential practice in neocolonised capitalist patriarchy. The majoritarian state’s manipulation of an identitarian regime of signification to use and control women’s lives is located in a plural, democratic society that is currently riven by the violent politics of conflicting religious and secular constructions of <i>hijab</i>, a head covering worn by Muslim women. From an engaged ideological perspective that seeks radical transformation, feminist struggle includes the right to practice and profess one’s faith, against a majoritarian norm that bulldozes difference and imposes its prescriptions as ideal. This article aims to show, from a feminist perspective, the manipulation of significatory practices in India, linking women’s ‘dress’ with progress to essentialise and politicise identity. It questions whether redressal against violence wrought on women by religious fundamentalism can be found in a secular state policy, based on the norm of equality of difference. Feminist practice would actively use the guarantees given to the citizen by a pluralist secular constitution to challenge the violence of interlinked discriminations, necessary for the survival of a plural society in which diversities co-exist.

Engaging in Transnational Feminist Praxis

In this reflective article, I focus on the meanings and implications of conducting feminist ethnographic research during the COVID-19 pandemic with women participants of an educational project supported by the non-governmental sector in India. This research aimed to provide the space for women to organically present and provide insight into the multiplicity of factors that influence their decision-making authority and ability, illuminating the connections between education, agency, and empowerment during the COVID-19 pandemic. I discuss the nuances as well as on-the-ground limitations of developing collaborative and relational research in contexts with significant material and structural constraints. In this article, I seek to underscore the need to examine closely what collective belonging, duty, and responsibility looks like for researchers in the development and implementation of transnational feminist projects during crisis.

Feminist flashpoints and the burning question of accountability

The media coverage of the Rubiales/Hermoso non-consensual kiss reveals the ongoing difficulties of holding powerful men accountable, despite decades of feminist mobilisation around sexual violence. This essay builds on Sarah Banet-Weiser’s concept of the ‘feminist flashpoint’ as spectacular media events which can help problematise cultural understandings of ‘accountability’ beyond ‘cancel culture’ and carceral feminist politics. Analysing the Rubiales/Hermoso non-consensual kiss in relation to another feminist flashpoint, the contested interpretation of the photograph V-J Day in Times Square, initiates an epistemological shift that focuses on the spectators of the kiss instead of its protagonists. This critical shift locates a feminist practice of accountability in processes of historicization and thinks of responsibility in collective rather than invidividual terms. This piece is part of a special themed issue on the Rubiales/Hermoso non-consensual kiss.

Tapestry of Tales: Women’s Collative Writings as Legal Storytelling

This article presents an exploration of the storytelling as a feminist practice generating a counternarrative to law, with particular focus on narrative forms that center the collation of women’s stories, examining the practice from the 1400s to contemporary microbiographies on TikTok. I focus on the literary mode of biographical collection. In doing so, I assert that it is the weaving and compounding of multitudes of stories that give rise to the challenging of law’s normative, masculinized narratives. Seemingly inconsequential, isolated biographical narratives are given larger social meaning when read together.

Collaboratively reimagining higher education: enacting posthuman feminist practices

ABSTRACT Helping people to better understand and respond to the complexities and multiplicities of twenty-first century realities requires higher education systems to break free from persistent hierarchical binaries and knowledge silos. Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman feminist vision, rooted in radically relational ways of being, offers a generative lens for reimagining higher education. As scholar-educators working in academic spaces, we have responded to Braidotti’s call to engage in creative experimentations for disrupting Humanism’s individualistic, competitive, and cogni-centric framings of learning and teaching. In this dialogue, we co-authors share stories about how ruptures in our experiences as educators led to rethinking theories from our field of adult learning through posthuman feminist concepts. We discuss how the theoretical resonances we found inspired us to reimagine our own research and teaching practices in ways that present possibilities for how posthuman feminist lenses can help us collaboratively reimagine higher education.

Women cannibalized! The troubling link between Queen Bees and mentoring in Pakistani academia

ABSTRACT This article problematizes informal mentoring as a feminist praxis in Pakistani academia, highlighting the potential for exploitative control by some women academic leaders. We contend that informal mentoring is susceptible to misuse at the hands of self-serving Queen Bee academics to reinforce their influence over their women colleagues which can entail suppressing them. This challenges the notion that mentoring can be used as an empowering feminist praxis. Through a self-designed questionnaire administered to academic leaders in 55 universities in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab provinces, followed by focused group discussions with early, mid-career and senior academics, we expose contradictions between the benign self-perceptions of women academic leaders and the experiences of their coworkers. These contradictions reveal an absence of genuine empathy and support extended by women academic leaders and detrimental internal hierarchies among women, thus hindering the collective growth of women. This study also exposes abusive forms of exploitation of early and mid-career academics by their women line managers to stifle competition and sustain disempowering asymmetries. To combat these issues, we propose collaborative mentoring built on equal respect and freedom to dissent ensured through well-regulated mentoring programs overseen by Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission to preempt abuse within mentor–mentee relationships.

Portrait of a Girly Girl: Self-Recording as a Feminist Practice

Portrait of a Girly Girl: Self-Recording as a Feminist Practice

Be-ing seen: towards a feminist interpretative phenomenological analysis to researching the marginalised

ABSTRACT Drawing from a study of women on boards in Egypt, in this methodological article we propose and illustrate four parts of a multidimensional feminist hermeneutic process for Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as a method of uncovering hidden stories of marginalised voices and unrecognised contexts. Underpinned by Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, our novel four-stage approach includes visual images as an alternative mode of data (re)presentation within the hermeneutic circle of interpretation. We show how IPA enables (re)imagining new possibilities of doing and writing feminist research and promotes an in-depth knowledge of the lived experience of women, as well as the systemic issues that concern them. Our contribution highlights our IPA process and outcomes, as a form of feminist praxis that prioritises the recognition of marginalisation and Otherness, embraces an ethic of care towards research participants and researchers, and provides a transformative, emancipatory opportunity for reciprocal learning, awareness and knowing of experience.

Towards a feminist praxis and pedagogy in higher education: knowledge-building and social action in Pakistan

ABSTRACT The fourth wave of feminism in Pakistan represents a significant departure from earlier movements, evolving into an intersectional force with widespread participation from younger women. Recent scholarship notes this shift, highlighting how activists are not only demanding equal rights but also critiquing the private/public dichotomy by centreing the intimate spaces where patriarchy is most entrenched. In light of this new phase in the feminist landscape, this article examines the overlooked narratives and experiences of women activists at the Feminist Students Collective (FSC), a student-led collective based in Lahore, Pakistan. It is argued that FSC activists employ a feminist praxis to analyse coloniality and neoliberalism’s entanglement with patriarchy in higher education and beyond. Through mediums such as writing, dance, poetry, theatre, and social media activism, they counter Eurocentrism in institutional spaces of learning and forge epistemic connections across class, religion, ethnicity, and social location in activist spaces.