Transnational feminist praxis

Las relaciones asimétricas y de subordinación existentes actualmente entre mujeres y hombres, permiten seguir el rastro en el cuerpo histórico de la mujer, las huellas de la violencia materializada permite comprender el espacio social y político en el que nos han posicionado.
El modelo hegemónico patriarcal ha penetrado hasta en la más mínima grieta de los cuerpos y cuerpas, naturalizando prácticas acordadas culturalmente dentro de un sistema sexo/género.
Los cuerpos ejemplificadores han moldeado conductas de mujeres a través de la historia; cuerpas golpeadas, heridas y asesinadas que devienen de estos, y cuya exposición busca modelar el cuerpo de todas las mujeres. Ahí la importancia de las utopías de la praxis, en donde mujeres se constituyen desde la resistencia política y material ante el modelamiento de las cuerpas.
Una(nuestra) utopía feminista.

Palabras clave: Feminismo, patriarcado, teoría de género, utopía, cuerpa, cuerpo.

Introductory Notes to syllabus I. Rationale I decided to focus on feminist praxis as an overarching concept for two main reasons: 1. Most programs, focusing on gender, women, and sexuality have separate classes on theory and method while activism is as aspect that is inconsistently integrated into the curriculum. 2. A focus on feminist praxis is relevant to teaching, research, advocacy, and activism, challenging the very distinctions between them. 3. This course is viewed a capstone course, with the material geared to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students. II. Choice of readings I began with the assumption that students will be familiar with seminal texts and have a general sense of current debates in the field. The readings are designed to ensure that majors can engage these debates. A solid theoretical foundation, including a familiarity with critical voices in the field, is especially important for students considering graduate studies in the field.

This article contributes to the urban political ecology of water through applied anthropological research
methods and praxis. Drawing on two case studies in urban Sonora, Mexico, we contribute to critical studies
of infrastructure by focusing on large infrastructural systems and decentralized alternatives to water and
sanitation provisioning. We reflect on engaging with residents living on the marginal hillsides of two rapidly
urbanizing desert cities using ethnographic methods. In the capital city of Hermosillo, Radonic emphasizes
how collaborative reflection with barrio residents led her to reframe her analytical approach to water
governance by recognizing informal water infrastructure as a statement of human resilience in the face of
social inequality, resource scarcity, and material disrepair. In the border city of Nogales, Kelly-Richards
reflects on the outcomes of conducting community-based participatory research with technical students and
residents of an informally settled colonia around the construction of a composting toilet, while also
investigating municipal government service provision efforts. Our article invites readers to view these
infrastructure alternatives as ways to explore how applied anthropology can advance the emancipatory
potential of urban political ecology through a collaborative investigation of uneven urbanization and basic
service provisioning. We emphasize everyday situated relationships with infrastructure in informally
organized neighborhoods. Using praxis to collectively investigate the complex and entangled relations
between large piped water and sanitation projects and locally developed alternatives in under serviced areas,
the two case studies reveal lessons learned and illuminate grounded research openings for social justice and
environmental sustainability.

In this two-part workspace, a collective of transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary scholars will come together to deliberate on and practice new modes of communicative praxis in academic conference/workshops. This workspace builds upon energies to decolonize university spaces, including during a previous workshop organized by members of our collective, Setting Forth At Dawn: A Workshop on the Geopolitics and Practices of Academic Writing, held in May 2016 at Jimma University in Jimma, Ethiopia.

Scholarships from across, within, and outside disciplines have asserted the need to move and extend beyond limited and limiting modes of knowing crafted and maintained under the auspices of colonial " modernity. " Enrique Dussel proposes modernity as an alternate being in the world, with " trans " meaning beyond, while Walter Mignolo encourages us to de-link from modernity through increasingly conscious bio-and geo-political scholarships. Horace Campbell prompts us to think and be through African fractal expressions that honor geometrically balanced forms of knowing. More recently, major scholarly associations have made calls for decolonization within conference frameworks and proceedings. In short, much of the efforts to decolonize knowledge have importantly been directed at
• What knowledge(s) are destroyed/expressed/cultivated/canonized and how,
• Who expresses knowledge(s), and
• Methodologies through which we know.

Less sustained attention has, as of yet, been given to the direct decolonization of academic conferences and workshops, during which scholars transmit and communicate knowledge(s).

Traditional conference modes can suppress expressions of dissimilar modes of knowing and communicating. In traditional academic conferences, scholars are subject to rigid time and space controls that often privilege more positivist and axiomatic research topics and knowledge(s). These academic spaces often reaffirm a spatial and metaphysical distancing between the " audience " (learners) and the " presenter " (the knower). This enforced distancing can re-privilege and re-center the " presenter. " This re-privileging can be particularly problematic for scholars whose works contribute to projects of decolonizing and/or are critical of the relationship(s) between knowledge and power. Moreover, traditional conference modes of communicative praxis can de-privilege (a) hesitancy, (b) the expression of multiple subjectivities, and (c) highly transdisciplinary scholarships. This is perhaps more acute for emerging, independent, and non-affiliated scholars, whom have yet to achieve the renown, prestige, and/or job security of tenured and highly published scholars. In such settings, scholars attempt transformative expressions through clandestine and often dis-unified formulas, oftentimes at the fringes of academic conferences.

As part of a U.S. Fulbright fellowship, the Bengali-American poet Tarfia Faizullah traveled to Bangladesh to interview birangona survivors of sexual violence during the 1972 Bangladesh Liberation War. In her resulting poetry collection, Seam (2015), transnational feminist praxis unites poetry, testimony, ethnography, autobiography & autoethnography to speak alongside, instead of for, the birangona. This essay uses critical close reading to explore the book’s suturing of voices, genres, and forms, illustrating how innovative poetics can expand the genre of testimonial while amplifying the power of poetry as part of a transnational (and transformational) feminist practice of solidarity.

PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture is seeking contributions for its next special topics issue on Becoming Ecofeminisms. Ecofeminism has many versions and genealogies. In the context of new kinds of
environmental crises, imaginaries, and discourses, how might we rethink and reinvigorate ecofeminisms—telling alternative genealogies of this movement, highlighting current practices, and envisioning its bold futures? We are interested in ecofeminisms in both theory and practice.

PhænEx revue de théorie et culture existentialistes et phénoménologiques invite des articles pour un numéro consacré aux devenirs écoféministes.

Il y a plusieurs versions et généalogies de l’écoféminisme. Dans le contexte des nouvelles formes de crises environnementales et du développement de nouveaux imaginaires et discours écologiques, est-il possible de repenser et de revitaliser les écoféminismes? Quelles sont les généalogies de ce mouvement, ses nouvelles pratiques et ses futurs possibles? Nous nous intéresserons ici autant aux théories qu’aux pratiques écoféministes.

Deadline for full submissions: AUGUST 1, 2015
Date limite pour les soumissions : 1er AOÛT 2015
All papers will be peer-reviewed /
Les articles seront soumis à une évaluation par les pairs.

Info: Astrida Neimanis (astrida.neimanis [at] gmail.com) & Christiane Bailey (christianebailey [at] gmail.com)

This spoof imagines a Zoom roundtable on intersectionality, led by key feminist scholars in Global North. The text is meant to summarize and complicate the genealogies and ruptures in feminist praxis while being alert to critiques from and hierarchies within feminist scholarship in Global South

This introduction provides the history and rationale for this volume on gender and practice. The editors’ broad conception of practice, especially gender practice, and the relationships among education, training, and practice, three sections into which the volume’s chapters are grouped, are outlined. Connections between gender practice and the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals are drawn. Each chapter is then summarized and relationships among them are highlighted.

Departing from an online interactive Gender Cafe on the topic of Knowledge Management (KM), jointly hosted by a UN agency and the Society of Gender Professionals, this chapter seeks to provide gender practitioners and others with practical examples of how to “gender” KM in international development. Through analyzing the travel of feminist ideas into the field of KM with inspiration from Barbara Czarniawska’s and Bernard Joerge’s (1996) theory of the travel of ideas, the chapter explores the spaces, limits, and future possibilities for the inclusion of feminist perspectives. The ideas and practical examples of how to do so provided in this chapter originated during the cafe, by the participants and panellists. The online Gender Cafe temporarily created a space for feminist perspectives. The data demonstrate how feminist perspectives were translated into issues of inclusion, the body, listening methodologies, practicing reflection, and the importance to one’s work of scrutinizing underlying values. However, for the feminist perspective to be given continuous space and material sustainability developing into an acknowledged part of KM, further actions are needed. The chapter also reflects on future assemblies of gender practitioners, gender scholars and activists, recognizing the struggles often faced by them. The chapter discusses strategies of how a collective organizing of “outside–inside” gender practitioners might push the internal work of implementing feminist perspectives forward.