Kinsey Dialogue Series #4: Claiming Global Space: Global Grassroots Movements

The influence of transnational civil society organizations and networks - both civil and uncivil - in global politics and unprecedented. Among them, those dedicated to greater social and economic equity and equality, to human security, ecological sustainability, peace, inclusion, and tolerance, have played a particularly effective role in restructuring the norms that inform policy and regulatory frameworks for the world. Some scholarly analysts grant that they have in fact effectively restructured global politics in visible and lasting ways. For this very reason, perhaps, their legitimacy, accountability and constituency base is being challenged by states, multinational corporations, scholars, and leaders of the powerful global institutions they seek to influence or discipline. These challenges make it imperative that they democratize their own structures and the processes by which they generate their agendas. They also bring into the limelight the emerging set of transnational grassroots networks and movements that are contesting for space in global policy making. These newer entities can teach us a great deal about how to create more grounded, constituency-based, accountable global advocacy structures that embody the right to represent those for whom they speak

Feminist Mentoring For Feminist Futures Part 1: The Theory

Feminist leadership is essential for transformation at the individual level, as well as organizations and movements, and has been one of CREA's core strategies since its inceptionHowever, translating feminist leadership from concept to practice is a challenging task. The work of undoing and rebuilding systemic and internalized models of power and leadership requires structured and ongoing support — namely, feminist mentoring. In 2016, CREA and Global Fund for Women designed the SAYWLM (South Asia Young Women's Leadership and Mentoring) initiative to build a cadre of young feminist leaders and movement builders through a process of systematic mentoring. This initiative's theory and practice of feminist mentoring breaks traditional models of mentoring that often do not interrogate patriarchal power structures — including in the mentoring relationship itself — and pioneered a model that centers and performs feminist values in the mentoring context. It also demonstrated the vital role that mentoring can play in strengthening feminist leadership in practice.Based on the learning from this initiative, the three-part guide 'Feminist Mentoring for Feminist Futures' was developed to support others who wish to explore the feminist mentoring pathway. The guide explores the theory and practice of feminist mentoring and its impact on both Mentors and young women leaders

Crossborder feminisms: Wendy harcourt in conversation with Srilatha Batliwala, Sunila Abeysekera and Rawwida Baksh

Wendy Harcourt interviews three feminist activists who have been engaged in feminist action from the grassroots to transnational levels. They reflect on changes in feminist and women's movement organizing, both in terms of what are the new issues emerging today and what feminist organizing has given to transformational movement building

Contextualizing women’s agency in marital negotiations:Muslim and Hindu women in Karnataka, India

We use 36 in-depth interviews, with 18 Muslim and 18 Hindu women in Karnataka, India, to explore the relationships between women’s educational attainments and women’s exercise of agency in spousal selection and the timing of marriage. We have outlined three kinds of agency, namely, convinced, resistance, and complicit, and the contexts in which they were deployed by our participants during their marriage negotiations. Our examination of the role of education across this spectrum of agential capacities during marriage negotiations suggests that the linkages between education and agency are not straightforward. Rather, the normative context, and how parents and daughters interact with it when fixing marriages, makes the use of agency by the woman and by their parents much more complicated than standard narratives that claim that “modern” education for girls will inevitably enable women to play decisive roles in realizing their personal preferences. Our data lead us to challenge this framework and we argue that the link between education and agency is not always positive and linear, as it widely thought to be

Conservation Genetics of the North American Box Turtle

This poster was presented at the National Collegiate Honors Council Conference in Boston, Massachusetts.https://scholarworks.uttyler.edu/student_posters/1006/thumbnail.jp

Liberal vs. Liberating Empowerment: A Latin American Feminist Perspective on Conceptualising Women's Empowerment

Paper prepared for presentation to the Conference: Reclaiming Feminism – Gender and Neo-Liberalism, Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Brighton, UK, 9-10 July 2007. A previous version of this paper was presented at the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Research Programme Consortium Inception Workshop, Luxor, Egypt, September 2006.The term ‘women’s empowerment’ is viewed with a certain amount of distrust by feminists in Latin America. There has been some ambiguity surrounding the term in the region and in some cases it has been appropriated to legitimise actions that may not actually empower. This paper reflects on feminist conceptualisations of empowerment and how the process is believed to unfold. It outlines two basic approaches to conceptualising empowerment: ‘liberal’ and ‘liberating’ empowerment. It argues that ‘liberal’ empowerment depoliticises the process by taking the ‘power’ out of the equation, whilst ‘liberating’ empowerment keeps power as the central issue. The latter approach is consistent with the Latin American tradition of collective action and, in conclusion, the paper contends that empowerment in its ‘liberating’ form has been at work in the region since at least the late 1970s

The Power of Relationships: Love and Solidarity in a Landless Women's Organisation in Rural Bangladesh

This article examines the significance of social relationships in women's lives and their relevance to processes of women's empowerment. In Bangladesh, traditional structures limit women's social interaction to their immediate family and maintain male responsibility over them. However, here we look at the example of Saptagram – a social mobilisation organisation particularly focused against gender injustice towards rural landless Bangladeshi women – and how by providing relationships beyond the private sphere it engendered bonds of friendship and loyalty amongst its beneficiaries. Difficulties with systems and its inability to recruit a new line of leadership led to its apparent failure at one point. Yet, despite this, by providing knowledge of rights, respect, courage to stand up for one's beliefs and a sense of wellbeing through working alongside people in the villages, it inspired an enduring solidarity amongst the women it served which led to its eventual resurrection