This collection of essays brings together auto-ethnographic, critical and comparative reflections on doing feminisms in the academy in contemporary India and the UK. Written by emergent and seasoned academics from a range of disciplinary, social and (geo)political locations, these essays explore the transformative potential, dilemmas and challenges of teaching, learning, researching and working as feminist academics. By engaging with questions of identity and difference, institutional and classroom pedagogies, reflexivity and accountability, and the production and circulation of feminist and non-feminist knowledge, the essays in this collection also provide the frame and the lens through which to view the wider landscape of contemporary higher education.Anchored in feminist scholarship and written in an accessible style, the collection will be useful to those interested in feminist, women's and gender studies, and more broadly those keen to pursue equality in higher education and decentring of knowledge production globally.RADHIKA GOVINDA is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her work examines gender politics at the intersections of caste, class, race and religion in women's and social movements, in development policies and practice, in everyday social relations in rural and urban spaces, and in the global dynamics of knowledge production.FIONA MACKAY is Professor of Politics and Director of genderED, the University of Edinburgh’s interdisciplinary hub for gender and sexualities studies. She teaches and researches in the areas of gender and politics. She founded and co-directs the Feminism and Institutionalism International Network.KRISHNA MENON is a Professor of Gender Studies, and currently Dean of the School of Human Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi. She is also Associate Editor of the International Feminist Journal of Politics and author of Social Movements in Contemporary India (2019).RUKMINI SEN is Professor of Sociology in the School of Liberal Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of sociology of law, feminist pedagogy, narrative methods, relationships and intimacies. She is a member of the Indian Association for Women’s Studies and has served on its Executive Committee.
How can women live fully? If autonomy is critical for humans, why do women have little or no choice vis-à-vis motherhood? Do women know they have a choice, if they do? How 'free' are these choices in a context where the self is socially mired and deeply enmeshed into the familial? What are implications of motherhood on how human relatedness and belonging are defined?These questions underlie Amrita Nandy's remarkable research on motherhood as an institution, one that conflates 'woman' with 'mother' and 'personal' with 'political'.As the bedrock of human survival and an unchallenged norm of 'normal' female lives, motherhood expects and even compels women to be mothers—symbolic and corporeal. Even though the ideology of pronatalism and motherhood reinforce reproductive technology and vice versa, the care work of mothering suffers political neglect and economic devaluation. However, motherhood (and non-motherhood) is not just physiological. As the pivot to a web of heteronormative institutions (such as marriage and the family), motherhood bears an overwhelming and decisive influence on women's lives. Against the weight of traditional and contemporary histories, socio-political discourse and policies, this study explores how women, as embodiments of multiple identities, could live stigma-free, 'authentic' lives without having to abandon reproductive 'self'-determination.
December 2012: Tens of thousands of people – women, men, families, young, old, rich, poor – come out onto the streets of towns and cities in India to protest the brutal gang rape and murder of a young medical student in Delhi. For days and months, the protests refuse to die down. People demand change, action, commitment to the ideals of democracy and egalitarianism. And they refuse to be silenced.Soon, a new law is put in place. More and more people start to report incidents of sexual assault. New conversations, new debates begin: is violence increasing? Are we seeing more of it? Was it previously invisible?In this bold and brilliant collection of visual stories, fourteen young women respond to the activism and debates on the ground; they negotiate anger, fear, hope, resistance. Created in a week-long workshop, these stories talk to each other as they powerfully describe the fierce determination of the writers/artists to continue the battle for change.
A thematic history of the women's movement in India both before and after independence, this book covers the period from the nineteenth century to the present day. It looks at how women's issues were raised, initially by men and as part of the movements for social reform, and then with the involvement of women in the nationalist movement, by women themselves. Using photographs, old and new documents, excerpts from letters, books and informal writings, the author documents the growing involvement of women and the formation of the early women's organizations, she examines the foregrounding of the `women's issue' during the reform and nationalist movements and its subsequent disappearance from the agenda of public debate until the post independence period of the sixties and seventies when it surfaces again.Radha Kumar is Senior Fellow and Director of the project on Ethnic Conflict, Partition and Post-Conflict Reconstruction at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. She is author of Divide and Fall: Bosnia in the Annals of Partition. She was formerly Executive Director, Helsinki Citizen's Assembly.
Poster Women is an archive of over 1500 posters from the Indian Women's Movement, collected over an 18 monthperiod from all over India. Put together by Zubaan, this unique archive demonstrates the dynamism, richness and variety of this important movement. Spanning the periodfrom the 70s to the present day, the collection is divide into a number of key campaigns that cover areas such as violence, health, political participation, the environment, religion and communalism, literacy and rights and marginalization. Also included are posters on different themes such as the use of the goddess metaphor, or the marking of particular days that ara important to the movement. The collection has been sourced from over 200 groups all over the country.