Insights from feminist organising for decolonisation initiatives. Alba Murcia and Kate Bird in conversation.
Feb 29, 2024Season 1Episode 29
Kate Bird
In this week’s episode, Alba Murcia and Kate Bird (The Development Hub) explore the findings from their research paper on feminist organising and decolonial initiatives. We talk about the work that feminist organising has developed in terms of understanding power and positionality, adopting an intersectional approach, and embracing diverse knowledges and value systems.
The paper features thematic case studies which focus on bodily autonomy, land rights, and territorial integrity across the Majority World. We also highlight feminist organisations which are engaging in anti-racist and decolonial strategies, such as Womankind Worldwide, CREA and IWRAW AP.
We discuss the importance of valuing diverse voices, questioning whose voice is in the room, and working at the community level to articulate power.
Alba Murcia is a Consultant at the Development Hub. She is interested in the intersection of decolonial feminism and resistance in Latin America, with a particular focus on sexual and reproductive health and rights and LGBTQ+ rights.
Kate Bird is Director of The Development Hub, Professor of Practice at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Surrey, Senior Research Associate with ODI and Associate with the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network. She brings over 25 years experience to her work designing and leading multidisciplinary research, training and advisory work.
If you’re interested to find out more about their work, take a look here:
In this week’s episode, Alba Murcia and Kate Bird (The Development Hub) explore the findings from their research paper on feminist organising and decolonial initiatives. We talk about the work that feminist organising has developed in terms of understanding power and positionality, adopting an intersectional approach, and embracing diverse knowledges and value systems.
The paper features thematic case studies which focus on bodily autonomy, land rights, and territorial integrity across the Majority World. We also highlight feminist organisations which are engaging in anti-racist and decolonial strategies, such as Womankind Worldwide, CREA and IWRAW AP.
We discuss the importance of valuing diverse voices, questioning whose voice is in the room, and working at the community level to articulate power.
Alba Murcia is a Consultant at the Development Hub. She is interested in the intersection of decolonial feminism and resistance in Latin America, with a particular focus on sexual and reproductive health and rights and LGBTQ+ rights.
Kate Bird is Director of The Development Hub, Professor of Practice at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Surrey, Senior Research Associate with ODI and Associate with the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network. She brings over 25 years experience to her work designing and leading multidisciplinary research, training and advisory work.
If you’re interested to find out more about their work, take a look here:
Welcome to the Power Shift Decolonising Development, the podcast series seeking to bring together thinkers, practitioners, and activists to share ideas, inspire change, and identify tools for practical action. I am Dr. Nompilo Ndlovu. I am a Zimbabwean living and working in South Africa. I am an oral historian who applies gender frameworks to my work with communities in Africa. Recent work has included involvement in a mixed method study on poverty dynamics in Zimbabwe, where I led the work on gender and marginalisation. My PhD focuses on mass violence, memory and local transitional justice in post colonial Zimbabwe. I'm a Senior Associate at The Development Hub. Today, I'm speaking with colleagues Alba Murcia and Kate Bird. Over to you first, Alba.
Alba:
Thank you, Nompilo. Hello, I'm Alba Murcia. I'm interested in the intersection of decolonial feminism and resistance in Latin America with a particular focus on sexual and reproductive health and rights and LGBTQ+ rights, and I'm a Consultant at the Development Hub. Over to you, Kate.
Kate:
Hi, I'm Professor Kate Bird. I'm the Director of the Development Hub. I'm a Senior Associate at ODI and an Associate with the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network. I'm a Professor of Practice at the University of Surrey. And I'm a socio economist working on poverty dynamics, resilience and bottom up growth. Back to you, Nompilo.
Nompilo:
Today we'll be talking about a study of feminist organising that The Development Hub produced with a number of partners. To read the study or to find out more about our partners in the study, click on the show notes below this episode. Okay, let's start. Kate, could you tell me about the ideas behind the study? First of all, what is feminist organising? And why were you interested in looking at feminist organising and what it may have to contribute to decolonisation?
Kate:
Thank you, Nompilo. So, when we first started thinking about this paper, Alba and I, we were thinking about feminist organisations, and then Alba actually suggested that we broaden to think about feminist organising because that would incorporate also feminist social movements. So the paper looks at feminist social movements and feminist organisations and looks at some of the tools that they use, some of the approaches that they use, and also presents some thematic case studies of the work that feminist organisations and feminist social movements are engaged with in the Majority World. And why we thought it was interesting to look at feminist organising and decolonisation was because as part of the podcast series, we interviewed a number of different representatives from feminist organisations and feminist social movements. And what we identified very quickly was that their understanding of structure in terms of patriarchy in the case of feminist organising, but also power and positionality, gave them some real strengths in thinking about coloniality, because the processes of coloniality are also structured through hegemonic Eurocentric thinking, racism and the way that racist thinking has become institutionalised and structural, and the way that it governs the development and humanitarian sectors. So that's why we thought it was a useful entry point to think about what feminist organising has in terms of observable approaches and entry points that might be useful for the wider shift the power movement.
Nompilo:
Thank you for that. Alba, the study we are talking about today includes a number of case studies. Could you tell me a little about the themes they cover and why you chose them?
Alba:
So with this paper, we also wanted to move quite a bit away from theory and to present quite practical case studies of different ways that feminists organising in general are tackling issues in their communities. And so we selected the case studies partly based on our regional specialisations as co-authors of the paper, which we co authored with Piyumi Samaraweera from CREA. We also wanted to represent a diversity of contexts in which colonialism continues to have a direct impact on women's lives and their basic rights. So thematically they generally focus on bodily autonomy, land rights, and territorial integrity. This common ground allowed us to identify how women's movements have organised around these claims to rights and identify approaches with a potential for wider application. So just very quickly, our first study focuses on decriminalising sex work in India and it dives into the colonial origins of the criminalisation of consensual sex work. And here we really highlighted how a rights based approach allows sex workers to organise and to demand safer and better working conditions. And then our second case study was on women's land rights in Zimbabwe and Uganda, on how women's access to land determines their economic autonomy, agency, and their involvement in household decision making. And then the final case study was on territorio cuerpo tierra as a practice of decolonial feminist resistance in Colombia. And here we were looking at, again, land rights, but also the relationship between gender based violence and land appropriation as mechanisms of neocolonial power, and how both enact power and control over women's bodies, habitats and access to resources. So this was really a common thread throughout the three first case studies, which focused on feminist organising, rather than feminist organisations.
Nompilo:
Thank you for that, Alba. I was part of a consultancy team in South Africa last year on actually decolonising sex work in South Africa. And it was just interesting reading the synergies around how the conclusion as well was that even in that context, everything needs to be addressed from a human rights lens. And that's the best way to actually enable the field and the discourse to move going forward. So I particularly enjoyed reading that because it was such a different context and yet it was trying to show the thinking and the move around the world globally. I'd like to discuss some of the findings that emerged from the study moving forward. First of all, you say that understanding power is a key tool to deliver social justice. Can either of you say a bit more about this?
Kate:
Yeah, sure. So, looking at the Zimbabwe case study, where we were looking at women's access to land and women's land rights. What was very clear was that under the patriarchal system of land allocation, women can only access land either through their husbands, their fathers, their sons, or their brothers. And this limits their agency in terms of household decision making and also their ability to invest in their land based enterprises. And therefore limits their scope to express their political opinions and their decision making power at the community and wider levels. So, a Zimbabwe based and a Zimbabwe initiated women's organisation has been working with women at the community level to link them up with each other and provide them with the capacity to engage in wider political debates around their rights, has given them access to information about the law, so they're able to engage in debates and defend their land rights. It's also linked these women's groups up nationally, and then within the SADC region, and this has allowed women to articulate their power and to express their power, to express their agency. And that's had a wider impact on their empowerment as individuals and their empowerment as women. And it's very much a Zimbabwe based organisation and structure, but then linking up with very similar land rights organisations and structures across the SADC region. Back over to you, Alba.
Alba:
Something else I think that we really found about the work that feminist organising has done to understand power is, so feminist organisations, we realised, as Kate was saying earlier, that they had already done a lot of the work that decolonial strategies are starting to propose, and so that's work on questioning power, questioning positionality, on designing strategies where every person's power is being questioned. And so I think that that was very interesting because it was like, oh, we maybe already have a bit of a framework here about how to go about things when we're talking about decolonisation, when we're talking about anti racism. For example, one of the organisations that we feature in the paper is Womankind Worldwide, which we interviewed Disha Sughand for, and she talked about the anti racism pledge that they had produced at Womankind Worldwide. And that was a very detailed document that we go through in the paper. And it showed a lot of steps that were being taken already to question anti racism at every point of the organisation and from a feminist perspective. And so, I thought that that was a very strong message throughout the paper is feminist organisations are ahead of the game in a certain sense when it comes to decolonisation and when it comes to anti racism.
Nompilo:
Those are some interesting insights. Can we move on to the next question? Another key finding is that unless we include diverse voices, equity will remain elusive. I know you've already started to speak about this Alba in your answer when you talk about questioning power. But can you tell our listeners more about this? And I can give you prompts about embracing diverse knowledges and value systems, local knowledge, South-South learning.
Alba:
Yes. So this was very interesting because it comes up throughout the case studies, but in the case study on territorio cuerpo tierra in Colombia, there was a very big emphasis on embracing diverse knowledges and diverse value systems, in this specific case study, it was about indigenous knowledges because it was focused on rural and indigenous communities in Colombia and throughout Latin America. So that was one of the main things where it was questioning what is counted as knowledge and whose voice is counted as legitimate and therefore who is setting the agenda for what issues are being spoken about and in what way they're being spoken about. And we really found throughout the case studies that we did that local knowledge can power movements to assert rights. And this goes back to the rights based approach that we were talking about when decriminalising sex work. And to drive a radical agenda to take back control against patriarchal and colonial structures of power. Something else is when we did the case study on IWRAW Asia Pacific, which is a Global South based organisation. They focus on facilitating inclusive global spaces for dialogue. And so, for example, they host the Global South Women's Forum, which brings together women from all across the Global South to discuss feminist issues. And we interviewed Priyanthi Fernando to talk to us about this, and she really focused on their efforts to make the event as inclusive as possible. And that's practical things with sorting out people's visas, making sure that as many diverse people as possible could be in the room. And so, for example, they found that when they hosted the Global South Women's Forum online for a few years due to the pandemic, participation increased massively, and they were able to actually get so many more diverse people from so many more communities because it was easier to access online than having to travel to a forum. And we spoke a lot as well, when talking about diverse voices and when global forums are held, how there's a double standard where when they're held in the Global North, they'll invite people over from the Global South to come to their global events, but that doesn't tend to happen the other way around. So organisations and people from the Global North will not attend the ones in the Global South. And so we spoke about that double standard, and about how these global spaces, they bring together and they generate a dialogue between marginalised groups and the mainstream, which helps to build inclusive movements and to shift those norms and values so that those voices are accounted as legitimate and are really put at the center. But as we've spoken a lot throughout the podcast, I think this comes with going all the way down to questioning whose knowledge we're counting as legitimate and whose voice we're counting as legitimate in certain spaces.
Nompilo:
Okay, can we move on to the next question then? All righty. It's been great talking with you today. To close off, Alba, can you identify a practical step that our listeners and viewers can take to support shifting power, anti racism and decolonisation, whether they are members of the engaged general public or work in the development sector?
Alba:
The main takeaway from the paper for me in regards to this was the importance of understanding a diversity of contexts and really holding space for those differences. So I would say that a practical first step would be to be conscious and self reflective when engaging with different communities, be that in development work or outside of it as well. And to be open to not only different ways of doing things, but also, as I was saying just now, different forms of knowledge and different understandings of what we consider the same issue. And we can really see this in the case studies presented in the paper because although the women in each of the case studies are ultimately all impacted by patriarchal and colonial systems of oppression. Each community has really developed very diverse strategies and perspectives to challenge these power structures. Over to you, Kate.
Kate:
Yeah, thank you Alba. I think something that stands out for me is the importance of understanding power and how power works and related to that, positionality and our power as individuals. And I think too often people in international development and humanitarian action, people who are from the Minority World or Global North, are kind of blithely unaware of the power that they have in interpersonal interactions within teams, within organisations, and how their organisation is powerful within the broader ecosystem. So I think really beginning to unpick and the power of people from the Minority World is really crucial if we're thinking about decolonising. And it's useful to look at the ways in which feminist organising have really thought about power and the tools and mechanisms that they've brought to bear to work on power and to shift power because I think the tools that they have can be very usefully applied in decolonisation. So for me as an individual, what I take away from this piece of work is really reflecting on my own power and positionality and taking a pause. And really considering and thinking about that. So having a thoughtful approach, I suppose.
Nompilo:
Okay. And I've seen this increasingly coming up in a lot of the work that you're doing power positionality personal transformation. So that's wonderful to hear. I hope that the paper receives the right kind of traction. And yeah, that we continue to disseminate it online. But that's all from my end. Do you guys have any concluding comments?
Alba:
No, I think that's all.
Kate:
Not for me. Just goodbye to everyone. Yeah. Thank you. Bye.