The Global Grace teams have been working on-line learning resources, to share the work we have been doing across our 6 work packages on decolonising gender in/equalities. The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted our thinking about teaching and learning, especially how our resources might be of value in times of social upheaval and uncertainty, when so much is up in the air. Some in our teams have got sick (including me). The various lockdowns and regulations in different regions have meant that others are having to redesign work quickly, so that it is not face-to-face.
Our annual meeting, hosted regionally usually takes place around April/May. It has been a vibrant opportunity to come together, discuss, workshop and also forge friendships across different languages and cultures. My post-card image comes from the 2019 Rio ‘Participation and Capability Event’, as we call our annual meetings. This year, our PCE, which was due to take place in the Philippines, will be on-line. I will miss our in-person exchanges, but the Philippines and Bangladesh teams who have been organising the 2020 PCE have come up with plans for a new programme with shorter days but which will extend over a longer period of two weeks.
As we respond to different local challenges, we have been seeing how valuable research problems are; how we come to better know ourselves, each other and the contexts we are working in. So, we are developing our learning resources with a focus on dilemmas. These will be multi-media stories that show how our plans have snagged and changed. For us, how dilemmas have been produced and what feelings, thoughts and actions they reveal and incite seems a good way to get to the heart of the untidy creativity of research. We see these dilemmas as involving four key activities: empirical humility, dialogue, critical reflexivity and change.
In the coming months, we will be exploring the capacity for dilemmas to enact and communicate the speculative, sensuous and embodied knowledge that characterizes our multisensory methods. We don’t know where this might lead, but we will continue to send postcards from the projects about what we are learning. In the meantime, we would like to share a short feminist reading list on ‘care, crisis and pandemics’ collated by Awino Okech, and some open access journals that we have found valuable.
A Feminist Reading List on Care, Crisis and Pandemics – The list ‘brings together material that draws on feminist and critical gender studies frameworks to offer a holistic analysis of what it means to deal with crisis. The material ranges from reflections on Ebola, HIV/AIDS, post conflict societies, hostile contexts (also commonly referred to as closing civc space). These are resources that are useful during this COVID-19 moment when it is easy to reproduce and erase. We’ve been here before.’
Capacious Journal - Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry is a peer-reviewed international journal. The principal aim of Capacious is to ‘make room’ for a wide diversity of approaches and emerging voices to engage with ongoing conversations in and around affect studies. Capacious endeavours to promote diverse bloom-spaces for affect’s study over the dulling hum of any specific orthodoxy.
Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research - is a progressive, feminist journal on gender and sexuality in the Middle East, South West Asia, and North Africa regions. Kohl Journal is a biannual, multilingual, open access, and peer reviewed academic journal based in Lebanon. It targets mainly, but not exclusively, graduate-level academics, fresh graduates, independent writers, activists, and researchers who are not affiliated with an academic institution. The editors gives particular importance to the Arabic language. Therefore, every issue of Kohl consists of two versions: one in Arabic, and another one in both English and French. All the articles accepted for publication will be translated either to Arabic (from French and English), or to English (from Arabic). Periferias - PERIPHERIES Journal is a publication of the Instituto Maria e João Aleixo, located in the set of Favelas that make up Maré, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The journal is available in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish. It is published biannually and available for free via digital platform, PERIPHERIES is dedicated to publishing works authored by subjects of the peripheries and on themes related to global peripheries. Its principal objective is to bring together researchers, social activists and artists from the world’s peripheries interested in sharing the diverse experiences of popular territories and constructing a convergent and global representation of the Potency of Peripheries.
- Yasmin Gunaratnam, Researcher, WP1