Social Issues Syndicate content

Awino Okech

If I were to trace the watershed moments in my life that re-affirmed and grew my journey with feminism I would probably say there have been three main ones. The first has to be an early journey after high school in rural Kenya with an organisation my mother founded and run.  You see my mother believed that children should not be idle, so as I waited to join university I had to “earn my keep”. KEFEADO was then one of the few organisations in Western Kenya doing any form of “gender and development” work. Due to my mother’s history as an educator most of the early projects focused on formal education institutions, specifically primary and high schools. I used to accompany my mother when she travelled with her colleagues to “implement” these projects. I started out as an observer really, filing out registration and payment forms. This observation sporadically over two years resulted in a deep appreciation of the meaning of access to resources, questions of choice and the importance of faith. Many of the young women we encountered in these schools which were often far removed from the reach of the State saw, through school projects KEFEADO ran, people who believed in them and who facilitated the re-mobilisation of local opportunities.

 

 

 

 

Amina Mama

I am a Nigerian scholar and researcher committed to ending the oppression of women and transforming the prevailing unequal and unjust gender relations that see so many women abused and their lives wasted. My world view is informed by my heritage as a Nigerian born of mixed Nigerian and English parentage, raised in the multi-ethnic, multi-religious and northern Nigerian town of Kaduna, with a family home in the ancient town on Bida.

 

 

 

 

 

In Conversation:  The Ghanaian Women's Manifesto Movement

Syllabus On Gender And Sexualities In African Contexts

This syllabus is designed for senior undergraduate, or early postgraduate students. Its objectives are:

 

 


Sexuality Bibliography -- Part 3

Compulsory heterosexuality/heteronormativity

Lisa Lindsay’s and Stephan Miescher’s edited collection, Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa (section 7a) addresses the construction of masculinities during the socio-economic and cultural transformations of the colonial and postcolonial periods.


Sexuality Bibliography -- Part 2

Other bodies of thought and activism

Here I have referred to the work of African liberationists, feminisms in the global South, diasporic feminisms in the global North, Euro-American feminisms, transcontinental organising, the political economy of sexuality, Freud, post-structuralism and queer theory.


Review Essay for Teaching Gender-Based Violence -- Part One

This part of our review essays covers an introduction to the broad area of gender-based violence for teaching. PART TWO presents ideas about different 'sectors' of gender-based violence work.


Sexuality Bibliography -- Part 1

Teaching and curricula on gender and women.s studies in Africa have predominantly focused on issues of development and/or policy, as indicated by a recent and ongoing survey carried out by the African Gender Institute. At the same time, scholars, practitioners and policy makers recognise that there is a “gap” between policy and its implementation.


Gender and Media Activists in Africa

We would like to thank and acknowledge the World Association of Christian Communication (WACC) for allowing us to use some of the profiles they put together. We also thank all the women who agreed to have their profiles included in this project. With time, more profiles will be included.


Gender & Sexuality: Review essay on teaching gender and sexualities (Part 2)

Intersectionality

- an approach to embedding gender processes into specific historical, cultural, and economic/political contexts.

Amina Mama’s Notes on Gender stress the historical specificity of the operation of gender, and Oyewumi considers carefully how this operation was, and is, placed within the organization of different societies: where and when is “gendering” a central political and cultural force? How, for example, does “gendering” interact with the dominance of class construction, or the weight of colonial influences?

 

 

 

 

 


Gender & Development - An Idea for a curriculum

This course aims to introduce students to the various approaches and assumptions that are implicit in the phrase Gender and Development. The everyday use of the term Development assumes that societies are on a linear path of continuous material improvement in terms of technology, economics, population growth, health, and education. Secondly, the phrase Gender and Development is usually understood to mean that women need to be brought on board the development project. Critics of the linear approach to development argue that social change linked to colonialism and migration in the third world have contributed to these societies’ economic and social underdevelopment. Similarly feminists have argued that development for women is more complex than a simple process of adding women to general development.