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Feminist Knowledge and Research Praxis: Postcolonial Mediations and Possibilities (RSS2.19) - Confirmed

As social scientists, we are all involved in producing knowledge. A central preoccupation of postcolonial feminisms has been to query the terms on which we produce knowledge. Postcolonial feminists have raised pertinent questions about who produces knowledge; with what methodological and analytical assumptions; what it means to think with gender in intersectional and relational ways as well as the liberatory possibilities of feminisms. This course explores these questions to prepare those interested in postcolonial feminist methodologies to develop their research praxis.

Duration: one-week.

General

 

The application deadline has passed, applying is no longer possible

The course runs as a series of interactive lectures and praxis-based workshops over five days to provide participants with a thorough understanding of key debates, issues and challenges for postcolonial feminist research and to explore the implications for their own research.

  • Day 1: Introduces postcolonial feminisms. The lecture offers a brief history of feminism to situate the interruptions made by postcolonial feminists to feminist/gender theories, introducing a range of thinkers who have analysed colonialism in relation to gender, race, sexuality, caste to map its historical and ongoing continuities. The workshop will explore the methodological propositions of postcolonial feminisms and how they relate to participants’ research projects. 
     
  • On Day 2: The lecture and workshop focus on situated knowledges, drawing on critiques of knowledge as objective and considering questions of epistemic justice. 
     
  • Day 3: Addresses the reflexive politics of location: from where do ‘we’ produce knowledge and how do ‘we’ produce it? We will think about location as a site of struggle and its implications for challenging the hegemony of Euro/North Atlantic knowledge, including in our research projects and practices. 
     
  • Day 4: Extends the previous days’ discussions to consider transnational epistemologies: How does feminist knowledge travel? How do we as feminist researchers centre accountability in relation to our location as we work in different research sites? What are the possibilities and contestations in transnational feminist projects? 
     
  • Day 5: Concludes with exploration of anticolonial feminist, queer possibilities, and its potentialities for doing feminist research that rigorously decentres empire and exclusionary frames of thinking.
Collaboration

Watch what our participants say about their experience!

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Starting date

24 June 2024, 9 am
Educational method
On-site
Main Language
English
Sessions
24 June 2024, 9 am - 28 June 2024, 5 pm
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Teacher(s)
Niharika Pandit
Guest teacher
Akanksha Mehta
Guest teacher
Unique code
RSS2.19

Factsheet

Type of education
Course
Entry requirements
See the requirements in cost and admission
Study load (ECTS)
2
Result
Certificate
Organisation
Radboud Summer School

Total package & social events

Niharika

Niharika Pandit
 

I am a feminist theorist interested in questions of gender, racialisation, post/coloniality, militarisation, everyday politics, and anticolonial epistemic and political potentialities of thinking from the Global South. I am Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London. I am currently working on my first book titled ‘On the Politics of Living: Gender, Coloniality and Occupation in Kashmir’, which offers a careful theoretical account of the ongoing occupation and how it structures everyday living – the routine, the banal, the ordinary worlds – of Kashmiri Muslim subjects in spatial, temporal, embodied and affective ways that are mediated through the complexities of gender, racialisation and coloniality. The book is based on my PhD (LSE, 2022) that won the 2023 Michael Nicholson Thesis Prize by the British International Studies Association. My broader research maps anticolonial and liberatory feminist thought and praxis from the margins of the Global South, and engages with feminist and gender theory, feminist international politics and relations and de/postcolonial thought. I work and experiment with creative methodologies like patchwork ethnography, ephemeral archives, narrative and visual storytelling. My work has been published in a range of feminist journals like Feminist Theory; Catalyst; Kohl and I have received several prizes including the 2023 Feminist Theory Essay Prize; 2022 Honourable Mention for the Best Graduate Student Paper Award, International Studies Association; and 2022, 2023 Class Teacher awards by the London School of Economics and Political Science. 

With Akanksha Mehta, I co-founded and co-run the public and community education collective ‘Insurgent Knowledges’ (https://www.instagram.com/insurgentknowledges/). Insurgent Knowledges dreams of free knowledge and critical exchange for all and believes in community education that is rooted in struggle, justice, and collective study. I am an editor of Engenderings and Otherwise Magazine, and write fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in English and Hindi languages.

Akanksha

Akanksha Mehta 
 

I am a queer feminist educator, researcher, writer, photographer, and community organiser based in Southeast London and India. I am Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Gender, Race and Cultural Studies and the Co-Director of the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. My broader research uses narrative writing, ethnographic methods, visual practice, and feminist, queer, crip, postcolonial, and anti-caste theory to examine the gendered, sexed, and racialised workings of everyday political mobilisations, violence, settler colonialism, and nationalism. My doctoral dissertation Right-Wing Sisterhood (SOAS, 2017), which examined the everyday and transnational mobilisations and violence of women in the Hindu nationalist movement in India and the Israeli Zionist settler project in Palestine, won the 2018 Best Dissertation Award by the European International Studies Association. I am currently finishing a monograph that expands on the project and is under contract with Oxford University Press.

My teaching, within and beyond the university, examines critical knowledge productions on race and racism, gender and sexuality, caste, and disability, and it centers grassroots organising, protest, and resistance, and radical crip and community-oriented pedagogies. I have won Student-Led Teaching Awards for ‘Challenging and Inspiring Teaching’ in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2021, 2022 and have also written about pedagogy, care, institutional violence, higher education, research methods, and organising. I facilitate several community spaces of learning and education, including Insurgent Knowledges (co-plotted and co-run with Niharika Pandit) and the Crip Theory Reading Group. I am a member of the Feminist Review Editorial Collective and was awarded the Community Engagement Award by the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the International Studies Association in 2020. 

The application deadline has passed, applying is no longer possible

 

Costs

  • Regular: €1049 (application deadline 13th of May)
  • Student & PhD's: €699 (application deadline 13th of May)

Includes: your course, short morning and late afternoon courses, coffee and tea during breaks, a warm lunch every day, Official Opening, MethodsNET Café (including some drinks and snacks) Official Closing (with some drinks and snacks) and a 1-year (2024 calendar year) free membership as MethodsNET regular member.

Excludes: transport, accommodation, social events and other costs. 

Discounts and Scholarships

Admission

Level of participant: 

  • Master
  • PhD
  • Postdoc
  • Professional

Admission requirements: 

This course is open to all researchers and practitioners who are interested in learning about postcolonial feminisms. It is particularly suitable for participants who have research projects that they are currently undertaking or designing as the course workshops will be praxis-oriented, encouraging participants to bring alive feminist postcolonial thinking in their research. The course does not require pre-requisite knowledge but interest, openness and curiosity to engage with feminist theory and its critical sub-fields are crucial.

Admission documents: 

None