The Social Imaginaries of Women's Peace Activism in Northern Uganda

The metanarrative of global feminism is often constructed as a progressive and emancipatory movement emanating from the West and fostering radical politics elsewhere in the world. Such a view is not only ethnocentric but, critically, it fails to engage with the complex ways in which feminist politics travel and are evinced in specific localities. In this article, I seek to understand how marginalized women in the “Global South” – particularly in Africa – interpret, experience and negotiate feminist ideas to wield political power within the context of their social and moral worlds. I focus on women's organized resistance to violence and armed conflict, known as “women's peace activism.” Using a case study of a women's peace movement in Uganda mediated by an international feminist organization called Isis Women's International Cross-Cultural Exchange, I conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with a wide range of activists in the organization and in its network in postconflict areas in Northern Uganda. I argue that the feminist peace discourse is most meaningful when its universal values of equity and securing the dignity of women are appropriated and re-signified through the cultural institutions and the collective memory of activists in their local settings.     

Intimate Violence against Rural Women: The Current and Future State of Feminist Empirical and Theoretical Contributions

Rural crime in general ranks among the least studied social problems in the social sciences; however, a growing body of research shows that rural woman abuse is a major problem. The current state of progressive critical feminist social scientific knowledge enhances an empirical and theoretical understanding of intimate violence against rural women. Revealing the complexities of rural women's experiences and struggles with violent relationships reconstitutes violence against women as a public crisis that requires continued serious attention with regard research, theory, and policy. Three primary objectives of this article are as follows: (i) briefly review recent feminist social scientific literature on research, methodology, and theoretical contributions on violence against women in rural areas, (ii) suggest new directions in researching and theorizing rural women's experiences with intimate violence, and (iii) offer creative practical and policy solutions towards a broad vision of social change.     

From Clinic to Community: The Evolution of a Group for Women with Postpartum Mental Illness

Since 1980, national and international research knowledge on carers and care-giving has been accumulating. However, the theoretical bases of this research are usually unstated and implicit. Theory is vital in shaping social work research programs and types of social work intervention. This paper examines and critiques the social work theories influencing published social work research on care-giving. A search of key social work journals from 1980 to 2001 identified a total of 102 research articles about care-giving. The perspectives informing these articles fall into four groupings: positivist; interpretivist; systems; and feminist/radical. Building on the model developed by Howe (1987), which differentiates theories of radical change from those concerned with social regulation, each perspective is critically analysed for its underlying assumptions, level of analysis, research methodology and implications for policy and practice. Our review indicated that research on care-giving is dominated by a positivist approach that focuses on stress-coping and social support theories. These approaches are essentially individualistic, focus on the burden of care and prescribe interventions that assist carers to adjust to or cope with the care-giving role. Future social work research on care-giving should be informed by critical social work theories offering deeper structural analysis. This would be more consistent with our discipline's concern for social change and social justice.     

From pillar to post: Women and social work studies in the 21st century

Abstract

A decade or so after the acknowledgement and inclusion of women's issues in mainstream social work courses, we find the circumstances in which such education occurs have changed. The 'third wave' of feminism has revisited the feminist agenda of the 1960s and 1970s; there has been a paradigm shift in what tertiary education is perceived to offer; and global theories have been replaced by post modern interpretations. This article discusses the impact of these changes for social work education drawing on the authors' experiences with the 'Women and Social Work' elective subject in the Bachelor of Social Work Degree at the University of New South Wales, Australia. This elective was popular until the mid 1990s when it failed to attract students. The authors reflect on their experience of teaching the subject and their understanding of current feminism to identify a way forward in the attempt to rekindle student enthusiasm for feminist understandings and provide education which will further the emancipatory project of social work.     

Eléments pour une sociologie des études féministes en Europe centrale et orientale

Women's/gender studies were established in the Eastern European post-communist countries during the 1990s, as a new field of academic research and higher education. Works produced in this framework are often used as expert studies and aim to contribute to the improvement of the condition of women in that region, being at the core of the social and political reconstitution programs during the post-communist era. They were established by agents who were simultaneously active in different social spheres (scientific space, civil society associations, or institutionalized politics) and who exemplarily personify the multisituated feminism of the globalization era. These studies criss-cross national and international levels as well as scientific and militant logics. Hence they seem a pertinent entry to study the reconstruction of social sciences, the emergence of new academic topics, the international circulation and the importation of scientific questions and, finally, the recomposition of the academic elites within the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The article begins with a general point about the East-European context of the 1990s, when the socio-economic degradation of women's condition met a widely-spread rejection of feminist ideas due to their ideological manipulation by the socialist regimes. Then a zoom on the Romanian case allows us a reflection on the construction of the ‘women's issue’ during the post-communist transition, when several types of agents involved in the democratization reforms make theirs the transnational concern for women's rights. Finally, on the basis of these preliminary ideas, some research axes and working hypotheses are presented, such as: the sociology of gender studies as a new academic discipline, in a perspective inspired by the social history of social sciences; the sociology of the international circulation of feminist ideas and of the dynamics of East–West intellectual debates on the topic of women's condition in the post-communist countries; the analysis of the multiplying bureaucratic uses of ‘gender’ consequences.     

Survivors of Woman Abuse

Abstract

The feminist social work and related literature on abused women has focused on women's processes of empowerment but has overlooked the question of women's movement from individual survival to collective resistance. In this feminist qualitative study, I explore the processes through which survivors of abuse by male partners become involved in collective action for social change. Using story telling as a research method, I interviewed 11 women about the processes, factors, insights, and events that prompted them to act collectively to address violence against women. I found that women's movement from individual survival to collective action entails significant changes in consciousness and subjectivity. Women's processes of conscientization are complex, contradictory and often painful because they involve political and psychic dimensions of subjectivity, protracted struggles with contradictions and conflict, and resistance to knowledge that threatens to unsettle relatively stable notions of identity. I suggest that feminist social work theory and practice must take into account three interrelated elements of women's transformative journeys: the discursive and material conditions that facilitate women's movement to collective action; the social, material and psychic costs of women's growth; and the multifaceted and difficult nature of women's journey in recognizing and naming abuse, making sense of their experiences, and acting on this knowledge to work for change. I recommend that feminist social work practice with survivors recognize that survivors can and do contribute to social change, and develop new, more inclusive liberatory models of working with survivors of abuse.     

Social Identity and its Influence on Women's Roles in East-Central Europe

An apparent drop in women's presence in the political sphere has spawned debates in the feminist literature over the need and cultural appropriateness of women's political office-holding in East-Central Europe. The author discusses the nature of political participation in light of women's self-definition, social identity, and loci of commitments in these transforming states. Taking their own value orientations and the societal processes they experience as a baseline from which to appraise political and social change, women in East-Central Europe feel disillusioned with the transition to a market economy and the ideological framework out of which it functions. They have, after all, disproportionately borne the ill-effects of the new ideology of efficiency and productivity in the workforce and they perceive the political arena as a narrowly defined arena of partisan rancoring that does not address their needs. Pointing to Dahl's work on moral civic virtue, the author argues that the orientation and values of women in East-Central Europe – i.e. a commitment to justice and preference for localized, pragmatic (not ideological) and particularistic action – are especially conducive to developing the moral civic infrastructure so badly needed in these transitioning countries. The author discusses the merits and drawbacks of three possible scenarios for action for the women of this region: maintaining the status quo; using women's traditional and preferred forms of action to effect change 'from the bottom'; and taking frontal action at the national level against inequities and discriminatory policies.     

Community Work:

This article presents a typology of models of community work currently extant in the United Kingdom. It focuses on clarifying theoretical points through analysis of the currently most widely accepted contemporary models in use throughout the UK: community care; community organization; community development; social/community planning; community education; and community action, and developing models of feminist community work, and black and anti-racist community work. The typology presented is organized on a continuum from models focused on ''care'' to those focusing on ''action.'' Each model is analyzed in relation to the following characteristics: strategy; workers' main roles; and typical agencies and examples of work. Selected critical key texts treating each model are documented. Discussion highlights similarities and differences among the models particularly with regard to techniques and skills and ideological traditions to provide a framework to understand community work practice.     

Analyzing Politics and Change in Women's Organizations

Research on women's political action too often passes over women's organizations that do not officially adopt a feminist ideology and do not explicitly set out to change gender power relations. Based on implicit notions that such women's organizations are nonpolitical (or less interesting), the research often supports a false dichotomy between feminist and nonfeminist organizations rather than illuminates women's common political ground. This study addresses women's collective action, politics and change by focusing on the case of Nicaraguan Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs - women who lost a son or daughter in the revolution or Contra War. Although some members in Matagalpa critiqued male domination, the organization itself did not set out to challenge the gendered division of labor; indeed, their collective demands relied upon and in many ways reinforced traditional gender identities. I argue that such movements are important to feminist political analysis. As I demonstrate in this article, an organization's lack of an official feminist ideology does not mean that individual members do not express interests, identities and ideals that challenge the gendered status quo. Such research, however, requires a nuanced approach, recognizing women as both accommodating and resisting gendered social structures. Thus, this study challenges the dominant feminist-feminine dichotomy by demonstrating that women's collective action is not only per se political (and politically important) but may also challenge as well as reinforce gendered power structures.     

What's to come is more complicated: feminist visions of peace in Colombia

The years following the Colombian Congress’ 2016 approval of peace accords with the country’s oldest and largest guerrilla army have brought into stark relief Cynthia Enloe’s assertion that “wars don’t simply end, and wars don’t end simply.” As Colombia and the international community grapple with the complexity of constructing a society at peace, it is essential to listen to Colombian feminists’ visions of what a true and lasting peace would look like. While the feminist gains evinced by the accords represent a significant step forward, my research with feminist peace networks during the negotiations points to a still broader vision of peace that has not yet been embodied by the accords or their implementation. I argue that the antimilitarist, antineoliberal and antipatriarchal peace envisioned by feminist activists is more comprehensive, more transformative and more stable than that contained in the accords, and offer predictions of how feminists might pursue their vision in the post-accords reality.     

A COMMENT ON SIEGFRIED'S FIRST LESSON IN ECONOMETRICS

In an insightful, and delightfully short, paper that was published in the Journal of Political Economy in 1970, Siegfried provided an important lesson about econometric methodology for all budding young econometricians. Unfortunately, there is a mistake in that paper. This short comment provides a simple correction for that mistake. This correction will hopefully enable econometrics students to obtain the fundamental insights from Siegfried's paper with less confusion than might otherwise have been the case. (JEL A20, C01, C10)     

COMPETITIVE FRAMING PROCESSES IN THE ABORTION DEBATE: Polarization-vilification, Frame Saving, and Frame Debunking

This article investigates how frame alignment processes are employed by a social movement organization in competitive response to a countermovement. Though the battles between feminist organizations such as NOW and conservative opposition are waged in many arenas, we focus exclusively on the ideological clash around abortion. After briefly describing the context of encounters, we examine the challenges launched against perceived threats to reproductive rights using New York State NOW chapter newsletters spanning 1970–1988. We identify three rhetorical strategies used by NOW to counterframe the debate for its members. polarization-vilification, frame debunking, and frame saving. Our findings suggest that in the face of opposition, framing strategies are modified with the goal of mobilization.     

A Collection of Thoughts and Findings on Affirmative Action

Abstract

During the 1980s and ′90s grassroots feminist and neoconservative movements increased in size and strength around the world. In the U.S. and globally, conservatives organized against the welfare state and against feminism. As a result, feminist social work has been constrained and enhanced by the competing claims of these divergent movements. This article presents a case study of one U.S. battered women's organization which retrenched and then reasserted its feminism in reaction to these contradictory forces. The analysis of this example explores the question of how feminist social workers can apply the capacity of feminist thinking and action, given the conservative constraints.     

Ten years after Beijing

For fifteen years, in the north of the state of Israel, a women's organization existed in which Israeli Jewish and Israeli Palestinian women activists worked together for peace and justice in a careful and challenging dialogue across difference. “Bat Shalom of the North” was the subject of research by the author in 1996. In this article she reports on her return in 2012 to re-interview former members. Applying the feminist concept of “transversal politics” she analyzes the organization's trajectory, radicalization and eventual closure in the context of a failed peace process and increasing violence in the region. Their perspective on Israel's oppression of its Palestinian minority led the surviving members of Bat Shalom of the North in its final days to envision not a “two-state solution” to the Israel Palestine conflict but a single, inclusive, multicultural and democratic country, in which subject identities are built not on a feeling of belonging to land, language or religion but on shared adhesion to human and democratic rights.     

Protest,Cyberactivism and New Social Movements: The Reemergence of the Peace Movement Post 9/11

This paper examines ways in which the Internet and alternative forms of media have enhanced the global, yet grassroots, political mobilization in the anti-war effort in the post 9/11 environment. An examination of the role of cyberactivism in the peace movement enhances our understanding of social movements and contentious politics by analyzing how contemporary social movements are using advanced forms of technology and mass communication as a mobilizing tool and a conduit to alternative forms of media. These serve as both a means and target of protest action and have played a critical role in the organization and success of internal political mobilizing.     

Can we,should we,measure ethnicity?

Feminist social science is marked by its diversity, its ethos of inclusiveness and its critical power. These qualities are best exemplified in feminisms' acknowledgement, at the epistemological level, that men as well as women are crucial participants in the feminist enterprise. Moreover, epistemological justifications for positioning men within feminism is matched by a commitment to think through the methodological implications of men's involvement as both researchers and researched. In particular, inclusiveness pushes at the boundary of what counts as feminist methodology, and it forces us to rethink the underlying principles of feminist research work. In this article, two key feminist methodological principles—rapport and empathy, and democracy—are interrogated in the light of a series of in-depth interviews with a group of powerful, authoritative and uniformed men (senior police officers). It is suggested that while there may be a temptation to dismiss the interviewing relations which evolved as ‘non-feminist’, they are also indicative of feminist methodological vitality and strength as well as its capacity to accommodate the fractured subjectivities of research participants. The paper concludes by positing a re-conceptualization of interviewing principles which not only appreciate diversity in feminist epistemological and methodological commitments, but also variability and difference in feminist research relationships.     

Shifting Boundaries and Splintering Movements: Abortion Rights in the Feminist and New Right Movements

Social movement boundaries are fundamentally about deciding who “we” are by defining who we are not. However, newly salient issues in a movement community can shift these boundaries by changing the membership criteria for both insiders and outsiders. Through a comparative case study of two relatively conservative feminist organizations, Women's Equity Action League (WEAL) and Feminists for Life (FFL), I examine how shifting boundaries around abortion rights in the feminist movement led to movement splintering, as organizations struggled and sometimes failed to maintain their relationships in a movement that increasingly defined them as outsiders. This analysis reveals how abortion rights' growing importance to both the feminist movement and the New Right resulted in the realignment of FFL with the feminist countermovement. This process had important consequences for both the organization and the countermovement with which it was realigned. This article contributes to our understanding of how shifting boundaries affect individual organizations, the movements in which they participate, and the relationships between countermovements.     

“The Day All of the Different Parts of Me Can Come Along”: Intersectionality and U.S. Third World Feminism in the Poetry of Pat Parker and Willyce Kim

This article brings to light the poetry of Pat Parker and Willyce Kim, two key figures within the 1970s and ‘80s women in print movement. While Parker and Kim have been rightly placed within African-American and Asian-American histories, respectively, and working-class and lesbian-feminist literary histories, their work is most fully understood within the context of U.S. Third World Feminism. Through close readings of poetic form and content in addition to engagement with current debates about intersectionality as a methodology, the article links Kim and Parker's works to central contributions of U.S. Third World Feminism such as intersectionality and power across and within difference that continue to influence feminist theory today.     

Gendering (Trans)National Advocacy

Whether lauded or deplored, transnational organizing among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) generally, and women's NGOs specifically, is recognized as an active player in debates about international economic policy. In this article, I turn attention toward one consequence of women's transnational NGO organizing that has been under-analyzed: the impact that transnational activism has on domestic political organizations and opportunities. The recent increase in activism on gender and policies of free trade in the USA is the product of women's transnational political organizingover the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In the case of NAFTA, theoretical insights about the ways that gendered categories undergird the economy were made visible by and through the transnational advocacy in which feminists engaged.And, this article indicates, these transnational advocacy efforts have helped to shift the domestic political terrain of women's organizing in the United States. I argue that as women's rights advocates in the United States were confronted with the realization that the nexus between gender and trade policy was important to many women's rights and feminist activists around the world, they began to question why the gendered implication of trade policy did not hold a comparable place in the US feminist arena. Thus, changes in the domestic political landscape of non-governmentalactivismmay be one of the longest lasting (and most overlooked) consequences of transnational political engagement.