Networking for women’s rights: academic centers,regional information networks,and feminist advocacy in southern Africa

Women’s rights advocates, in southern Africa as elsewhere, have challenged gender inequality to advance the status of women in society and as a means to also address related, cumulative issues of disadvantage. As communication technologies and neoliberal globalization alter forms of communication, the potential for organizing, coalitions, and advocacy work across time and space, such as through transnational feminist networks (TFNs), has grown. Understanding the rise of TFNs has largely relied on historical narratives and case studies, and the literature has tended to emphasize transnational over regional dimensions. Our approach, however, finds that regional connections not only play an important role in linking TFNs to local women’s rights initiatives in southern Africa, but that information-rich academic institutes focusing on gender studies bring structure to local and regional information networks in the region and act as bridges between the local, regional and global. Methodologically, we employ an innovative approach to visibly capture the work of regional and local activists by taking a meso-level snapshot of website links among 70 women’s rights organizations operating in southern Africa. We pair the network visualization with a case study of our central academic center, the African Gender Institute, to demonstrate the work of this critical hub in the local and regional communication network.