Feminist Movements Around the World
Values
We are an autonomous community
We aim to contribute to creating autonomous, ungoverned spaces for students, alumni, activists and anyone interested in building a collective approach to telling stories of feminist movements around the world. We work in collaboration with the Gender Department at LSE, however outside of the LSE Societies system.
We are a horizontal space
Our work is not regulated, only coordinated in order to organize the efforts for better outreach among students, and keep track of topics and information shared. New initiatives and members are always welcome.
We promote Feminist Learning
We understand feminist learning as time-generous, collaborative, horizontal, based on mutual respect, understanding and support. We are mindful of structural power inequalities and use our space to try and revert them.
Feminist Movements Around the World
Background
Feminist Movements Around the World started in 2020 as a community of students within the Gender Department of the London School of Economics. It was born as a strategy to reclaim the sharing spaces that were lost to the COVID-19 pandemic and to the inability (or unwillingness) of private, neoliberal universities to provide an online alternative to these. The proposed dynamic was simple: each week, someone prepared a short presentation about a movement or social uprising in their home country. This was followed by a moment for questions, sharing experiences, and finding similarities and differences between contexts.
During the following academic years, FMAW became an important space of belonging for students that are studying far away from home and are eager to find a community with their classmates. Meeting regularly allows the students to reflect on the missing links in their gender courses, adding to the transnational efforts to address gender issues. Importantly, it continues to be an entrance door for many students who did not feel completely included in the university community.
Feminist Movements Around the World
Relevance
Feminist Movements Around the World is a space for people to share with others their political stories. The task is to convey the affective elements of that story, to be able to transmit to others the feelings of the street in a certain context, rather than focusing on the “formal” aspects of a movement. This is a platform especially important for people coming from the Global South and South Eastern Europe, who often feel like voices from their realities are missing from the study programs. It is also a space for people to engage with their own countries and political histories from a new perspective. In increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic times, we learn with each other to create narratives and strategies to challenge inequalities and injustices. Through that collective learning, we aim to build a stronger bridge between academia and activism. Moreover, the emphasis is in that “being an expert” is not important. Rather, it focuses on building a narrative that combines personal trajectories with political movements in an original way.
Feminist Movements Around the World channels something that people within academic environments positively need: a space where time is not a commodity. Such availability of time allows the creation of a space where people feel comfortable, safe, and sheltered. A key aspect, noted by participants, is the ability to learn from each other about feminist tools used in feminist street politics. For example, feminist movements in the US can learn a lot from Latin American activists about strategies to ensure access to safe abortions within a context of restriction. Not being regulated by any institution, this is a space where ideas can circulate, where we can go out on tangents without thinking we are not following a syllabus. Although it started as a response to the challenges of online learning, its continued relevance showed the extent of the need for alternative learning spaces. FMAW is a space for people to share with others their political stories as a way of reclaiming some of the spaces that were lost, not only to online learning but to an increasingly individualist model of studying.
This community is a way of defying the contradictions of studying feminist issues and politics in an academic space marked by neoliberal rationality. That is, the distance between the content of what critical gender studies teach (i.e. how that neoliberal rationality creates the illusion of a self-sufficient individual, how that idea is tied to patriarchal, colonial, racist and capitalist structures) and how we do it (i.e. through pedagogies that are constructed upon an idea of individuality, in a highly competitive environment, and sometimes, from the solitude of our screens). Through a collective form of learning that overflows what is taught in class; we enact a desired but sometimes elusive feminist praxis. Because in the end, isn’t it about creating the feminist spaces that we need to transform the environments we inhabit?