Papers by nilmini fernando
Critical Racial and Decolonial Literacies Breaking the Silence, 2024
Description
Reviews
Author
Contents
This collection offers a unique exploration of critical racia... more Description
Reviews
Author
Contents
This collection offers a unique exploration of critical racial literacy and anti-racist praxis in Australia's educational landscape. Combining critical race and Indigenous theories and perspectives, contributors articulate a decolonial liberatory imperative for our times. In an age when 'decolonization' has become a buzzword, the book demystifies 'critical anti-racism praxis,' advocating for critical and multidisciplinary approaches.
Educators from a range of disciplines including Law, Indigenous Studies, Health, Sociology, Policy and the Arts collectively share compelling stories of educating on race, racism and anti-racism, offering strategies that can be put into practice in classrooms, activism and structural reforms.
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2023
Race structures the lives of Indigenous peoples and other negatively racialized people in Austral... more Race structures the lives of Indigenous peoples and other negatively racialized people in Australia. The language of race permeates institutions, workplaces, and is embedded in everyday life. Racial literacy as pedagogical praxis resists the racial contract that secures whiteness as a structure of possessive power. We explore the state of racial literacy in Australian education, and the obstructions and opportunities for educators to do anti-racism work. To this end, we draw on the preliminary findings from an ongoing research project, Breaking the Racial Silence, and use them to inform a theoretical framework for conceptualizing educators' racial literacy practices. We bring to the fore effective strategies, practices, and programmes used to interrogate race and racism. Despite the efforts of educators, racial literacy in formal and informal education is oftentimes suppressed and concealed by languages and practices that sustain the practices and pedagogies of whiteness.
Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2021
This essay expands on my uses of the central concept of Sara Ahmed's seminal work, Postcolonial E... more This essay expands on my uses of the central concept of Sara Ahmed's seminal work, Postcolonial Encounters, in a participatory theater-based research project with a cohort of women from different countries in West Africa 'On their Way' through the asylum/migration nexus in the Republic of Ireland. I situate asylum-seeking (and asylum-giving) in white nations as a fourth encounter between the West and the rest, and examine the shifting conditions in which encounters between the other, and 'other others' take place. Part 1 of the paper provides a background to my research project and asylum-seeking in the Irish context. In Part 2, I outline my use of the 'encounters' method to make decolonial interventions across theory, epistemology and methodology. Part Three analyses a devised theatrical scene to illustrate how the women re-stage the past and present, disrupt relations of power, proximity and distance, and speak back to what has been said or known about them. I conclude with a discussion of 'making theory from the flesh' to distinguish specific forms of Black female agency and resistance and outline my current practice-based applications of Ahmed's work in Australia.
WIRE ORIGINAL RESEARCH REPORT , 2018
Over the last decade in Australia and elsewhere, a growing body of research has deepened attentio... more Over the last decade in Australia and elsewhere, a growing body of research has deepened attention to financial abuse and the financial impacts of family on victim-survivors. Women affected by family violence end up with significantly reduced assets and resources post-separation., and financial insecurity pushes victim-survivors towards entrenched poverty, homelessness and lifelong mental and physical ill-health.
Financial abuse is a distinct form of family violence affecting nearly 99 percent of women seeking help. Perpetrated alongside physical, emotional and sexual violence , it can continue post-separation, long after the violence ends. Drawing from focus groups, interviews and a national survey of more than 300 Australian women, this study examines how, when and where women want to receive targeted, timely and relevant financial information and support as they progress through multiple ‘phases’ of their journeys. Feminist Intersectional methodology centralizes victim-survivors' experiences, looking outward to structural, cultural and disciplinary obstactles that obstruct financial wellbeing, pre- and post-separation. Recommendations are made across programs, policy and practice for a gendered, trauma-informed and strength-based practice.
This paper situates postcolonial asylum as a dominant global
encounter between the West and the R... more This paper situates postcolonial asylum as a dominant global
encounter between the West and the Rest. Rather than a
humanitarian gift, the paper argues that discursive violence of
asylum regimes forces the materialization of identities, spaces and
structural conditions that encamp and re-colonise asylum-seeking
bodies. It first examines the global instrumentalization of images
and bodies of Third World women in refugee representations to
act as a humanitarian alibi that re-signifies the white saviour
discourse. Moving to the Irish context where childbearing bodies
of African women were targeted in a political campaign that
ended birthright Citizenship for children of non-EU parents in
2004, it examines the performativity and affective entanglements
of visual representations of ‘Third World Women’ and illustrates
how NGO policies and projects force performances of black
female bodies that exploit their representational and affective
labour. Meanwhile, the material labour—of waiting— is
appropriated from bodies detained in Direct Provision (a form of
open asylum detention) by the asylum industry. The paper argues
that postcolonial asylum is non-performative of the promise it
makes, but a colonial continuity that serves a number of uses for
white Western states and preserves a humanitarian face while
detracting critical attention from the root causes of forced
displacement—necropolitics in the South.
The Republic of Ireland is a unique postcolonial State. The prototypical British settler colony, ... more The Republic of Ireland is a unique postcolonial State. The prototypical British settler colony, the Irish were colonizers and colonized, emigrants and immigrants, ‚black‛, and white. Irish Nationalism constitutionally 'policed, controlled and abused‛ the Irish maternal body and subalternized Irish women's texts . Ireland's relatively recent ascension to transnationalized capital (the Celtic Tiger period) brought with it an immigrant labour force.
Asylum scholarship in the North has scandalized biopolitical racist regimes and States of Excepti... more Asylum scholarship in the North has scandalized biopolitical racist regimes and States of Exception that deter, detain and deny entry to refugees from the South. In the Republic of Ireland, the bodies of pregnant African women were used as a political battlel ground to re-draw racial lines of the nation. In contrast, this paper tells a story of asylum in Ireland as a postcolonial encounter where a false humanitarian welcome, or a “handshake from the front”turns out to be a “slap from behind’. Drawing from a twelve
-month participatory drama project with African women, I bring visual
and discursive representations together with material bodies and lives using intersectionalanalyses of on-stage and off stage ‘performances’. This dual analysis traces strategies that oppose, resist and reverse the colonial gaze and speak back to whitely scripts, re-articulating black female bodies as insurgent texts. Based on two main findings, that “ People are Tired” and feel used, I ask: what“work” are black women doing in asylum? I argue that colonial constructions of gendered race that hierarchicized and regulated both black and white women’s bodies are reanimated in asylum. The Black female body is forced to appear as a South-in-North bodyborder, whose figure is put to work while the woman herself is subalternized.Findings are applicable to feminism in the Australian context, where crisis narratives deflect attention from colonial whitely scripts embedded within asylum discourses.As humanitarian space shrinks,and feminism and race become “post”, the paper concludes that west-centric theory and hegemonic feminism may become more “response-able” through robust, ethical and politicized feminist scholarship and activism grounded in Postcolonial and Black Feminist perspectives.
Four 30 minute episodes available on link below.
Part1: What is feminism? What do feminists do?... more Four 30 minute episodes available on link below.
Part1: What is feminism? What do feminists do? What does the research say?
Part 2: Irish Feminisms: Interview with Dr Linda Connolly and Dr Sandra McAvoy, Women's Studies, UCC Cork, Ireland
Part 3: Women and Media/Culture: Control of women's bodies.
Part 4: Panel Discussion with Academics- Gender, Nationalism, Race. Politics of the veil, Irish Nationalism and women's bodies.
With Dr Yafa Shanneik, Dr Piaras McEnri, Ms Eileen Hogan,Mr Faris Badawi
"It’s very difficult in this society we have today, as a minority person, as an immigrant… to r... more "It’s very difficult in this society we have today, as a minority person, as an immigrant… to raise your voice and say something… which is not right and you should say it....I can say it’s very dangerous…you become like an enemy of all.
Sanle, 2012
“They’re using us…we are tired…”
Yayah,
Third year living in Direct Provision Hostel
“I’m an African and I know what a welcome looks like...Don’t give me a handshake on the front and a slap behind!”
Yoh, 2012
Abstract.
African/migrant women displaced in contemporary western societies breach a multiplicity of intersecting geopolitical, ideological and socio-cultural borders on their journeys. Chandra Mohanty (2003) has said that ‘It is especially of the bodies and lives of women and girls from the third World/South…that global capitalism writes its script’. Contemporary political and media discourses of first world nation states typically racialise and represent asylum seekers as illegal “Others” who abuse national resources. Such discourses entrap third world/black asylum-seeking women in intersectional locations of “exception”, from which they “cannot speak” (Spivak, 1988, Agamben, 1998). Spaces for self-representation are scarce; though their “stories” “faces” and “voices” are hypervisible, their forced identity locations subject them to re-colonizing practices that silence and exclude them in “everyday” social, cultural and political spaces.
“On Our Way” describes the ways in which critical feminist postcolonial perspectives shaped the research design and methods of a doctoral research project with a cohort of African women “moving through” the asylum/migration continuum in an Irish city.
Participatory Theatre methods drawn from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (1979) were used, which, as Yuval-Davis & Kaptani(2008) find, offer effective and innovatory sociological research tools through which ”embodied, illustrative and dialogical” knowledges may be acquired by the participants and researchers through reciprocal and egalitarian research engagement.
This paper argues that participatory theatre-based research, grounded in feminist postcolonial perspectives and re-articulated for 21st Century conditions, can capture the complexities of identity locations and representation of third world women displaced in the west, and facilitate a creative, politicized, pedagogic and self-determined response by the “displaced” to a hostile environment.
" “What makes you not a feminist?”explores women’s endorsement or disavowal of the feminist ident... more " “What makes you not a feminist?”explores women’s endorsement or disavowal of the feminist identity. Empirical studies conducted in the USA over the past four decades indicate that many women reject a feminist identity, yet support feminist goals. Despite the 1980's backlash, and subsequent rise in the "feminism is dead" postfeminist discourse in the 1990's, empirical data suggests that public support for women’s equality has remained stable or increased in the past forty years.
So, what is inhibiting feminist identification, while support for feminist goals is increasing?
Using feminist methodology and qualitative methods, ten women from Ireland from three generations participated in the research. Just two out of the ten women fully adopt the feminist label, yet all report a belief in women’s equality , having personally experienced inequality across many dimensions of Irish society. Other factors such as Irish backlash, generational differences, and the "post" discourses are also evident in an social environment that has grown increasingly hostile to women's gains.
"
The ‘Third World’ came into being at the Bandung Conference in 1955, when Afro- Asian member stat... more The ‘Third World’ came into being at the Bandung Conference in 1955, when Afro- Asian member states refused to align themselves with either the superpowers of the First World or with the Communist Bloc. Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision for a ‘third world’ of peaceful non-alignment where the ‘moral force’ of the south would triumph over the aggressive military expansion of the north for a ‘false security’ was sadly stillborn. Over fifty-five years later, ‘military security’ has resulted in devastating circumstances for women of the third world and Nehru’s observation that ‘…every pact [with the Great Powers] has brought insecurity and not security to the countries which have entered into them…’ largely holds true.
As Cynthia Cockburn points out, ‘military security’ is an oxymoron; how can Transnational Feminist peace movements reconcile the deep contradictions that arise when engaging within institutions such as the UN and NATO, who promote justice and peace for women within an institution that also creates the very devastation it purports to ease?
Fiction Insurgent Texts by nilmini fernando
http://www.bluegreenearth.com/site/archive/article/2006/island/island-3-2006.html
Webinars, Talks by nilmini fernando
Loving Feminist Literature by nilmini fernando
This list emerged from a live event as part of the Critical Mass program at Melbourne Fringe Fest... more This list emerged from a live event as part of the Critical Mass program at Melbourne Fringe Festival 2019. I interviewed two leading Aboriginal women writers, Claire G. Coleman and Timmah Ball who discussed the colonial state, the futurism (and past/present) in their work. The session aimed to bring together an assemblage of texts to establish the point that Black and brown bodies were 'outlawed' from the very definition of 'human'. Used to demarcate the bottom margins of what is human and inhuman. That black and brown flesh in coloniality-then and now-exist outside of Western frames and not solely in relation to whiteness. Colonality constructed black and brown female bodies as even less that human, representing the category 'woman' itself as a quality of whiteness...and womanhood a possession only white women can have. What if we placed the unlawful genocidal and ecocidal colonial force of oppressors at the bottom, to demarcate the margins of what is human and not. It is flesh bodies that speak, create, carve political space to shatter extant political constructions of the identities scripted onto their bodies. Flesh is what occupies those bodies in abjection-but also scribe possibilities of freedom, of life that exists before, during, after, outside, beyond. To see the technologies that force their existence, ways to overcome those forces, we need to see and imagine beyond concepts of resistance and agency alone-but read and recognize them through the flesh. How might we better 'read' the flesh-the agency, intellect, literature, art and bodies of First Peoples and raced/gendered others in the settler colony? Nilmini Fernando
A Collaborative Live Reading of Intersectional Feminist Texts Scholars, artists and activists wil... more A Collaborative Live Reading of Intersectional Feminist Texts Scholars, artists and activists will read from a book they love. Enjoy a delicious vegetarian meal in a leafy garden space. Chat and share your own poetic musings.
Thesis Chapters by nilmini fernando
Uploads
Papers by nilmini fernando
Reviews
Author
Contents
This collection offers a unique exploration of critical racial literacy and anti-racist praxis in Australia's educational landscape. Combining critical race and Indigenous theories and perspectives, contributors articulate a decolonial liberatory imperative for our times. In an age when 'decolonization' has become a buzzword, the book demystifies 'critical anti-racism praxis,' advocating for critical and multidisciplinary approaches.
Educators from a range of disciplines including Law, Indigenous Studies, Health, Sociology, Policy and the Arts collectively share compelling stories of educating on race, racism and anti-racism, offering strategies that can be put into practice in classrooms, activism and structural reforms.
Financial abuse is a distinct form of family violence affecting nearly 99 percent of women seeking help. Perpetrated alongside physical, emotional and sexual violence , it can continue post-separation, long after the violence ends. Drawing from focus groups, interviews and a national survey of more than 300 Australian women, this study examines how, when and where women want to receive targeted, timely and relevant financial information and support as they progress through multiple ‘phases’ of their journeys. Feminist Intersectional methodology centralizes victim-survivors' experiences, looking outward to structural, cultural and disciplinary obstactles that obstruct financial wellbeing, pre- and post-separation. Recommendations are made across programs, policy and practice for a gendered, trauma-informed and strength-based practice.
encounter between the West and the Rest. Rather than a
humanitarian gift, the paper argues that discursive violence of
asylum regimes forces the materialization of identities, spaces and
structural conditions that encamp and re-colonise asylum-seeking
bodies. It first examines the global instrumentalization of images
and bodies of Third World women in refugee representations to
act as a humanitarian alibi that re-signifies the white saviour
discourse. Moving to the Irish context where childbearing bodies
of African women were targeted in a political campaign that
ended birthright Citizenship for children of non-EU parents in
2004, it examines the performativity and affective entanglements
of visual representations of ‘Third World Women’ and illustrates
how NGO policies and projects force performances of black
female bodies that exploit their representational and affective
labour. Meanwhile, the material labour—of waiting— is
appropriated from bodies detained in Direct Provision (a form of
open asylum detention) by the asylum industry. The paper argues
that postcolonial asylum is non-performative of the promise it
makes, but a colonial continuity that serves a number of uses for
white Western states and preserves a humanitarian face while
detracting critical attention from the root causes of forced
displacement—necropolitics in the South.
-month participatory drama project with African women, I bring visual
and discursive representations together with material bodies and lives using intersectionalanalyses of on-stage and off stage ‘performances’. This dual analysis traces strategies that oppose, resist and reverse the colonial gaze and speak back to whitely scripts, re-articulating black female bodies as insurgent texts. Based on two main findings, that “ People are Tired” and feel used, I ask: what“work” are black women doing in asylum? I argue that colonial constructions of gendered race that hierarchicized and regulated both black and white women’s bodies are reanimated in asylum. The Black female body is forced to appear as a South-in-North bodyborder, whose figure is put to work while the woman herself is subalternized.Findings are applicable to feminism in the Australian context, where crisis narratives deflect attention from colonial whitely scripts embedded within asylum discourses.As humanitarian space shrinks,and feminism and race become “post”, the paper concludes that west-centric theory and hegemonic feminism may become more “response-able” through robust, ethical and politicized feminist scholarship and activism grounded in Postcolonial and Black Feminist perspectives.
Part1: What is feminism? What do feminists do? What does the research say?
Part 2: Irish Feminisms: Interview with Dr Linda Connolly and Dr Sandra McAvoy, Women's Studies, UCC Cork, Ireland
Part 3: Women and Media/Culture: Control of women's bodies.
Part 4: Panel Discussion with Academics- Gender, Nationalism, Race. Politics of the veil, Irish Nationalism and women's bodies.
With Dr Yafa Shanneik, Dr Piaras McEnri, Ms Eileen Hogan,Mr Faris Badawi
Sanle, 2012
“They’re using us…we are tired…”
Yayah,
Third year living in Direct Provision Hostel
“I’m an African and I know what a welcome looks like...Don’t give me a handshake on the front and a slap behind!”
Yoh, 2012
Abstract.
African/migrant women displaced in contemporary western societies breach a multiplicity of intersecting geopolitical, ideological and socio-cultural borders on their journeys. Chandra Mohanty (2003) has said that ‘It is especially of the bodies and lives of women and girls from the third World/South…that global capitalism writes its script’. Contemporary political and media discourses of first world nation states typically racialise and represent asylum seekers as illegal “Others” who abuse national resources. Such discourses entrap third world/black asylum-seeking women in intersectional locations of “exception”, from which they “cannot speak” (Spivak, 1988, Agamben, 1998). Spaces for self-representation are scarce; though their “stories” “faces” and “voices” are hypervisible, their forced identity locations subject them to re-colonizing practices that silence and exclude them in “everyday” social, cultural and political spaces.
“On Our Way” describes the ways in which critical feminist postcolonial perspectives shaped the research design and methods of a doctoral research project with a cohort of African women “moving through” the asylum/migration continuum in an Irish city.
Participatory Theatre methods drawn from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (1979) were used, which, as Yuval-Davis & Kaptani(2008) find, offer effective and innovatory sociological research tools through which ”embodied, illustrative and dialogical” knowledges may be acquired by the participants and researchers through reciprocal and egalitarian research engagement.
This paper argues that participatory theatre-based research, grounded in feminist postcolonial perspectives and re-articulated for 21st Century conditions, can capture the complexities of identity locations and representation of third world women displaced in the west, and facilitate a creative, politicized, pedagogic and self-determined response by the “displaced” to a hostile environment.
So, what is inhibiting feminist identification, while support for feminist goals is increasing?
Using feminist methodology and qualitative methods, ten women from Ireland from three generations participated in the research. Just two out of the ten women fully adopt the feminist label, yet all report a belief in women’s equality , having personally experienced inequality across many dimensions of Irish society. Other factors such as Irish backlash, generational differences, and the "post" discourses are also evident in an social environment that has grown increasingly hostile to women's gains.
"
As Cynthia Cockburn points out, ‘military security’ is an oxymoron; how can Transnational Feminist peace movements reconcile the deep contradictions that arise when engaging within institutions such as the UN and NATO, who promote justice and peace for women within an institution that also creates the very devastation it purports to ease?
Fiction Insurgent Texts by nilmini fernando
Webinars, Talks by nilmini fernando
Loving Feminist Literature by nilmini fernando
Thesis Chapters by nilmini fernando
Reviews
Author
Contents
This collection offers a unique exploration of critical racial literacy and anti-racist praxis in Australia's educational landscape. Combining critical race and Indigenous theories and perspectives, contributors articulate a decolonial liberatory imperative for our times. In an age when 'decolonization' has become a buzzword, the book demystifies 'critical anti-racism praxis,' advocating for critical and multidisciplinary approaches.
Educators from a range of disciplines including Law, Indigenous Studies, Health, Sociology, Policy and the Arts collectively share compelling stories of educating on race, racism and anti-racism, offering strategies that can be put into practice in classrooms, activism and structural reforms.
Financial abuse is a distinct form of family violence affecting nearly 99 percent of women seeking help. Perpetrated alongside physical, emotional and sexual violence , it can continue post-separation, long after the violence ends. Drawing from focus groups, interviews and a national survey of more than 300 Australian women, this study examines how, when and where women want to receive targeted, timely and relevant financial information and support as they progress through multiple ‘phases’ of their journeys. Feminist Intersectional methodology centralizes victim-survivors' experiences, looking outward to structural, cultural and disciplinary obstactles that obstruct financial wellbeing, pre- and post-separation. Recommendations are made across programs, policy and practice for a gendered, trauma-informed and strength-based practice.
encounter between the West and the Rest. Rather than a
humanitarian gift, the paper argues that discursive violence of
asylum regimes forces the materialization of identities, spaces and
structural conditions that encamp and re-colonise asylum-seeking
bodies. It first examines the global instrumentalization of images
and bodies of Third World women in refugee representations to
act as a humanitarian alibi that re-signifies the white saviour
discourse. Moving to the Irish context where childbearing bodies
of African women were targeted in a political campaign that
ended birthright Citizenship for children of non-EU parents in
2004, it examines the performativity and affective entanglements
of visual representations of ‘Third World Women’ and illustrates
how NGO policies and projects force performances of black
female bodies that exploit their representational and affective
labour. Meanwhile, the material labour—of waiting— is
appropriated from bodies detained in Direct Provision (a form of
open asylum detention) by the asylum industry. The paper argues
that postcolonial asylum is non-performative of the promise it
makes, but a colonial continuity that serves a number of uses for
white Western states and preserves a humanitarian face while
detracting critical attention from the root causes of forced
displacement—necropolitics in the South.
-month participatory drama project with African women, I bring visual
and discursive representations together with material bodies and lives using intersectionalanalyses of on-stage and off stage ‘performances’. This dual analysis traces strategies that oppose, resist and reverse the colonial gaze and speak back to whitely scripts, re-articulating black female bodies as insurgent texts. Based on two main findings, that “ People are Tired” and feel used, I ask: what“work” are black women doing in asylum? I argue that colonial constructions of gendered race that hierarchicized and regulated both black and white women’s bodies are reanimated in asylum. The Black female body is forced to appear as a South-in-North bodyborder, whose figure is put to work while the woman herself is subalternized.Findings are applicable to feminism in the Australian context, where crisis narratives deflect attention from colonial whitely scripts embedded within asylum discourses.As humanitarian space shrinks,and feminism and race become “post”, the paper concludes that west-centric theory and hegemonic feminism may become more “response-able” through robust, ethical and politicized feminist scholarship and activism grounded in Postcolonial and Black Feminist perspectives.
Part1: What is feminism? What do feminists do? What does the research say?
Part 2: Irish Feminisms: Interview with Dr Linda Connolly and Dr Sandra McAvoy, Women's Studies, UCC Cork, Ireland
Part 3: Women and Media/Culture: Control of women's bodies.
Part 4: Panel Discussion with Academics- Gender, Nationalism, Race. Politics of the veil, Irish Nationalism and women's bodies.
With Dr Yafa Shanneik, Dr Piaras McEnri, Ms Eileen Hogan,Mr Faris Badawi
Sanle, 2012
“They’re using us…we are tired…”
Yayah,
Third year living in Direct Provision Hostel
“I’m an African and I know what a welcome looks like...Don’t give me a handshake on the front and a slap behind!”
Yoh, 2012
Abstract.
African/migrant women displaced in contemporary western societies breach a multiplicity of intersecting geopolitical, ideological and socio-cultural borders on their journeys. Chandra Mohanty (2003) has said that ‘It is especially of the bodies and lives of women and girls from the third World/South…that global capitalism writes its script’. Contemporary political and media discourses of first world nation states typically racialise and represent asylum seekers as illegal “Others” who abuse national resources. Such discourses entrap third world/black asylum-seeking women in intersectional locations of “exception”, from which they “cannot speak” (Spivak, 1988, Agamben, 1998). Spaces for self-representation are scarce; though their “stories” “faces” and “voices” are hypervisible, their forced identity locations subject them to re-colonizing practices that silence and exclude them in “everyday” social, cultural and political spaces.
“On Our Way” describes the ways in which critical feminist postcolonial perspectives shaped the research design and methods of a doctoral research project with a cohort of African women “moving through” the asylum/migration continuum in an Irish city.
Participatory Theatre methods drawn from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (1979) were used, which, as Yuval-Davis & Kaptani(2008) find, offer effective and innovatory sociological research tools through which ”embodied, illustrative and dialogical” knowledges may be acquired by the participants and researchers through reciprocal and egalitarian research engagement.
This paper argues that participatory theatre-based research, grounded in feminist postcolonial perspectives and re-articulated for 21st Century conditions, can capture the complexities of identity locations and representation of third world women displaced in the west, and facilitate a creative, politicized, pedagogic and self-determined response by the “displaced” to a hostile environment.
So, what is inhibiting feminist identification, while support for feminist goals is increasing?
Using feminist methodology and qualitative methods, ten women from Ireland from three generations participated in the research. Just two out of the ten women fully adopt the feminist label, yet all report a belief in women’s equality , having personally experienced inequality across many dimensions of Irish society. Other factors such as Irish backlash, generational differences, and the "post" discourses are also evident in an social environment that has grown increasingly hostile to women's gains.
"
As Cynthia Cockburn points out, ‘military security’ is an oxymoron; how can Transnational Feminist peace movements reconcile the deep contradictions that arise when engaging within institutions such as the UN and NATO, who promote justice and peace for women within an institution that also creates the very devastation it purports to ease?