Reimagining Social Justice Scholarship (Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality)

Showcasing creative decolonial feminist and critical social justice scholarship, located in a South African context, this book works across modalities and disciplines, and within art and activism, to challenge hegemonic and oppressive forms of gender and sexuality. In the wake of decolonial activism in higher education and civil society since 2015 and the larger struggle for equality and justice, Shefer, Rustin, Boonzaier and their contributors draw primarily from the work of local research and pedagogical projects directed at alternative imaginaries of gender and sexual justice, with global import.

Increasingly scholars are engaging in collaborative, dialogical and creative work that foregrounds performance, art, music, crafts, literature, as well as embodied, affective and relational engagements in the making of knowledge. This book shares some of these diverse counter-hegemonic pedagogies and research approaches that bring an intersectional and decolonial feminist lens to contemporary efforts to decolonise higher education and larger civil society.

Producing lines of thought and sharing praxis that destabilises, disrupts and opens up new possibilities for justice scholarship, the book provides a space for going beyond critical reflexivity in research and practice related to gender and sexual inequalities. It seeks to make a scholarly intervention founded on rethinking its own grounds through collaborations with knowledges often deployed by those outside the authoritative, “expert” domains of academia, aligning it with feminist and decolonial aims. This book is a valuable resource for students and scholars of gender, sexuality and intersectionality, particularly those with a focus on the global South.

Tamara Shefer is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of the Western Cape. She has primarily focused on gender and sexual justice with particular emphasis on young people and is currently engaged with reconceptualising academic knowledge with emphasis on embodied, affective, relational feminist, decolonial scholarship, and working on environmental justice and the Blue Humanities.

Carmine Rustin is a lecturer in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape. She has more than 20 years research and research management experience across various sectors including a research parastatal, a NGO, as well as in the legislative sector. Carmine is interested in matters related to gender justice, gender related policies and legislation, feminist methodologies, happiness, subjective well-being and quality of life.

Floretta Boonzaier is Professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town, and Co-Director of the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa. She researches and works within and across feminist, critical and decolonial psychologies, intersectional subjectivities, gendered and sexual violence. She is also noted for her expertise in qualitative methodologies, specifically in narrative, decolonial and participatory approaches.