The African Gender Institute (AGI) is a feminist research and teaching group that studies issues related to gender in Africa. It has become a department at the University of Cape Town (UCT), administered within the School of African and Gender Studies, Social Anthropology and Linguistics. The AGI has its own staff and has a unique[ clarification needed ] degree of independence from UCT. [1]
The AGI describes itself as specifically feminist and seeks to promote feminism on the African continent. [2] It serves as a point of contact for feminist intellectuals across Africa, many of whom suffer from isolation and discrimination at their academic institutions. [3] Amina Mama—a key figure at the AGI—has argued that the organization constitutes a key exception to neoliberal commodification of and control over African academics. [4] [5] A major goal of the AGI is to maintain an institutional space for African feminists to network, collaborate, teach, and research. [6]
The AGI grew out of the Equal Opportunities Research Project, created at the University of Cape Town in 1992 as apartheid was ending. The AGI was created in 1996, with the specific goal of advocating for women researchers, policy advocates and writers based within African countries, and with commitment to the growth and voice of African feminisms. [7] From 1998 to 1999 Amanda Gouws was the acting director.
Mama became director of the AGI in 2000 and helped to found its journal Feminist Africa . [8] Under Mama's leadership, projects in women's access to e-technologies, women's peace activism, sexual and reproductive rights, and projects on citizenship were undertaken, with contributors across the continent. Key among these were Elaine Salo, Sisonke Msimang, Jane Bennett, Jennifer Radloff, and Yaliwe Clarke in South Africa, Charmaine Pereira in Nigeria, Sylvia Tamale and Ruth Ochieng in Uganda, Takyiwaa Manuh and Akosua Ampofo in Ghana, and many others. The AGI also grew a strong undergraduate and graduate teaching and research programme within the university of Cape Town.
Faced with budget cuts and shifting institutional support, the AGI found itself split from the project of Gender Studies at UCT. The AGI, under the directorship of Jane Bennett from 2008 to 2017, focused on consolidating its core intellectual positions and its institutional position at UCT, and continued to run successful projects, especially in sexuality and reproductive justice work. These efforts were generally successful, and in 2017, Yaliwe Clarke took over the directorship of the AGI with new agendas for strengthening black, queer and African work especially among young women. This was strongly supported by a new Advisory Board [4]
Gender and Women's Studies for Africa's Transformation, or GWS Africa, is one of AGI's major projects. GWS Africa is an effort aimed at creating and sharing a strong intellectual core for feminists across Africa. Much of GWS Africa takes place online, through a listserv and a website. The organization generated Feminist Africa, which mostly circulates online. [4] Through GWS Africa, the AGI has been a major force for increasing women's access to internet communications. [9]
In 2000–2002, GWS Africa conducted a survey of Gender and/or Women's Studies Departments across Africa. It found that these disciplines were generally on the rise, but that many of them had adopted the mainstream Women in Development (WID) approach. This finding reinforced the AGI's desire to foster a more critical African feminist discourse, and led in 2002 to a significant pan-African feminist forum in 2002, held at UCT. [6]
From 2002 on, the AGI's work on strengthening gender studies and feminist work on the continent grew in multiple directions, including the creation of a Southern Africa-wide network on sexual harassment in higher education, the growth of feminist-oriented e-space specifically designed for the interest of African-based feminists, the regular publication of Feminist Africa, and many capacity-building workshops on questions of land, movement building, militarism and sexuality.
From 2008 on, under the new directorship of Jane Bennett, programmes on sexuality and reproductive justice were strengthened while other AGI threads were simultaneously developed by a very strong team, including Yaliwe Clarke working on women's peace activism with Ruth Ochieng of ISIS-Wicce in Uganda. The teaching programmes within the University of Cape Town grew strongly, and partnerships were built with Barnard College in New York, the Gino Germani Institute in Buenos Aires, and CODESRIA in Senegal. E-advocacy projects were built by Selina Mudavanhu, and others.
In 2012, the University of Cape Town instituted a merger process which split the AGI's public project work from its gender studies teaching, creating a new section of Gender Studies. This had challenging impacts, but the AGI continued to stabilize itself with new programmes in young women's leadership in sexuality.
In 2017, under new directorship again, with Yaliwe Clarke, the AGI ran programmes in queer visuality, with film festivals in different locations, and initiated work on a symposium entitled "Dreaming the Future," to celebrate the work of acclaimed South African feminist, Pumla Gqola.
Women's studies is an academic field that draws on feminist and interdisciplinary methods to place women's lives and experiences at the center of study, while examining social and cultural constructs of gender; systems of privilege and oppression; and the relationships between power and gender as they intersect with other identities and social locations such as race, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, and disability.
Amina Mama is a Nigerian-British writer, activist and academic. Her main areas of focus have been post-colonial, militarist and gender issues. She has lived in Africa, Europe and North America, and worked to bridge the gap between feminists and related movements across the globe.
The Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women is an interdisciplinary research center focused on gender and women at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. It was established in 1981. In addition to research, the center is home to archives of feminist theory and women's history as well as Brown's undergraduate Gender and Sexuality Studies concentration. Postcolonial theorist Leela Gandhi, is the Center's director, having assumed the position in July 2021.
Sylvia Rosila Tamale is a Ugandan academic, and human rights activist in Uganda. She was the first woman dean in the law faculty at Makerere University, Uganda.
Feminist Africa is a peer-reviewed academic journal that addresses feminist topics from an "African continental perspective". It is published by the African Gender Institute. Its founding editor-in-chief is Amina Mama. It was accredited in 2005 by the South African Department of Education. This allows authors publishing in the journal to collect publication subsidy. The journal is primarily online but also distributes a small number of print copies.
Jessica Horn is a feminist activist, writer, poet, and an advisor on women's rights with Ugandan and Malian background. Her work focuses on women's rights, bodily autonomy and freedom from violence, and African feminist movement building. She was named as an African woman changemaker by ARISE Magazine and as one of Applause Africa's "40 African Changemakers under 40". She joined the African Women's Development Fund as director of programmes in October 2015.
In 2004, Jane Bennett co-edited Jacketed Women: Qualitative Research Methodologies on Sexualities and Gender in Africa with Charmaine Pereira. Bennett has a BA from the University of Natal, MPhil and EdD from Columbia University. She has an academic background in linguistics, literature, sociology, and feminist theory.
Zethu Matebeni is a sociologist, activist, writer, documentary film maker, Professor and South Africa Research Chair in Sexualities, Genders and Queer Studies at the University of Fort Hare. She has held positions at the University of the Western Cape and has been senior researcher at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA) at UCT. She has been a visiting Professor Yale University and has received a number of research fellowships including those from African Humanities Program, Ford Foundation, the Fogarty International Centre and the National Research Foundation.
Richa Nagar is a scholar, writer, poet, theatre-worker, translator, and editor. Nagar is Professor Emeritus of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota, where she had a long career as an anti-disciplinary educator, theorist and writer and held the title of Professor of the College, before joining Smith College as the inaugural Gloria Steinem ’56 Endowed Chair in Women and Gender Studies. Nagar's creative and scholarly work makes multi-lingual and multi-genre contributions to transnational feminism, social geography, critical development studies, and critical ethnography. Her research has encompassed a range of topics including: politics of space, identity and community among communities of South Asian origin in Tanzania; questions of empowerment in relation to grass-roots struggles in the global South, principally with the Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS) in Sitapur District, India; the politics of language and social fracturing in the context of development and neo-liberal globalization; and creative praxis that uses collaboration, co-authorship, and translation to blur the borders between academic, activist, and artistic labor. She has held residential fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford in 2005–2006, at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study (JNIAS) at New Delhi in 2011–2012, and at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in 2013. She was named Honorary Professor at the Unit for Humanities at the Rhodes University (UHURU) at Rhodes University in South Africa in 2017, and her work has been translated into several languages including Turkish, Marathi, Italian, German and Mandarin. Nagar is a founding editor of the online journal, AGITATE! Unsettling Knowledges.
Jennifer Radloff is a South African feminist activist and a pioneer on Information and communications technology (ICT) for social justice. She works for the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) in the Women's Rights Programme and is a board member of Women's Net.
Floretta Avril Boonzaier is a South African psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Cape Town. She is noted for her work in feminist, critical and postcolonial psychologies, subjectivity in relation to race, gender and sexuality, and gender-based violence, and qualitative psychologies, especially narrative, discursive and participatory methods. She heads the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa with Shose Kessi.
Awino Okech is a Kenyan academic, based at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where her "teaching and research interests lies in the nexus between gender, sexuality and nation/state making projects as they occur in conflict and post-conflict societies". Okech has also taught at the African Leadership Centre, based at King's College London, and is a member of the editorial advisory board of Feminist Africa.
Andrea Cornwall is Professor of Global Development and Anthropology at King's College London.
Fatou Sow is a Senegalese feminist sociologist specialising in sociology of gender.
Catriona Ida Macleod is a South African researcher. She is a distinguished professor of psychology, SARChI Chair of Critical Studies in Sexualities and Reproduction, and previous Head of the Psychology Department at Rhodes University. Her research focuses on sexual and reproductive health and feminist theory in psychology. Her book "Adolescence", Pregnancy, and Abortion: Constructing a threat of degeneration received the Distinguished Publication Award by the Association for Women in Psychology. Since 2013, she has been editor-in-chief of the international journal Feminism & Psychology.
Amina Doherty is a Nigerian/Antiguan feminist, artist and women's rights advocate. As an African-Caribbean feminist and women's rights advocate, her work is centered around raising awareness for social justice through movement-building, and innovative approaches to philanthropy and grantmaking. Amina's work takes many forms: art exhibitions, community programs, cultural events, philanthropic advising, and grantmaking initiatives.
Sarojini Nadar is a South African theologian and biblical scholar who is the Desmond Tutu Research Chair in Religion and Social Justice at the University of the Western Cape.
Marilyn ('Lyn') Ossome is an academic, specialising in feminist political theory and feminist political economics. She is currently Senior Research Associate of at the University of Johannesburg and a member of the advisory board for the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa, amongst other accolades. She is an editorial board member of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, and in 2021, she co-edited the volume Labour Questions in the Global South. She serves on the executive committee for the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). She is the author of Gender, Ethnicity and Violence in Kenya’s Transitions to Democracy: States of Violence.
Sa'diyya Shaikh is a South African scholar of Islam and feminist theory. She is a professor of religion at the University of Cape Town. Shaikh studies Sufism in relation to feminism and feminist theory. Shaikh is known for work on gender in Islam and 'Ibn Arabi.
Fatima Seedat is a South African feminist, Islamic scholar and women's rights activist. She is known for her scholarly work on gender and Islamic law, and Islam and feminism.
Powerfully feminist in philosophy and practice the AGI offers programmes of teaching and research on gender in the contexts of, inter alia, sexuality, development, land reform, law, conflict, politics, race, economics and culture.
Powerfully feminist in philosophy and practice the AGI offers programmes of teaching and research on gender in the contexts of, inter alia, sexuality, development, land reform, law, conflict, politics, race, economics and culture.
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