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Abstract
In this article, we introduce Revisiting Dilemmas in Transnational Feminist Research and Practice, a themed section of Gender, Place and Culture. Composed of four articles and this Introduction, the section builds from a core problem, documented in the literature, that feminist engagements between the global ‘South’ and ‘North’ can lead Northerners or outsiders to inadvertently essentialise the ‘culture’ of underprivileged groups and hold to paternalistic attitudes towards marginalised communities, even while attempting to confront and mitigate inequalities. While privilege can be an obstacle to solidarity work, how might solidarity be ethically and respectfully built, across chasms of race, class, nation, and other forms of difference? This themed section focuses primarily on this question, through evidence and researcher reflections from settings as disparate as southern Africa, Nigeria, Jordan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Canada. The articles also describe the uncomfortable circumstances encountered by researchers who occupy both an insider and outsider position in the communities they work with, but move beyond this description to discuss how this type of positionality can produce valuable insights. In this Introduction, we summarise and describe the four articles contained in the themed section, pointing to the ways in which the authors help to enhance our understanding of the problems inherent in transnational feminist work and potential solutions.
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to express our gratitude to all the authors, mentors, and peer reviewers involved in the development of this special issue. We thank them for their time and energy.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Hamsa Rajan
Dr. Hamsa Rajan is a British Academy post-doctoral fellow and lecturer in Contemporary Chinese Studies at the School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford. She has lived in China for over six years, and is fluent in both Tibetan and Chinese. Her work explores dynamics of family and gender relations in Tibetan areas. Her publications discuss the economic and social structures underpinning women’s vulnerability to intimate partner and family abuse; local Tibetan discourses around the topic of women’s rights; and the question of how and whether theories arising primarily from Western contexts can be relevant to the experience of domestic abuse in Tibetan and other non-Western settings. Prior to becoming an academic, Dr. Rajan worked for many years in the fields of public health and education, including as a staff member of an NGO implementing public health projects in rural Tibetan areas and as a consultant for the World Health Organization.
Kerrie Thornhill
Dr Kerrie Thornhill completed her DPhil in Geography & the Environment at University of Oxford, with an interdisciplinary dissertation analysing public perceptions of gender-based violence in postwar, postcolonial Liberia. Her research has won awards from the OUP Clarendon Fund, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, SSHRC, the TORCH-Humanities programme, and the Sexual Violence Research Initiative. For several years she taught at the University of Oxford as an Academic Mentor and Tutor for the Women’s Studies Programme, a Graduate Tutor in Gender, Geography and the Environment, and as the Deputy Director of the International Gender Studies Centre at Lady Margaret Hall. In 2017 she joined London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine as an Assistant Professor in Gender Violence, studying peaceful pedagogical techniques among schoolteachers in rural Côte d’Ivoire. Recently, she took a period of leave from academia in order to hike 1000 miles on the Appalachian Trail between Virginia and Maine.