What is Feminist Movement School?

The Feminist Centre for Racial Justice and Just Associates (JASS) are excited to host a second feminist movement builders’ school with activists and organisers from Eastern and Southern Africa. This school follows a successful pilot school held in Mexico City in August 2023. The movement builders’ school is a five-day intensive learning space that offers a mix of practical tools and theory intended to support strategising by developing a deeper understanding of structural exclusions underpinned by African feminist analysis. This is a two-part school for experienced activists who want space to reflect and deepen their knowledge to inform organising strategy. Applicants will be required to commit to attending the first school in August 2024 and returning a year later for the second part in August 2025.

Focus

The feminist movement builders’ school is based on the premise that feminist movements are central to how big transformational power shifts have occurred across societies. We also believe that feminist analysis that takes seriously questions of race and class offer us better ways to think about the systemic factors that generate inequalities. Through the schools’ methodological approach, we will
strengthen our collective analysis on belonging, identity, and citizenship in a global context where there are increasing attacks on basic rights, threats to bodily autonomy, and increasing transnational mobilisation by state and non-state actors on the interlinked issues of gender, race and class.
These schools are designed to help us reshape both discourse and practices to challenge the manifestations of exclusions as witnessed through closing civic space, femicide, and the rising criminalisation and violent attacks on gender and sexualities.

Guiding Principles

Co-creation and intellectual generosity: we approach the school as a community of organisers located in and outside the academy in conversation with each other across generations and contexts. We invite attention to these differences and power relations embedded within them. We are mindful of not reproducing unequal power relations and will instead cultivate diversity for our conversations.

Care: we want to create an intellectually nourishing space in which we extend grace and care to each other. Even if we disagree, we will aim to have conversations about complex issues with curiosity and care.

Space: we want to ensure everyone has space to engage in the manner they feel useful. This means we will invite consciousness of how we occupy space.

Joy: the issues we will discuss have material implications for all of us. We will ensure that across the school we lean into joy as a space from which we can imagine possibilities.

Connect: we aim to find connections to develop a language to understand the global and regional dimensions of gender and racial injustice.

Inclusivity: we set up the space as one that takes gender as a construct and one that African knowledge systems show us looks like more than one thing. We will create a space that is gender expansive and one in which we aim to not reproduce harm.

School Pedagogy

• Popular education,
• interactive lectures,
• Group work,
• Case studies
  

Link theory to practice
Emphasise collective and experiential ways of learning Centre the body in its fullness – heart and mind – in how we learn and reflect Guiding Principles

Who is this school for?
The school will be fully funded for 20 participants from Eastern and Southern Africa. The school will be conducted in English.
We are seeking applicants who are:
Africans based and working in Eastern and Southern Africa

A leader in the community Embedded in women’s rights and/or feminist, queer movements with at least ten years of actively working as an organiser with/and supporting feminist and/or queer movements.

Want to think strategically about making change happen Committed to participating in a follow up school in August 2025
Have a demonstrable plan for building lessons from the school into your ongoing movement work
What you will get out of the school:
Build a shared understanding of the transformative power of movements

1. Develop applied knowledge on the importance of transnational
solidarity for social change

2. Expand access to tools, concepts, and research approaches to
support your work

3. How to apply:
The school will run from 26th August – 31st August 2024.
Participants are expected to arrive on 24th August and depart on
1st September 2024.
Complete the application form by 31st May 2024 00.00 BST
(https://forms.gle/F4H3neS5Azg6CdvG7).

# Email your CV and a commitment letter to attending both schools and engagement in processes in between to [email protected].
#Only successful applicants will be contacted by 15th June 2024

Find JASS’s Official Webpage here!