AGENDAPub Date : 2023-06-25DOI: 10.1080/10130950.2023.2225289
Barbara Tsverukayi
{"title":"Experiences of female higher education academics in Zimbabwe: A decolonial feminist perspective","authors":"Barbara Tsverukayi","doi":"10.1080/10130950.2023.2225289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2023.2225289","url":null,"abstract":"abstract The low representation of women in leadership positions continues to characterise higher education institutions (HEIs) in Africa. Most senior positions, from Programme Coordinators, to Departmental Chairpersons, Deans of Faculties, Directorships and Vice-Chancellorships, remain occupied by men. Arguments for more representation of women in academic leadership positions have largely been shaped by neoliberal feminist thoughts which emphasise gender parity or numerical representation. While critical, the limitation of this approach is that it lacks engagement with the lived experiences of women academics in HEIs, which still carry colonial legacies, and patriarchal structures and processes. In the context of scholarly discussions on the need to decolonise HEIs, coupled with a rising critique of hegemonic western feminist influence, there are pertinent questions on how women academics respond to, and resist the gendered policies, structures and processes in universities, using alternative feminisms. This study offers a feminist interrogation of the experiences of black women occupying decision-making positions in two of Zimbabwe’s HEIs, presenting the results of qualitative empirical research. It explores the extent to which decolonial feminism and associated ethics of care have influenced women empowerment, shaping and improving experiences of female academics in leadership positions within HEIs in Zimbabwe.","PeriodicalId":44530,"journal":{"name":"AGENDA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49114298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AGENDAPub Date : 2023-06-25DOI: 10.1080/10130950.2023.2225270
Mercy Mupavayenda, Fikile Masikane
{"title":"Symbolic inclusion and systemic exclusion: Exploring our precarious journeys to becoming black women academics at a South African university through the lens of fieldwork","authors":"Mercy Mupavayenda, Fikile Masikane","doi":"10.1080/10130950.2023.2225270","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2023.2225270","url":null,"abstract":"abstract This perspective piece surfaces financially vulnerable black (women) students as predominant fieldwork research assistants and precarious frontline workers of/in the university in marginalised and volatile communities, often with disabling consequences. Research is a time-consuming, indispensable site for knowledge production and empowerment. Yet, as ‘assistants’, black women’s contributions and capabilities remains in a constant phase of infancy and potentiality characterised by income inequality. Included in hard labour while excluded from recognition, we find tension in demands to meet neoliberal time while experiencing racialised and colonised embodiment, leading to temporal fragmentation. We contend through a Feminist Decoloniality as Care framework that fieldwork viscerally produces potential for epistemic disobedience in black students, and holds transformative and reparative potential for the university to recognise both the students and communities as knowers/collaborators in knowledge production privileging African/local epistemes. However, this potential is minimised and/or foreclosed as a competitive neoliberal university framework is sustained through exploitative labour conditions and extractive relationships with vulnerable students and communities. We conclude that individualised forms of care counter-intuitively sustain the status quo and call into question methods, terminologies, and the ethics of ethics as we unmask the in-built costs and risks associated with fieldwork that the university relegates to individual researchers.","PeriodicalId":44530,"journal":{"name":"AGENDA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49063582","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AGENDAPub Date : 2023-06-14DOI: 10.31958/agenda.v5i1.9321
Santa Rusmalita, Patmawati Patmawati, Fitri Sukma Wati
{"title":"The Aisyiyah Women's Preaching Movement in Assisting Divorce Cases","authors":"Santa Rusmalita, Patmawati Patmawati, Fitri Sukma Wati","doi":"10.31958/agenda.v5i1.9321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31958/agenda.v5i1.9321","url":null,"abstract":"The family is the smallest part of society. Whole and harmonious family is coveted by every family. But not all couples can maintain a harmonious family. There are many families who have problems in their households so that they file for divorce at the Religious Courts. the divorce rate is also high. The ‘Aisyiyah women's organization feels compelled to provide divorce assistance. ‘Aisyiyah, who oversees the Law and Human Rights Council, formed a Legal Aid Post (posbakum) which is engaged in providing assistance in divorce cases. The method used is a qualitative approach with descriptive methods. The results of the research are that the Posbakum carry out mediation, using several approaches, namely the faith approach, the worship approach and the psychological approach. The results of the mediation can be seen through the data, namely out of 15 cases handled during a year, 7 cases canceled their divorce plans and 8 cases continued. Obstacles encountered in mediation are internal and external. From the internal partner, there is an ego that is still put forward by each partner. There are also those who are infected with disease. Meanwhile, externally there is family intervention, so that the couple continues their separation.","PeriodicalId":44530,"journal":{"name":"AGENDA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136017329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AGENDAPub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10130950.2023.2254028
Anniah Mupawose, Emmanuel Ojo
{"title":"Decolonial feminism and indigenisation: Reimagining postgraduate research supervision in post-apartheid South Africa","authors":"Anniah Mupawose, Emmanuel Ojo","doi":"10.1080/10130950.2023.2254028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2023.2254028","url":null,"abstract":"This briefing examines the potential for a decolonial feminist approach to indigenise postgraduate research supervision in South African universities. It presents a conceptual framework that challenges the traditional Eurocentric and patriarchal structures of academia, foregrounding the experiences and knowledge systems of black African women. The framework incorporates indigenisation and decolonial feminism, advocating for an academic environment that is more inclusive and equitable. The application of this framework is illustrated through a case study of a course taught by the authors, emphasising the potential for transformation in teaching and learning methods as it relates to postgraduate research supervision, institutional policies, and the development of student identities. The briefing concludes with a call for more studies into the application and impact of this approach, as well as integration of this approach into institutional policies and practices. By putting the needs and experiences of black African women at the centre and valuing the diversity of knowledge systems, this work contributes to the ongoing discourse on transformation in South African academia and offers valuable insights to other contexts facing similar challenges.","PeriodicalId":44530,"journal":{"name":"AGENDA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135718058","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Metaphor drawing as decolonial research and feminist care among Black women academics in selected South African higher education institutions in times of crises","authors":"Relebohile Moletsane, Ronelle Carolissen, Saajidha Sader, Nonhlanhla Mthiyane","doi":"10.1080/10130950.2023.2253633","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2023.2253633","url":null,"abstract":"abstractThe global COVID-19 pandemic and devastating floods in parts of Southern Africa in 2022 intensified the competing gender role expectations for women academics in the home and workplace, with negative consequences on their effective participation and success in their institutions. This article explores the value of participatory visual methodology generally, and metaphor drawing as feminist decolonial praxis and a research as social change approach to develop a community of practice among a group of 20 South African Black women academics. Participants drew animal metaphors to reflect on their experiences of COVID-19 and the gendered impacts of the neoliberal policies and processes in universities during crises. The participants exhibited and shared their reflections in a workshop format. These were audio-recorded, transcribed and thematically analysed using decolonial feminist care as a conceptual lens. Two main themes highlighting women’s vulnerabilities and strengths emerged. Metaphor drawing as a decolonial method has the potential to generate counter-narratives that disrupt pathologising discourses about women academics’ experiences and capacities. The drawing workshop (and previous ones) contributed to generating deep relationality and sociality in the group, with care embedded deeply in the various interactions and formations that arose throughout the workshop and the project.keywords: metaphor drawingdecolonialitydecolonial feminismfeminist careBlack women academicsparticipatory visual methodologySouth Africa AcknowledgementThe project ‘Neoliberalism, Gender and Curriculum Transformation in Higher Education: Feminist Decoloniality as Care’ (FEMDAC) is funded by a grant from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation (New York) (Grant Number: G-1807-06023).Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 The authors of this article are the research team members based at the three public HEIs in South Africa (the rest of the transnational members of the team are based at the two institutions in the USA). We wish to thank them and the rest of the members for their support throughout the COVID-19 crisis and FEMDAC project.2 As part of our decolonial feminist praxis, we never ask our participants to do tasks that we ourselves as facilitators do not participate in. Therefore, we also drew our own metaphor drawings and presented our experiences and vision for the future. Our drawings form part of the collective/co-generated data set.3 By this time in the FEMDAC project all members were on a first-name basis, but in this article we use pseudonyms.Additional informationNotes on contributorsRelebohile MoletsaneRELEBOHILE MOLETSANE is Professor and the JL Dube Chair in Rural Education at the School of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Her current research interests include rurality, gender transformation, and participatory visual methodology as transformative feminist praxis. Moletsane is","PeriodicalId":44530,"journal":{"name":"AGENDA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135717394","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AGENDAPub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10130950.2023.2251814
Eugenia AB Anderson, Nora K Nonterah, Margaret M Tayviah, Sally Opoku Agyeman, Rufai Mahami
{"title":"“It seems the women are taking over\": Stereotyping around women in top-level leadership positions in Ghana's universities","authors":"Eugenia AB Anderson, Nora K Nonterah, Margaret M Tayviah, Sally Opoku Agyeman, Rufai Mahami","doi":"10.1080/10130950.2023.2251814","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2023.2251814","url":null,"abstract":"abstractThis article explores patterns of change in the advancement of academic women’s leadership at universities in Ghana. Referred to as the ‘glass ceiling’, women generally suffered great setbacks in their advancement in leadership positions, although recent events have led to the appointment and election of women into top-level leadership positions at universities. At a conference at the University of Ghana, organised by the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa in September 2022, one attendee commented that “It seems the women are taking over”, due to the number of women occupying top-level positions at the university. Existing literature on women’s leadership at the universities have not adequately explored the implications of the recent appointment of women vice-chancellors on the perception of women’s leadership and advancement of the careers of other women at universities. This article sets out to investigate the challenges women face in the advancement of their careers, and implications of the recent appointment of women into leadership positions. Using a feminist decolonial lens, it inductively analyses semi-structured interviews with key academic women as well as men in leadership positions at selected universities, backed with the authors’ experience as female academics, and employment records. It adds to knowledge on the gradual advancement of women to top leadership positions at universities.keywords: universities, women academics, women’s leadership, feminist decoloniality, glass ceiling Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 In Ghana the senior management level used here refers to both academic and administrative professionals such as Professors, Senior Lecturers, Senior Researchers, Registrars, Deputy Registrars, Finance Officers, Deputy Finance Officers and other analogous positions in higher education institutions (Adu-Oppong, Aikins & Darko Citation2017).Additional informationNotes on contributorsEugenia AB AndersonEUGENIA AMA BREBA ANDERSON is an adjunct lecturer and feminist historian affiliated with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana. She holds an MPhil and a PhD in Historical Studies, specialising in the gender question in Social Movements in Africa through the lens of student activism. Her expertise cuts across variant research themes and methods, with a key interest in student activism, gender, higher education, and healthcare. She is currently a Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow with the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, working on decolonisation and student activism in postcolonial African universities. She is part of a Feminist Africa Research Consortium on religious digital activism in Africa. Email: amaeugenia24@gmail.comNora K NonterahNORA KOFOGNOTERA NONTERAH is an ethicist and a lecturer in the Religious Studies Department, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghan","PeriodicalId":44530,"journal":{"name":"AGENDA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135717395","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AGENDAPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10130950.2023.2179410
Miriam Adelina Ocadiz Arriaga
{"title":"‘Loboko Ya Mama’: Homemade recipes of belonging","authors":"Miriam Adelina Ocadiz Arriaga","doi":"10.1080/10130950.2023.2179410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2023.2179410","url":null,"abstract":"abstract During the COVID-19 pandemic, migrants in South Africa were not only exempted from social allowances such as food parcels but also targeted by xenophobic sentiments. Consequently, migrants who were already pushed to the margins of society experienced an increased sense of alienation from South African society. Based on Food for Change, 1 an online project in which eight forced migrant women from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda living in Gqeberha, South Africa, shared cooking recipes during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article approaches the cultivation of a sense of home and belonging through food. Using the concept of visceral politics, it analyses how food created a visceral experience in which embodied subjects acquire personal pleasure, affiliation with other embodied subjects and a sense of connectedness to their places of origin and South Africa. This approach documents how women exercised creative agency through their cooking by implementing knowledge from their home countries, acquiring new knowledge from other cuisines and adapting local ingredients and techniques to create meals that unite their households around the pleasure of eating ‘exactly like home’. In this way, they were able to reduce the impact that the alienating anti-migrant discourses outside their homes had on the everyday life inside them.","PeriodicalId":44530,"journal":{"name":"AGENDA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59730796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AGENDAPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10130950.2023.2183138
Pralini Naidoo
{"title":"Greener on the other side: tracing stories of amaranth and moringa through indenture","authors":"Pralini Naidoo","doi":"10.1080/10130950.2023.2183138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2023.2183138","url":null,"abstract":"abstract My research, with its focus on women and food seed through the lens of indenture, has led me into the world of leafy green vegetables and their intimate connection to women who had been brought to South Africa to service colonial plantations. Leafy greens are currently buzzwords in the fitness, health, vegan, and vegetarian vocabulary. Occasionally, another leaf is discovered by the doyens of fancy cuisine, researchers or experts, elevating an unknown dark green leaf to superfood status. In the past few decades moringa and amaranth have gained popularity in scientific and culinary circles. This sudden spurt of interest in a food that has been traditionally eaten for years in ex-indentured communities, among many others, has often elicited from this community, wry amusement, confusion at its celebrity status or pride at its recognition. Delving into research transcripts and fieldwork notes, I observe, not only, how these communities consume moringa and amaranth, but the variety of ways the human and other-than-human stories are entangled. I also consider the impact/ benefits of the commodification of foods and seeds such as moringa and amaranth, on the many invisible people who have been propagating, consuming and storying the plant before its discovery.","PeriodicalId":44530,"journal":{"name":"AGENDA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45944591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AGENDAPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10130950.2023.2191467
Desiree Lewis
{"title":"Food Shaming and Race, and Hungry Translations","authors":"Desiree Lewis","doi":"10.1080/10130950.2023.2191467","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2023.2191467","url":null,"abstract":"Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America by Psyche A. Williams-Forson (2022) and Hungry Translations: Relearning the World Through Radical Vulnerability by Richa Nagar (2019) deal with food and hunger in relation to the very different geopolitical regions of North America and India. At the same time, they enter into dialogue with each other in exploring how socially situated bodies – othered in gendered, raced and neoliberal systems and discourses – navigate and resist oppressive food politics. As both authors also show, critical approaches to food politics should entail much more than attention to who gets to eat well, or why certain groups are able to waste food obscenely while most of the world’s population starves, cannot make informed and healthy food choices, or inhabits food deserts, those foodscapes of near-starvation created by the corporate food industry’s hunger for profits. As the authors show, exploring the politics of food, eating and hunger should focus also on the languages and attitudes surrounding how these are connected to radical struggles for human freedom. By focusing on the represented and imagined connections between human desires and experiences on one hand and food and hunger on the other, Williams-Forson and Nagar also encourage us to interrogate and reimagine our relationships to both humans as well as nature and other living beings. These books’ perspectives from different continents invite us to consider the transcontinental context of multiple subaltern struggles through the lens of food.","PeriodicalId":44530,"journal":{"name":"AGENDA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48342045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}