What can we learn from African feminists about how to navigate a world in meta-crisis? Join us for a dynamic conversation exploring how African feminists have organized over generations for collective thriving.
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So much of the story of African resistance has been told in the masculine, tracing the history of spectacle: great struggles, great speeches, the grand displays of nation building. This book adds to the literature that reverses this, exploring the flesh and breadth of contemporary African feminist politics as articulated across the African continent. It is structured around the key principles of kinship, courage, pleasure, care and memory, and draws on the African feminist academic canon, the “grey literature” of practitioner knowledge and narratives of feminists activists themselves. Through this it evidences the argument that African feminist praxis is fundamentally a politics of proposition, a mode of liberatory worldmaking.
Speakers
Jessica Horn is an East African feminist writer and practitioner. With two decades of experience in philanthropy, Jessica pioneered the Futures initiative at the African Women’s Development Fund and became the first African woman to lead the Ford Foundation’s East Africa office. She co-founded Our Africa, a platform for African women’s voices on openDemocracy. Jessica served as Commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Gender and Global Health and co-founded the African Feminist Forum. She is lead author of the BRIDGE Cutting Edge Pack on Gender and Social Movements. Her new book, African Feminist Praxis: Cartographies of Liberatory Worldmaking (Sage, 2025), explores African feminist principles, focusing on kinship, courage, pleasure, care, and memory and how they have shaped transformative action.
Chair
Tessa Lewin is a Research Fellow at IDS. She is a development professional with over 20 years of experience working on participatory action-research projects both as a researcher and visual practitioner. Tessa has extensive experience in participatory action research and project management.
Lucia Nader is a Brazilian political scientist, with expertise in the field of democracy, social change and human rights. She has been researching and working with activists, NGOs and donors for 25 years. Her PhD research at IDS focuses on the enablers of a regenerative activism – one that can renew, restore and revitalize itself at individual, organizational and movement levels.
Discussant
Priya Raghavan is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, with multi-disciplinary teaching and research expertise in gender and development, anti-colonial feminist theory, anti-racist and especially abolition feminisms, and critical race theory.
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