Global South Grassroots Transgressions Against Gender Inequity

• In Event: 67.025 - Contested Liminalities, Erasures, Invisibility, and Hypervisibility: Global South Perspectives on De/Colonizing Social Context of Education

Abstract

Objectives
Conceptualizations of equity and social justice are strongly anchored within particular ideological, political, and policy stances – thus translating and/or importing such conceptualizations without explicit interrogation of its neoliberal implications to local politics, policy, culture and ideology, thereby re-inscribing colonialism. Discourse on issues of gender in Global South countries have always been fraught with meta-narratives of violence and dysfunction that is left to be solved by western countries (NGO’s, researchers, policies, etc.). In this paper, I share my work with educators from five Global South countries to examine/understand how transnational social contexts, policies, and practices shape/manage commitments to justice issues like gender, intersected by multiple power structures. Such contextual analysis elucidates the transgressive ways in which social justice oriented educators shape, challenge, dis/engage, re/construct gendered educational policies and practices in classrooms, schools, communities, and cultures.

Perspective(s)
Social justice has become a trope of political symbolism (like promissory equity policy), while globalization appropriates acts of social justice (e.g. making choice a social justice precept), creating conflict with indigenous decolonizing ideals, and changing the internal discourse and implementation of social justice in developing countries. Drawing on decolonizing projects of knowledge disruption and action (Smith, 2012; Santos, 2014), I frame gender within socio-cultural, political, and personal ways. My decolonizing work reflects on and recognizes the legitimacy of Global South educators’ epistemology in creating and sustaining justice initiatives grounded in their embodied relationships to gender in/equity. While social justice theoretical frames may work against oppression and counter dominant narratives that delegitimize issues of equity, they are also culturally and contextually situated. In the West and South, social justice plays out differently given different politics, peoples, histories, and contexts. Global South grassroots social justice epistemology is an alternative lens through which those marginalized can coalesce to examine/disrupt the discursive and intersected nature of gender, power, and knowledge, as part of a justice-driven decolonizing process. People utilize socio-cultural knowledges to give meaning to their lives and such knowledges should have epistemological merit. Additionally, as a transnational researcher, living and working in the US, I engage with my ambiguous and complicit location on gender equity against the backdrop of contemporary gender issues.

Methods
I utilize critical ethnographic case studies (Madison, 2005) with educators from Peru, Uruguay, Senegal, Nigeria and Cameroon. Participants engaged in six-week professional development in US and continued their gender equity projects in their home countries. Analyzing various data sources (reflections, biographies, self studies), publicly available socio-poliotical data in each country, individual and focus group interviews, I highlight how educators practice/perform dissent against dominant structures, knowledge and practice of gender in-equity, and reposition themselves as emancipatory actors within a larger discourse.

Conclusion/Significance
The case studies illustrate the ways in which gendered interactions shape issues of power and knowledge, and particularly how power intervenes in legitimizing certain forms of knowledge and action. These case studies provide non-binary articulations of Global South efforts at interrogating gender in/equity, highlighting decolonizing processes, and offering tangible ways in which Global South transgressions lead to more nuanced and culturally sensitive outcomes.

Author

• Sharon S. Subreenduth, University of Massachusetts - Lowell