The Fembot Collective’s Global South Initiatives

• In Event: Gendered Voices and Practices of Open Peer Review

Abstract

From the beginning, as a publishing platform, the Fembot Collective experienced challenges owing to its location in the Global North and its English-language platform. Some members of Fembot have recently been discussing the need to expand its international efforts through what I am calling the “Fembot Collective Global South Initiatives.” As co-editor of Ada and member of the Fembot Collective board, I have decided to engage in discussions around this with various Global south based feminist scholars, activists and NGO workers.

In this initiative, we aim to extend Fembot publishing and mentoring successes further beyond the formal academia that is dominated mostly by English speaking Western countries. We would like to think of it more as an extension of Fembot within Fembot. In doing so -- this initiative extends Fembot’s core philosophy by challenging the inequalities between the global North and the global South academic culture and to work with global South feminist scholars and activists in their struggles around negotiations of a mix of local and neocolonial hierarchies around evaluations of scholarly output that prevail in many such institutional settings.

Author

• Radhika Gajjala, Bowling Green State U