A feminist guide to pracademia: lessons from Argentina’s movement for legal abortion

• In Event: Pracademia: Impacts and Pathways

Abstract

During a recent mapping effort of the resourcing ecosystem of feminist civil society in Latin America, I came across an element unforeseen in the project’s conceptual framework, but which emerged as having a key role when seeking to account for the impact of recent campaigns for women’s rights in the region. I found a consolidated and increasingly dense web of research centres and institutes working on women, gender and feminism, mainly located within universities’ departments of Social Sciences, Humanities and Law, and to a lesser degree in university departments of Psychology and the Health Sciences. A conversation with the (female) head of a regional research organisation made me realise that what I was seeing was an unusual concentration of feminist pracademics, even when most if not all of them wouldn’t have thought of calling themselves that. When asked about the links between women academics working on gender studies in universities and the feminist movement mobilised in the streets, in the media, in the courts and legislative chambers, her answer made me understand that this was not about external links between two separate entities: ‘we are the same ones here, there and everywhere’. Posner’s classic definition of ‘pracademics’ refers to hybrids or ‘dual citizens’ who inhabit both the territories of academia (as professors and/or researchers) and of professional practice in their respective areas of expertise. Much of the literature indeed refers to the ‘practice’ side of the pracademic equation as a professional domain; however, some also bring the activist dimension into the picture, viewing the ‘activist scholar’ as a form of pracademic – that is, including volunteer work and social activism as a possible form of the ‘practice’ component of pracademia. Based on this more comprehensive conceptualisation of pracademia, this article explores the role of pracademics of the activist-scholar kind in the longstanding process of social mobilisation leading to the recent legalisation of abortion in Argentina.

Author

• Ines Maria Pousadela, CIVICUS/Universidad ORT Uruguay