The 'Global Feminisms Project' is a three-year (2002-2005) collaborative international project on "Global Feminisms: Comparative Case Studies of Women's Activism and Scholarship," which examines the history of feminist activism, women's movements and academic women's studies in Poland, China, India, and the United States. This project is funded by the University of Michigan (2002-2005), and is based in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG) at UM, which is also the home for the US site research team. Our international collaborators are: The Sound and Picture Archives on Research on Women (SPARROW) in Mumbai, India, eFKa, a Women's Center at Jagellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and The Chinese Women's College in Beijing, China.
The project questions conventional notions of global feminism as the "internationalization of the women's movement," which often assumes a transfer eastward of western feminst ideals. We are examining the histories of feminsm in local contexts by collecting ten videotaped oral histories of women's movement activists and women's studies scholars in each country. Each site has developed its list of interviewees independently, thereby selecting the issues that represent aspects of their national histories and women's movement histories, as well as whos should represent them, on their own terms. All four research teams meet annually to review each other's materials and to discuss the disparate the body, the public-private divide, the state, law & jurisprudence, and publishing-that have emerged from the interviews.
By documenting individual life stories of activists and scholars, and considering them in their particular historical and cultural contexts, our project records important differences in women's activisim in specific local sites, and questions constructions of 'global' feminsim that assume a common (Western) set of issues as universal to all women. Working at the intersections of the local and global, we hope our archive will provide a nuanced understanding of the dense historical relations, and long history of mutually influential interactions, among women's movements in and feminist scholarship from different countries and regions. The completed archives from this project, consisting of forty written transcripts, along with the videotaped interviews, will be a resource for future relationship on the histories of feminism. These materials will be deposited at each site, thus creating an international network of archives of oral histories that document women's scholarship and activism, and avoiding the historically unequal flows in the production and exchange of knowledge between the West and non-West. In addition, we developing a variety of model curricular uses for the narratives-for courses on methods, on activism, on the history of feminst activism and scholarship, and for comparative studies of gender.
The project's co-directors are Abby Stewart (Women's and Psychology), Jayati Lal ( Women's Studies and Sociology), and Kristin McGuire (History). Our international site coordinators are: C.S. Lakshmi from SPARROW (Mumbai) for India, Zhang Jian from the Chinese Women's College (Beijing) for China, and Slawka Walczewska (Krakow) for Poland. UM based coordinators for each site are: for the USA, Professor Elizabeth Cole ( Women's Studies and Afro-American and African Studies); for China, Professor Wang Zheng (Women's Studies and the Institute for Research on Women & Gender); for India, Professors Jayati Lal and Abby Stewart; and for Poland, Magadalena Zaborowska (American Culture and Center for Afroamerican and African Studies) and Justyna Pas (American Culture). Graduate interns for the overall project have been: Kim Clum (Social Work and Anthropology) for 2002-2003; and Jana Haritatos (Psychology) for 2003-2004; Julia Lee (Law) for 2004-2005; and Desdamona Rios (Psychology and Women's Studies) for 2005. Zakiya Luna (Sociology & Women's Studies) is the US site intern; and the China site interns have been Ying Zhang (Women's Studies and History) and Kim Dorazio (Political Science); and the India intern was Sridevi Nair (2004-2005). Dustin Edwards manages technical support.
For more information, visit our website.