GOP IWD Session 4 - Prof Amina Mama - Building epistemic voice

Building epistemic voice: reflections on transnational feminist knowledge work.
This IWD lecture explores developments in transnational feminist education at the turn of the century. It will discuss the strategies of African feminist scholars concerned to strengthen the feminist politics in gender studies, despite the neo-coloniality of the neo-liberalised university campuses. I argue that because these took place alongside the ongoing feminist training carried out by women's movement organizations, interventions in gender and women's studies were able to make an epistemic contribution to African feminism. Tracing these connections makes it possible to see how a decade of feminist educational work contributed to the spread of transnational feminist epistemologies and politics in the work of both scholarly and activist organizations.
Amina Mama - Professor in the Dept of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis. A transdisciplinary feminist educator, researcher and organizer, Mama’s most influential works include The Hidden Struggle: Statutory and Voluntary Sector Responses to Black Women and Domestic Violence in London (Runnymede Trust 1989); Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender and Subjectivity (Routledge 1995); and Engendering African Social Sciences (co-edited with Fatou Sow and Ayesha Imam, CODESRIA 1997). She has 30 years of teaching experience on university campuses in Africa, Europe and the USA. Key career honors include her appointments to the Prince Claus Chair in Development and Equity at University of Utrecht (2004), the Angela Davis Guest Professor in Social Justice at the Cornelia Goethe Centre (2016), University of Frankfurt, and the Kwame Nkrumah Chair in African Studies (2020-2022). She continues to pursue collaborative action-research, documentation and film projects.