 Hi everybody, I'll begin to welcome you as you begin to enter and the numbers start to to climb. So good morning on one side and good day on the South African side, but you will take the the greeting appropriate to you. Welcome to day two. Welcome to this panel, which is decolonization and feminist voices. We're looking forward to and hoping for a panel that is suitably provocative and evocative. And do we have an exciting lineup for you, which is a symmetrical in the best possible way because it is a panel where there's a postdoc experience or established rather researchers new emerging academics. Which is a lovely mixed voice, and you can see by the way we've labelled the panel that we are looking for what is obvious a polyvocality. So without dwelling too much more, let me jump into the first speaker who's Rosalind Canyambe. And Rosalind is one of our School of Social Sciences alumni. I know her supervisor, intimately, and that's an inside joke but Rosalind will know what I read by that. And she is now a postdoc fellow in Herd, which is and let me get this right, Health Economics HIV and AIDS Research Division. Her PhD, which wasn't too long ago was in a topic around misogyny and sexist humor, and she is drawing from that for this presentation. The topic, the title of a presentation is higher education spaces as radical sites for female resistance. A case of the case of the Zimbabwe University. So Rosalind, we are looking forward to your presentation. I just want to quickly reiterate your Q&A please post into the Q&A box and to remind all the speakers here to be mindful of the time and the clock. Over to you Rosalind. Oh, as I know you're Rose. Good morning everyone. As Professor Mayesh said, my name is Rosalind Canyambe. Allow me to present to you the findings from a study I did not long ago. It is titled, Higher Education Spaces as radical sites for female resistance, a case of the great Zimbabwe University. So a little background of the study. The study discusses the expressions of the female voice in response to sexist humor at a university in Zimbabwe. The study approaches the female response through African feminist lenses, which recognizes that patriarchal domination is one thing African women have in common, despite their differences in religion, politics, and others. In light of this study, the study explores how women's substantive voice is suppressed in an environment which is perceived to be equal and or inclusive. The study seeks to illuminate the female student's voice in reclamation of higher education space, which has been deemed by a strong patriarchal tradition of violence against women, aggravated by misogyny and denying them equal and quality access to higher education. All this despite the fact that public higher education continues to remain the main route to career advancement for many women in Africa. Their constrained access therefore poses a constraint to the pursuit of more equitable and just modes of political, economic, and social development. Our findings from the study revealed that female response was only broad spectrum, ranging from total silence to outright protest. The general assumption, which is somewhat simplistic and indicative of the masculine expectation of physical resistance is that resistance will be overt and active and follow the legal route. However, this view does not acknowledge the deeply established normative practices and cultures that support violence and silences women. Although our female students is a type of resistance differed in this university and did not always take this activist form, which many have come to expect it was resistance nonetheless. The first form of female voice was a voluntary silence or selective mutism. This type of silence was hinged on resigned acceptance that even when they speak up in challenge sexism, nothing was going to change. Female students voluntarily chose to remain silent, even when the consequences of their silence included shame and social ostracism. Silence can reflect disempowerment or can act as an innovative strategy for survival in dangerous places. There is an element of choice to the extent to which these female students exercise their voice in the struggle for space in higher education. A choice that was driven by the desire to remain in school, even if it hits, because education represents an investment in their own social economic progress with significant long term benefits. In other words, female students held the knife with the sharp end. Then there was forced the silence. This was a result of the power structures that forcibly mutes women and prohibited them from acknowledging their experiences. Excuse me. In this case, this was due to the ambiguous nature of sexist human, which was prevalent at this institution. Female students had no vocabulary to explain this subtle but equally harmful type of harassment. The available statutes criminalizes overt expressions of harassment, where injury is visible, as such women need to defend and justify why sexist human was harassment. And often complaints were certainly dismissed. It can be easy to trivialize sexist human harassment, particularly when comparing it to more severe forms of sexual assault, but the harm in sexist human lies in its everyday and repetitive nature where communications of women's contributions are trivialized and dismissed. Then there was shamed silence. For some female students. This harassment has to be deeply concealed and never be talked about because of the cultural and social ramifications. The stigma and labels that will come with it will ruin their chances at marriage. Female students we internalize the scores of traditional femininity were less likely to exercise agency as they viewed male aggressiveness is normal. This may signify how solid the threat of masculine authorities, such that female students would not dare challenge it. Fear of retaliation also from the male male students reduced women to mute visible objects. And this is something that consumes one's very being as a result survivors remained silent for fear of being ostracized in marginalized. However, there were a few brave ones who called out the harasser. Calling out the harasser allowed female students to reclaim their power from the perpetrator. However, those who chose to fight back were aware that shows of resistance may invite further stereotyping from the perpetrator, such as being called crazy, or being dismissed. A small percentage of the respondents went even further and large formal complaints at the university level. Sadly, such reports were met with sympathy or subordination or dismissiveness. There were some students who resorted to adopting the super woman personality. This is when they strive to outpace men in class to prove female intelligence. Excelling over male students in a space which they've claimed is exclusively theirs is a direct challenge. As Teresa Barnes notes, high education spaces are intricately linked with codes for men as thinker, aggressive debater, athlete, etc. Therefore, the addition of women to this means club is that's not only statistical, but also an extremely meaningful social and symbolic exercise, which by nature is dynamic, challenging and likely conflicted. However, it can be argued that being a super woman student represent how women feel the need to manage their performance for them to be taken seriously, or to be viewed as intelligent and to be received as equal partners by male students. Sadly, there were some female students who learned their voices in solidarity with the harasser. They learned their existence of harassment and labored those who acknowledged harassment as overreacting. This might signify the feminine hope of being admitted into what may be termed respectable heterosexuality by being admitted into the somewhat powerful circles of patriarchy, although this is subject to debate. So identifying and supporting the harasser derails efforts to fight against harassment, as Jane Bennett rightly put it, is tantamount to taking two steps forward and three steps somewhere else. Then there was another form of silence which was based on protectionism. This was for fear of hurting the harasser, what if he gets expelled, what if I embarrass him by calling out. Regardless of these different types of responses, both outright and restrained, successful or unsuccessful, all have contributed to growth of activism at the university. Gender issues at the university have been granted a respected position with the establishment of a separate centre for gender studies, named the Buyané Anders centre. Creation of feminist space in itself is a radical act. More so given that the centre derives its inspiration from Buyané Anders, the first Zimbabwean woman to join the liberation struggle. Naming the school after female liberation struggle icon implies acknowledgement of the struggle for gender equity that women are currently engaged in. In conclusion, I'd like to say that the study has shown that the issue of gender activism is far from simple. It is an issue that is both personal and social with far reaching consequences. Therefore, there is need to be aware of messages both subtle end of it, implicit in the multiple social responses to female violence. patriarchal domination being the major culprit. Allow me to share with you as my concluding remark. This is a quote from Ngozi Adichie. She says, we raise girls, we raise girls to cater for the egos of men. We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We tell girls you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful, otherwise you threaten the men. If you teach girls shame, close your legs, cover yourself, we make them feel as though by being born female, they're already guilty of something. And so girls grow up to be women who cannot see they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And this is the worst thing we do to girls. They grow up to be women who tend pretends into an art form. Thank you. Thank you, Rose. Thank you for taking us on that empirical journey. And I think in true anthropological style you are evocative and spoke to the lived experiences of your respondents. So thank you very much for that deep and insightful presentation. We move now to the next speaker who is a colleague in the School of Social Sciences. She's a researcher, academic former head of Department of Political Science, but I think my affinity to her comes from her alter ego, which is I think a true personality as activist and you'll read in her bio that she is an anti-racist who struggles starboard. And what is fascinating about Dr. Lubna Nagvi is that a lot of her scholarship is deeply entangled in her passion and her activism work. And the Lubna that you know is the Lubna that you see the Lubna that comes through her work. And I think that is the power that she brings to the research that she is interested in. And her topic is evaluating reflection, replications of Oriental forms of knowledge as patriarchy, a focus on the Middle East and North Africa. So she's going to look at knowledge production in the geographical regions of Middle East and North Africa and their politics. Over to you, Lubna. Thank you very much for that wonderful introduction. And thank you so much to the organizers of this symposium for giving me this opportunity to share some of my exploratory ideas around my topic. So to start off, I basically start reflecting on, in my paper, the practice of subjugation of one group of people by another. And I mentioned a range of forms of subjugation. From the advent of slavery across most of Europe, the Middle East, the Orient, Asia, Africa, and America's to the implementation of formal colonialism, apartheid, xenophobia, Afrophobia, Islamophobia, Zionism, anti-semitism, fascism, patriarchy, neoliberalism, there's so many. And so, reflecting on these, we can see that our historical records are replete with examples of the most violent and shocking modes of suppression of human beings. Now, while some of these formalized modes of oppression have been legally abolished, they still continue to manifest in both subtle and overt forms. Through policy frameworks, informal practices, knowledge production, state bureaucracies, and the like. And many of these forms of subjugation continue to work hand in hand with each other to replicate on the subjugation. So it's against this backdrop of oppression and subjugation that this paper really concerns itself with conducting an exploratory analysis. And I, you know, highlight this because it's always working so very exploratory and working progress. So exploratory analysis of how some components of knowledge production in its various forms, which is through print, digital or forms, is still advancing. One of the most brutal forms of subjugation in modern times, that of patriarchy. Now, of course, the practice of patriarchy is already deeply embedded in other forms of structural oppression, such as those that I referred to earlier. And I've chosen to locate the exploration within the context of the framework of Orientalism as an ongoing practice and attempt to interrogate how it is that knowledge production, which can be considered Orientalist and substance and nature has become a vehicle for the ongoing violence that is being perpetrated by patriarchy. Now, this is not an entirely new claim, and it has been articulated in various ways by feminists such as Fatima Manisi, who in her work, Beyond the Veil, attempted to break down the ethnocentric stereotypes that Western society had developed towards Islam and especially Muslim women. So in this paper, I'm attempting to take some of those arguments and locate them within the context of a more contemporary 20th century expression of Orientalism, one which is located largely within the Palestinian American academic Edward Said's definition of the term. Now, I would say in his summer work, Orientalism refers to three broad definitions of what he means by Orientalism. He argues that firstly, anyone who teaches, writes about or researches the Orient, either in a specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism. He further posits that even if it does not survive, as it once did, Orientalism looks on academically through its doctrines and theses about the Orient and the Oriental. His second explanation is that Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the Orient and most of the time the Occident. But for the purposes of this paper, I will use his third definition, which according to him is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two. So taking the late 18th century as a very roughly defined starting point, Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient, dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, by describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it. In short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. Now, Orientalism as a field of study has arguably evolved over the years. Prior to Said's conceptualizing of the term as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient, it had been a term used largely to refer to the literature, art, culture, and other aspects of the geographical region of the Orient, more commonly known today as the Middle East and And now Said's definition, however, arguably brought into sharp focus the oppressive and indeed colonialist elements of the practice of placing an Orientalist lens on how the region of the Orient was perceived and understood. Other scholars agree with him. For example, in Empire, a very short introduction, Stephen Howe agrees with Said that Western nations and the empires were created by an exploitation of underdeveloped countries and the extraction of wealth and labor from one country to another. So one can extrapolate from these scholars who agree with Said, a very clear link between the practice of Orientalism and Western forms of colonialism and imperialism. One non-African intellectual Mahon Nandani in his work, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, argues that Said very effectively summed up the principle dogmas of Orientalism, and there are quite a few, but because of time I'll just go through a few. The one being which portrays the West as rational, developed, humane, superior, it caricatures the Orient as aberrant, undeveloped, and inferior. Another dogma is that the Orient is at the bottom, something either to be feared or to be controlled by pacification, research, and development, an outright occupation, wherever possible. Now in the introduction, I attempted to draw the link between ongoing Orientalist practices as being akin to Western colonialism and imperialism, and this notion has been widely accepted and confirmed by many scholars other than Said. So now I want to talk about how a substantial amount of knowledge production that has been generated within a more contemporary context, that is the 20th and 21st century, about the geographical region of Middle East and Asia, and even their diasporic communities. Now it is that this knowledge production has a very clear patriarchal agenda and bias. And I will do this by examining a few examples of what some scholars would describe and categorize as Orientalist scholarship by one prominent author. And because of time constraints, I can't look at more than that. Now at this point, it's useful to articulate a working definition of patriarchy within which one can locate the core argument of this paper. Given a patriarchy as an ideological framework and a set of practices is defined differently across various academic disciplines and social context. It's important to capture definition that will be adequate for the purposes of this paper. The definitions argue that patriarchy is largely a philosophical idea that others women, when a woman is considered a second class citizen, some regarded as a social structure that oppresses and subjugates women, even if they have civil and political rights. Others view patriarchy as a social system in which men dominate in a variety of roles and are beneficiaries of social privileges accorded to them by that system. And then there's a view that patriarchy as a social system is harmful, oppressive and subjugates women and men and society at large. So it is this last all encompassing idea of patriarchy that I wish to utilize to locate my arguments. Now to quickly return to say it's first definition of Orientalism, which basically refers to anyone who teaches threats about researchers. It is a harmless enough definition and no different to calling someone who teaches that's about or searches politics of political scientists. However, for those of us in the Academy, who understand our knowledge and research can very often become a vehicle for propaganda and ideological domination and subjugation. It is important to distinguish between simply writing about a subject area and being able to discern whether the writing is intended to advance ulterior motives or not. Which is why say it's third definition of Orientalism is so important and liberating as it truly speaks true to power by enabling one to subject various modes of knowledge about the orient or to use the contemporary terms of the Middle East nation to more refined analysis. Now, the body of information knowledge and material can be available on the contemporary Middle East and Asia. And of course they diaspora communities is huge massive. In the wake of September 11, 2001, in particular, scholars from across the world, and with the knowledge production paternity at large, produced a huge amount of material in the form of printed text, online content forms, audio visual and digital items and broader consumption. A lot of this material attempted to counter the rising Islamophobia and hatred of the Middle East and persons of Middle Eastern and Asian origin. However, there were some who arguably considered this an ideal opportunity to advance certain technological values that presented propaganda falsehoods and myths about the Middle East and Asia as facts to be consumed and active upon. Now one of these scholars identified as falling into this category is Bernard Lewis, who, while well known for his historical work on the Middle East, amongst many others, is often cited by some contemporary scholars as someone who wrote and a very biased manner towards the Middle East region. Said's own critique of Lewis' work is very instructive, and he argues, for example, that Lewis treats Islam in a monolithic entity without the nuance of its plurality, internal dynamics and historical complexities, and accuses him of demagoguing and downright ignorance. In other words, Said also criticized Lewis as simply not being able to deal with the diversity of Muslim, much less human life, because it is close to him as something far radically different and other. And he criticizes Lewis' inability to grant that the Islamic peoples and Arab peoples are entitled to their own cultural, political and historical practices free from Lewis' calculated attempt to show that because they're not Western, they can't be good. Now a substantial consequence of the scholarship produced by Lewis, such as what went wrong, the clash between Islam and modernity in the Middle East, the crisis of Islam, holy war and holy terror, and the arrows in history, and others, in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks was the use of his works to guide and inspire, for example, the policy frameworks of the new conservative government of George W. Bush, which ultimately ended up invading Afghanistan in Iraq and started a more than decades long global war against terrorism, that had severe implications for the Middle East, Asia, and the rest of the world. It became a well known fact that Lewis was frequently consulted by the Bush administration in order to guide their foreign policy objectives in the Middle East. Now, in terms of linking this to patriarchy, it's important to understand that the mastery and power dynamics that are inevitably conjured up in these machinations through the use of Oriental literature or into writing can only lead to one conclusion, which is that deep root of patriarchy drives both the production of the knowledge, as well as the politics that it services. And so in concluding, I want to affirm that there is a huge link between the Orientalist nature of the writing of scholars like Bernard Lewis, and of course, the fact that they ultimately serve a very patriarchal agenda. I thank you for your attention. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Natalie. Thanks, Lubna, for that really insightful paper that troubles this notion of Orientalism and peels back these shifting, shifting spaces that this word ideology occupies, and its ramifications through policy frameworks because as we know policy documents are far from neutral. We hope to come back to you in the Q&A section. We move now to the next speaker, who's Professor Vivian Jong, and please don't be fooled by the fact that we are different heights and maybe even different hues. She is my sister from another mother. And she's the acting Dean of School of Social Sciences and in many ways the driving force for this particular symposium from the UK ZN side. Professor Jong, researchers and publishers across a diverse intellectual terrain as you would gather from reading her bio, and she has done this. I think even before we discovered the word interdisciplinarity. So she is extensively published research has graduated a large cohort of students, and I could go on as I could go on for many of the other speakers. But I will guide you back to the Rosha. She is going to be taking us to another space a contested and highly volatile violence space, which is in the guys of the church, and talking to us about decolonizing the church and even if that is possible. Her title presentation is decolonizing the church. What should constitute the agenda for an African Christian feminist and feminism I suppose. She's going to look at popular and academic discourses and debates about religion in Africa, and, and talk to us about a vibrant spiritual capitalism. Thank you. Thank you so much, Professor Nigel and greetings panelists and and greetings to all the participants. I'm so delighted to share with you some of my, my experiences, my paper, this particular presentation is around. My, my position, maybe, because most of you will know me, they know me as a pastor at the same time on an academic, and I often find it, you know, I find it weird when people meet me and it's the, you know, they're trying to box me in. And so being trained as an anthropologist. I had those that epistemic struggle. And so I'll just like for the interest of time. I just want to just quickly speak to a couple of issues I've got just 10 minutes, and I'll leave the rest to today to the question to the Q&A session. So, for this particular paper, I would just like to demonstrate what constitutes the gender for African Christian feminists, and also to explore my positionality, which has been like my journey throughout from when I began as a young academic up to where I am now and I'm going forward. My positionality as an academic and a religious practitioner, actually a leader of one of the Pentecostal churches in South Africa, and the tensions that exist within me as I engage in knowledge production. I also try to establish whether decolonization is taking place in the churches and how it is done and the impact it has on women, and to demonstrate the extent to which the church being actually a tool of colonialism to make up principles, continue to promote the operation of African women. And finally to review some of the inroads made by African Christian families to the decolonial project. As I said, I am an anthropologist and a Pentecostal pastor, and I often find myself trying to practice and engage anthropology and to preach a gospel that is relevant in this context. My intellectual mind and my strong desire to be epistemologically free. See, that has been driven and has actually given shape to my scholarship and teaching from when I entered the academy. To be epistemologically free. And as far back I remember more than a decade ago, I, together with my postdoctoral fellow at the time, Dr. Jenna Butuki, we published a paper, it was in 2010. And the title of that paper was, A Massipation or Reconstituted a Subordination, where we looked at the position of professional women, where we find a woman who is, who is empowered through education because we know from statistics that education is an empowerment tool. And so we began asking, asking question, how is it that the African women, despite all the education, despite the level of empowerment, sees happens to find herself in a very subjugated and oppressed position. So that moved me on to, I think later on, I think it was in 2011 or 2012, around that time I can remember clearly, I did, I did a research and I published a paper which was, which I looked at the rights of, the rights, rights of, human rights versus empowerment of women. Vis-a-vis the requirement, the Christian requirement of everyone to submit to the authority of the pastor. And I'll say that, they say this to you, my personal experience, you see, I speak to you from the, from my experience. At that time, the partner in my life, you know, I, I was in a very challenging space. I remember going, I remember wanting to buy a setting, a technological tool. And I said to him, I want us to buy this. And he said, no, we don't have money for that. And I said, no, I'm not asking you to bring the money. I will buy it. I, I do and I do and I'll incur. And he said to me, if you buy it, keep it in your office. Don't bring it here. So you see, for me, I've looked for that. I've tried to understand myself and also trying to understand the position of other women. Also, because you will get to know as I continue my presentation that the church is that space where you find a majority of women, women who seem to fall under some kind of oppression, in the experience in equality, the experience, the violence, gender-based violence, and so on. So for me, that, that whole desire to be epistemologically free. And also being a feminist anthropologist with an inclination to reject anything Western and to promote an African and left scholarship and to generate knowledge that has utility within our social context. It became, it does those tensions. They were always around me. And then, and then as a pastor, I felt that I was obligated to preach a gospel from the text, which is the Bible, and we understand the nature of texts, texts which are just sensitive barometers with embedded meaning. And if you understand how religion is structured and practiced, it's dogmatic. There is no room for engage, there's no room for critical engagement. You can critique, you can critique it in church, you can critique it in the academic space, but here I am an academic. Who is supposed to critique and I'm critiquing in the academic space, but at the same time when I find myself at the pulpit trying to preach, I cannot do that. And so it got to a point where I almost resigned from work. I was resigned from the university just to focus and do church work because the tensions were too much. But then I got to a point where I thought that no, I think I've got, I have to, I thought that I was a cultural insider and I occupied that space, that ideological space where I could self-concentrate to empower other women. So those tensions, they continued with me and I eventually, around 2019, I carried out a study. Let me just share, I just want to, so that you understand where I'm coming from. I want to share a, I'm not going to share the entire, I'm not going to read from there. I'll draw your attention just to specific, okay. So what happens is that with the project, the decolonization project, I found it very interesting. It was easier for me to engage with other aspects of scholarship, but to decolonize a church, it became very tricky. Why do you decolonize? Because decolonization suggests a doing away, a doing away with, doing away with everything that is Western because, and you understand that the church is a product of colonialism, of colonialism. And also at the same time, that church with all its patriarchal practices has ensured that colonizing and yours. So decolonize the church will mean unlearning Christianity or doing away with. How do you do that? It, because for decolonization to happen, there has to be an alternative. Now, do we have an alternative? We don't. But if we, if we, if I have to copy, if I were to copy from, from Fanon, from Fanon who, who actually looks at it as a way of reimagining. That we reimagined the position of, we reimagined what is not just doing away, but reimagining and, and, and, and, and creating. Then we cannot begin to engage with a decolonization of the church, but to decolonize the church will mean for me, I tried, I targeted leadership, leadership of the churches. So you see, I looked at a study which was done in a study which was done in 2010. Here is the picture that you see here, which shows, sorry, which shows a background, a background of, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. It shows the background and the, the, the, the, the, the, the population of, of churches. You find that a majority of the churches is constituted by women. It's made by women. And then you begin to ask yourself the question, if a majority of men and women look at the gender gap in religion around the world, men and women are telling churches. You find that a majority of the churches is, is, is, is populated by women. And if we understand how churches are, most of the churches are democratic in principle, where elections take place, how is it that men end up as the leaders and women being a majority cannot, cannot put a woman in leadership. So in 2019, I carried out this study. This study here in the 20, 2019, and I did a sample of where I looked at church leadership because I found that to decolonize the church, you can only do that, you can successfully do that by interrogating the issue of church leadership. If you do not, if you do not, if you do not critique that space, it will be difficult to decolonize the church because majority of the African women, they find themselves in churches. African beauty had told us Africans are notoriously religious, and then you find the women, women mostly, you find them in church, submitting under leadership. So if you look at the study that I did in 2019, of the hundred churches that I surveyed in, in Southern Africa, 92% of the churches are led by men and are founded by men. Only 5%, you see, 5% are constitute a femininity that is churches that are found by women and 3% are jointly led by, by men and women. So then the problem is, how do you, how do we decolonize the church if we do not interrogate the issue of church leadership? And I tell you why. If a woman has, you know, church is their, church is, as we get to know it as religion, the structure and the guide people's behavior. Now, and the sanctioned those behaviors as well. If a woman goes to the pastor, who is most likely to be a man because we can see from the statistics, 92%. If a woman goes to church and complains about the issue of gender-based violence, abuse, whether psychological, emotional, and other forms that he may take, they are most likely to go to the man, to meet a man. A man who now look back straight into the text and tell the woman, no, you see the Bible says to be a good wife, all the wife must submit themselves under the authority of the man. And that, you know, you should be nice, treat your husband nicely and so on. So, I just want to take that up in the interest of time and colleagues. I just, I just, as I engage with this, I feel strongly, I have the paper and will be circulating soon. I feel that there are some things that have happened around that. I'm just, as I conclude, and there's a few examples around of that, from that 5%, some, we have some good stories. For instance, we have an example of, sorry, I was supposed to take that slide. I'll show you here, we have an example of an example of, if you look at this, an example of women who have broken through that glass ceiling of leadership. We had the appointment of the first female presiding bishop in the Methodist Church. The Methodist Church in South Africa, you see, for the first time, she became the first 100, among 100, so we had 99 men did it. And she is the first presiding bishop elected to be the presiding bishop in the Methodist Church in South Africa. So, what I'm saying is that, yeah, they are little, we have like some of us, I constitute part of that 5%, and there's much more that we can do. And so, for me, the way forward would be to look at how we can re-methodologize and see how to use our own examples, and embark on emancipation, learning, re-socialization, and ensure that we actually engage, we critique the issue of church leadership in Africa. So, I'll leave it at that, and I think I will take your questions. For me, decolonizing the church is not about on learning, doing away with Christianity. Thinking from far now, what we can do is to reimagine ourselves and use our context in a way that we focus on the experiences of women and see what can be done to empower them to promote and eradicate the issue of gender inequality. So, I leave you with this quote as I am. I just leave you with that quote. Thank you so much. Colleague, the woman needs, you can read it. And thank you. I know that I've gone above my 10 minutes, but thank you so much, Professor Leidy. Thanks so much, Vivian, if you could stop sharing screen. Thank you for that. I think there were lots of delicious provocative morsels that we can pick on, not least of which your notion of epistemologically free. So that's something hopefully we have some time to come back to. Thank you for taking us into the space of the church and the way you've defined church in terms of the scaffold of leadership. It would be interesting to, to interrogate whether just placing a female leader actually changes anything, or whether that's another kind of incarnation of patriarchy. And that question has kind of surfaced from the audience itself. So let's move now quickly to the next speaker who's Dr Shamra Rama. She's also a colleague in the School of Social Sciences. Recently she's taken on the mantle of leadership in her cluster and is leading several departments under her. She has been very prolific recently and if you read her bio she has published chapters and has worked extensively in her discipline of sociology. She's had too much of time. Her topic is, reflecting on the gender curriculum content, looking at decolonization, Africanization and transformation in South Africa. So we're looking forward to listening to you, Shamra. Over to you. Thank you very much for the opportunity to present on this very illustrious panel, and to engage with the idea of decolonization, Africanization and what does it mean in terms of the context in teaching in sociology, which is my discipline. And I focus particularly on the classroom and looking at first year sociology, which I used to teach, but it actually relates also to the undergraduate program, because the undergraduate program is what then launches the postgraduate research. So what kind of student do we produce at that level, and how do we engage with them. There were also some very interesting points that Professor Neyamjo made which I will touch on as I think it really blends into the kinds of things we're looking at. Globally, the curriculum content of the undergraduate sociology modules are typically predetermined by the text or the textbooks that we select for that particular class. Most of our textbooks, particularly if you are teaching in Africa and in South Africa are developed and published in the global north, particularly in the USA. That will tell you about the examples, the hegemonic bias, the philosophical bias, the methodological bias that exists, but textbooks are the key pedagogical tools that we use. And I talk about a bit about this new wave that we're seeing in terms of the decolonial Africanization, indigenization, where there is this idea to then revise international textbooks. For me, this is a very contested and restricted space because you are restricted to maintaining the structure and the content of this international global north textbook. In some cases, the manner in which the publishers engage with you about how to transform it to meet to a South African and African audience is problematic because the suggestion is, well, just substitute some of our examples for African or South African examples. That does not speak to the issues of the hegemony and the biases. What we then end up doing is, and if we want to locate this into some of the decolonial literature, Gramsci talks about encyclopedic knowledge. That's what we then start to produce when we're teaching sociology to our students. We don't become cognizant of what am I teaching. How does this make sense to the student? All I'm thinking about is I have to get through this content I've got a next class to do and the pressures that are existing on us. Paulo Freer talks about the idea that we expound on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. Sociology is extremely theoretical abstract and we lose students after the second year. So we have a high number of first years and second years by the third and postgraduate. We have really frightened them away. They look at this theory and think how am I to deal with this monster. And in the push, especially from the fees must fall and roads must fall context about how do we transform our teaching our pedagogical practices, our curriculum and our content. Do we throw everything out, which is sometimes the more popular rhetorical or populist view in the South African society. But can a sense tells us after a century city is not a black version of your century city, because if we follow that line, we then are reproducing and perpetuating this discrimination and biases of minority groups are vulnerable and actress populations because we want to then replace one dominant view with another dominant view. So it brings in this tropes of power dominance and struggles by just replacing the one with the other. But it also challenges us if we ought to look at what Prof talked about in the first speech, a convivial scholarship. How do we engage with that. How do we readjust our thinking challenge our own expressions in the classroom. Paulo Freire also talks about the poor lived in a culture of silence dominated by the ideas and the values of others. And that is important when you look at who is it that is sitting in my classroom. Who is it that I am speaking to who is it that I am sharing this knowledge with. And how do I locate myself. Am I positioning myself as the knower. And they are somebody who doesn't know or do I recognize in them their lived experiences. So the sociology texts that we have do not adequately reflect the lived experiences or to draw from see right modes private troubles and public issues of the young people who are our audience in the teaching. In particular in my context, female black and African students living in South Africa and Africa. And who are these students at UK ZN between 80 to 85 85 to 90% of our students come from Quinta one and two schools. These are no feet fee paying schools, meaning that these young people live already in resource poor settings, experiencing economic deprivation forms of marginalization and exclusion, although demographic African population in South Africa is the majority. But the experiences are that we need to engage with. In my classroom, most of the students are female. So again, the textbook does not reflect who it is that I'm teaching to. So does what I teach and how I teach resonate with the students and engage them with analyzing the social problems change and phenomena they have to discuss. Our concern then is the exercise that I gave them the students around how do they engage with see right modes as well. And in particular the students then wrote an essay where they had to reflect on their personal experiences. And in looking at the essay I didn't anticipate the kinds of responses that student gave you gave us, they reflect their lived realities in ways that we didn't I didn't anticipate. So for example, students I didn't ask them to write about this, but they wrote very deeply personal stories that told me that they this is their lived experience. For example, one says, my personal problem is abuse. I am physically and emotionally abused by my boyfriend he forces me to have sex with him without using a condom. This is from a first year student who's probably 18, 19 years old. All I didn't ask for these kinds of stories, but they chose to talk these very personal stories. And when I look at Paulo Freya's work, how do I contextualize the fact that students have decided to really share with me very deeply and personal stories for an essay assignment. Paulo Freya talks about generative themes, things that are really important to people wanting to change. In looking at the essay that I had set students, I then started to wonder, well, how do I understand this particular responses from the students. Do I then just not talk about this do I change the essay. Bell Hoops's work says that the narrative of our experiences in the classroom discussions eliminates the ways and possibilities we can function as knowing. And Professor Nhamjo talked about including the voices of students that the professor does not always have the insight in the classroom. And about monopolizing that insight, but rather how through our shared experiences, we can gauge engage with this hooks also talks about stories as being healing. So when I looked at this particular essay assessment that I had set for the students, and asked them to look at concepts and their own experiences and engage with that by bringing in their stories. Perhaps it was a way for them to heal to engage with me and emotional and bringing in stories also requires emotional intelligence to telling the story that heightens our awareness and perception of who our students are. What are we teaching them and sometimes when we use the examples in our teaching, we do them with such lack of passion. Yet these are the lived realities of our students. So rather than reflecting on some of the examples in my class experience I try to engage with the students. So many of our students then are living these realities that we are theorizing about intersectionality patriarchy power relations, unequal exclusion and violence in our society. And for me the classroom then becomes a space where I bring in the theory and we then engage with our own experiences. So it's not just about decolonizing and Africanizing before we can even get to that we have to start humanizing our pedagogy. This for me is not a complete process. Each time I've got to rework and rethink. I'm going to stop there. Thank you very much. Sorry if I went over my time. Thank you so much. Sharma, thank you for that. I think you ended on the perfect powerful note that loops us back to a shield's talk on talking about humanizing whatever it is that we're doing and you're talking about humanizing in the space of higher education and space between the lines of our textbooks. Thank you so much for that presentation. We move now to the last speaker who's Dr. Amina Yakin. She's a reader in Urdu and postcolonial studies at SOAS. She's extensively published as you would see from her bio. Most importantly she's chair of the Decolonizing Working Group director of the SOAS Festival of Ideas, chair of the Center for the Study of Pakistan and Program, co-convener for the BA English program. Thank you so much. Over to you, Amina. Thank you. Thank you very much, Professor Naidu, and greetings to all my fellow panelists and to all the people who are here. It's always been a dream to connect with colleagues in South Africa. So this is, I wish we could have done it in person, but this is the next best thing. I've learned so much from this panel and I already have the pressure of being the last speaker and trying to do this in 10 minutes. So I'm going to make some huge moves in my paper. So please forgive me. It comes out of a piece that I wrote on Islamic feminism in a time of Islamophobia. That is about a close reading of Leila Abu-Leila's Minaret and LF Shafiq's 40 Rules of Love. I'm not going to go through those close readings, but what I'm going to do is map some ideas and thoughts in relation to this kind of context of Islamic feminism in a time of Islamophobia and where my work is going. So the question of feminism has been central to my work for the last 20 years and I have engaged with a variety of political philosophies and worked across languages and cultures to think through the concept of agency and how it has been understood by feminist scholars from Gayatri Spivak to Amina Wadud. As a post-colonialist, I am committed to the question of social justice and the question of rights and interested in how the woman question connects to global protest movements from India to South Africa and its disconnect with women's everyday lives. Working across cultures from Africa to Asia and civilizational narratives has impressed upon me the need for a methodology that takes into consideration a variety of moral and ethical contexts to formulate a dialogic feminist model that is informed by ideas of coexistence and mutual trust and the question of agency. What kind of world might we find this model in? There was much discussion about planetarity in yesterday's keynote conversation with Ashil and I would argue that planetarity requires from us a model of being good that has so far eluded us in democratic and liberal societies. So I see the life futures of feminism in coexistence with post-colonial studies and decolonial thought as an activist and transformative project that disrupts normative political cultures. Let me talk about this a bit more in relation to my work and how it has come to take shape in my study of Muslim representation. And I'm just going to sort of very briefly touch on this in relation to media coverage and the co-authored book Framing Muslims. Media coverage of Muslim issues in the 20th century, as Edward Zayed noted, was dominated by major disputes such as the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, Anthony Thomas' controversial 1980 docus drama Death of a Princess and the Rushdie affair of 1989. In the 21st century we continue to see issue-led stories focusing on a narrow and repeated series of supposed Muslim misdemeanors. When it comes to such coverage, the kind of global and transnational loyalties represented by the Muslim ummah come to form the emotive power driving suspicion of multiculturalism at home and neocolonial adventures abroad. Now the long, long duree of framing means that the task of politicians in bringing the press on board, at least partially, for their projects is already half done for them. So Boris Johnson can make Islamophobic comments about Muslim women as letterboxes and not be accountable for it because that is already normalised in the media sphere. More recently we see this in the interview on Women's Hour BBC Radio 4 with Zahra Mohamed, the first female representative of the Muslim Council of Britain and the interview with Emma Barnett and how it's been protested against as a hostile interview. And today I was reading there's a response in the Jewish Chronicle to this sort of discussion unfolding about the Muslim Council of Britain, which by no means is an easy space in terms of its representation of a community that is diverse. But it's already kind of spiralling into lots of different directions from Islamophobia to anti-Semitism. And we really don't have the time to talk about technoscapes here at the upper the right, but that's something I'd be happy to pick up in the Q&A if we have time. So the thing I want to pick up is the image of veiled Muslim women as an oppressed minority that is a well-loved staple of the right-wing press and a contemporary manifestation of old orientalist images in respect to Islam and Christ to save the Muslim woman. And this is not to deny that Islamic regimes in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia have often forced women into more circumscribed roles and punished deviation from accepted societal norms with violence and death. Instead it is to redirect our attention towards the imagery used in such calls and the cultural assumptions of safe superiority often deep-rooted and tenacious they draw on. In Framing Muslims we looked at, I looked at the example of Muslim lifestyle dolls as the affirmation of a visual stereotype. And this is my kind of prop as it were, the lifestyle doll. As the affirmation of a visual stereotype emphasizing the need for recognition of faith-based identities in secular nations, we explored the tension between a more conventional globalized cosmopolitan marketing phenomenon and its modern Islamic equivalent in the branding of lifestyle dolls for young children across the world as well as the performativity of identities through roleplay and mimicry. What we were interested to point out in our analysis borrowing from Bakhtin and Parba was the inherent dialogicality in the way such constructions are formed and the two prophet identities that are mutually shaping. And from framing Muslims to contesting Islamophobia is then a journey through arts and culture ranging from youth activism, new media, superheroes, visual art and the common strand that is a part of this is the veil. And as I've argued traditionally ethnographies and orientalist narratives have played a major part in translating the veil in Muslim women of the West. And recently creative writing by Muslim women in particular captures the attention for its seemingly authentic confessional style. So it's a kind of anthropological, you know, insight into lifting the veil on women's subjugation. And from the polemical feminist position of a well known Egyptian writer such as Naval al-Saddabi to the psychological feminine writing of the British Sudanese writer Leila Abulayla. We can see varied interpretations grappling with specific historic moments in Muslim women's identification with pious forms of dress. Now what I'm going to I have very, very little time so I'm really going to jump. And what I do is look, engage with how the naturalized view of women's oppression is looked at by looking at the specificity of historical and regional contexts in Islamic societies and an alternative way of reading the veil. And you'll be some of you will be familiar with the work of Sabah Mahmood and the politics of piety, which is an ethnographic study of the mosque movement, which is a woman's revivalist Islamic grassroots dava piety movement and provides an insight into the debate that has taken place amongst its members over how female modesty should be lived and the necessity of wearing the veil to prove one's virtues are very much kind of about how you own shame. Emphasizing the point about the performativity of the veil as a marker of piety and the inner transformation of the soul, she offers a reading that explains how within the movement Sharia is absorbed as a moral and ethical duty. Now this is also something that Islamic feminists pick up on in a different way by engaging with Quranic concepts of Khilafah, trusty ship and tawhid oneness of God. And one of the surahs in the Quran that is very troubling is Surah Al Nisa, which is about women and is often read as providing proof of the elevation of men over women. And this is the one that Islamic feminists have kind of reinterpreted and reengaged and looked at the Quranic term Kavvamuna Allah from the Surah which has been interpreted in a variety of ways to support established gender hierarchies. And this is caused disagreement so the feminist rendition by Amna would do suggests that it's a meaning of complementarity rather than separate gender differences or identities of two genders and so it allows a correlation instead of hierarchy. So in a global environment in which the Burqa and female veiling continue to be framed as one of the main sources of intercultural controversy today, when you get a novel such as the 40 Rules of Love by Elif Shafak, the Turkish writer, global writer, appears to offer an alternative with its representation of the heterodox tradition of a softer Sufi Islam, and the popularity of this brand of Islam among liberal audiences is evident from the novel's bestselling status. At the other end of the spectrum the psychologically dense story of minaret reinforces a conservative view of Islam that carries a certain appeal, both to a niche Muslim readership who want to see an account of the spiritual life in print, and for totally different reasons to a hostile Islamophobic readership looking for more examples of women's oppression in Islam. The clash of perspectives between Abu Leila and Shafak is to be found in the respective fates of their representative heroines delivered through the popular genres of romance and historical fiction for global English readership. While they both contest Islamophobia as they map efforts towards female agency through Islamic models, they also reiterate certain myths about Islam from heterodox mysticism to pious renewal through the veil. So in conclusion, and again you know I'm making some jumps here, in conclusion what I want to say is women's mobilities underline how transnational women's performativity and labour contribute to transformative and critical narratives about the veil. And they don't ask for a reiteration of the Hegelian dialectic and they demand something beyond empathy and ethical and emotional thinking of the body and the self, disrupting normative western understandings of the secular and the sacred. So perhaps hinting a little bit towards the polyvocality that was referenced at the start by Professor Naidu. I'll just end there and I'm sorry there've been a lot of jumps in here but I'm just very conscious of time so I'll stop there. Thank you so much. I want to say catch your breath because I appreciate how much you compressed into there those few minutes and we have, we would have had two minutes but we've been donated 10 more minutes so we have about 12 minutes for questions. But rather than me reading what most of you would have read already I want to just formally thank Amina for a presentation allowed to catch a breath and scan through to see their questions that may come up for her. So I want to invite you to just look through the questions rather than me reading it and, and let me know if there's anything that you would like to answer even if you've typed in an answer, but I want to go to one question which, even though it's been answered. I want to invite Vivian to take this question because it's from a student and we prefaced this entire symposium by saying that it wasn't just, you know, academic speaking to academics, but that we wanted to hear and speak to students. Vivian, you have read the question but just to draw your attention again, while the rest of you look through other questions that you might want to, to address live the question regarding African spirituality which was not mentioned, and the claim that I like provocative questions so the question is asking, you know, why have you not considered African spirituality in your arguments are we thinking that it's just a vacuum that there was no God for the for African people and consideration that this might be highly misleading so if you could respond but a little sort of succinctly so that we could maybe take a few more questions. Thank you so much. I would just like the participants to those who post questions to actually go to the Q&A session and read some of the responses because I may not have the time to answer on and if you have further questions, you can take my email address and write to me. Because of the time I could not actually explain everything I could not even explain the entire paper in 10 minutes, but African Africans are very spiritual and very religious that is well established. But this particular presentation, it's about the truth because spirituality is very broad. Africans have an understanding, generally speaking, Africans have an understanding of God, which is in all the different languages they have, they understand that there is a supreme being, they are spiritual in that way, but how they approach the supreme being is what makes it different from the colonial, from the kind of religion that was introduced to colonialism, which we practiced through the churches. So I will have to just try and explain this in the context of the church. I cannot, Africans are spiritual, but we are looking at decoloniality in the context of the church because we all understand that the church has been, the church is a very enduring colonial tool, although as academics we are engaging in other aspects of colonialism and how to decolonize certain aspects of our everyday experiences in contemporary Africa. We have still not been able to decolonize that space, that church. So spirituality, I don't know who raised the question, but African Africans are spiritual, but to understand the context we have to look at the churches. The spirituality within the churches, church as we know it today, is the colonial project. So I want you to understand the presentation in line in light of the church. Thank you so much, Professor Niding. Thank you, Vivian. There was a question earlier, there are quite a few, so I'm just being picky and picking on a few here. Thank you to Rose regarding Afro matriarchy. Rose, do you want to quickly comment on that and your experience in the context of your empirical study. Yes, thank you, Professor Naidu. Unfortunately, there are still some women who deny that harassment exists. Remember, women are not a homogeneous group. So we can't force them or pull them to share the same view as we share, but we only hope that they will share the same view and share the struggle with other women. Our only request for now is for those who have been, who have queries with this or who faced this type of harassment to seek legal requests, because remember the policies that exist at different institutions do not only cater for one type of gender, they cater for the males as well as the females. So those who are, we have queries, if to seek legal requests, we can't really expect women to share one world view, unfortunately. Thank you. Thanks for that Rose. Shamla Lubna Amina scanning through is there any question that you would like to answer live Shamla and Lubna. One of us since she in the order that they presented is there anything that you'd like to, if not maybe a minute to to round up your thoughts anything that you want to add in the context of the other speakers presentations and the questions raised. There weren't any specific questions addressed to me, but I just want to maybe reflect on some of the things that the other panelists have said which linked to some of the thoughts that I raised that, you know, decolonization is is a long term project and how we decolonize various spaces be it a gender curriculum or a church space or you know ideas around Islamic feminism and so on. And in fact what I was talking about relating to orientalist modes of knowledge production. I mean, these are all long term processes and we have to find different methodologies that will enable us to actually achieve the best version of the knowledge that we want. And to use the term humanism that Dr. I'm also used that we need to humanize. We need to know our spaces and decolonizing has to be bringing us back to be human. And in the African context, you know, we revisiting Ubuntu. So I'll leave it there. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Thank you, Dr. Nadvi. Dr. Rama, a last minute for any sort of final words that you want to share. Thank you very much. I think some of the participants asked for my email address, so I have put that up. I'm more than welcome any engagement around this and just to say that in terms of sociology for the first time this week we having the International Sociological Association Forum. And for the first time we inaugurated the SESH thematic group, which will then move on to become a research group called Teaching Sociology. So when Professor Niamja was talking about, you know, the global south global north debate, for us this was exciting because it was sociologists from the global north and global south, we hoping for a lot more people to participate because this was just on your inaugural session. But for the first time we actually engaging with what we're teaching, how do we humanize this process because it does not only impact on what we're teaching, it's also the research. And then how do people then take that into their communities? We've had experiences of some global north colleagues talking about, you know, they went to conferences on decolonization and were told to remove all the white people from their slides and possible new textbooks that they're going to be looking at. So, you know, these kinds of very distorted understandings of what decolonization means and almost negating people from history when like Professor Niamja said, it's about engaging, regardless of whether you're doing your research and recognizing the humanity in the others and in yourself. Thank you. And I'm more than happy to respond to email queries. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Rahma. I mean, Dr. Jackie, maybe the last word to you. I don't know if you've spotted any questions but I was fascinated by this persistent epistemic violence and the discourses around the veil, even when there's so much about the sort of emancipatory power where women choose to avail. I don't know if you want to speak a little bit more about that or pick up on anything else that you want to address in the last minute or two. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Naidu. That's a good question. I think the epistemic violence of the veil, sadly, continues and it's something that, you know, after I... we published Framing Muslims, the editor wanted me to pursue a project on the veil, to pursue a book on the veil and I said, look, I don't want to write on the veil because I think I want to move beyond that conversation. I don't have much new stuff to say that hasn't been said already but I, you know, the kind of reactions and the recognitions that continue to be engendered through it and in terms of the normalization in society that it remains in European society a kind of fetish, I think. And the inclusivity question around, for example, visible Muslim identity becomes very much around how the veil is structured in that performativity of identity as well. So I think, you know, there's the veil that Fanon talks about in relation to Algeria. There's the veil that is practiced in the mosques in Cairo that Sabah Mahmoud talks about and then there is the veil that has been the subject of disagreement over citizenship and belonging in Europe in terms, you know, from over discussions of Laicite in France and the fact that you cannot, you know, you are not being part of a model of citizenship that is required in modern day democracy. So it seems to me that we just, you know, it all kind of keeps coming back around that sort of woman, a passive identification and doesn't allow us to move beyond much more thoughts and ideas. I mean, I thought there were so many intersectionalities and contexts here. And with regards to Islamic feminism, I want to use feminism and, you know, in relation to the idea of decolonization, I'm very conscious that there is not one particular idea of feminism and that so many people here are providing the labor, you know, in pedagogy, in sort of resistance in thinking through, you know, the church, the spiritual spaces, non-spiritual spaces, body shaming and just general not being able to talk about the trauma that is part of the process of women's lives here that have been, and I think there's a lot that we can gain from our transnational connections and conversations. And I really hope that this is the beginning of something much, much bigger, because I've learned really quite a lot from these sessions and thoughts and ideas that I will continue to reflect on. So I hope that sort of answers your question. Actually, yes, thank you. And the word fetish, I think sums it up and fixation on what discourse popular and otherwise chooses to fixate on. We have to end here because we have encroached and eroded into the keynotes, but it's a beautiful, thank you so much to all the speakers, the panelists. I think we can come back to Vivian because she opened with a response to one of the questions. Thank you everybody but this is a beautiful seamless dovetail into the keynote. And we really, we know that you're going to want to remain here because they will pick up a lot of the provocative sort of questions that were raised here or surfaced and congealed here. So I want to lead you to the keynote conversationalist, Irina and Desiree, they're both in gender studies, Irina is in gender in SOAS, the reader there, and Desiree Lewis is from University of Western Cape, and who better to lead us and continue this discussion and conversation around decolonization and feminism resistances. Resistance came up a lot in all the talks, and hopefully some of those can be peeled back in this conversation as well. So thank you so much to all the speakers. I hand over now to Irina. Thank you. Thank you so much Mahesh and absolutely I hope folks are staying because we are going to have what I imagine will be a very, very exciting conversation largely because we are going to be listening to somebody I consider to be one of the most erudite preeminent feminist scholars whose work I have immensely benefited from when I was a student as and also as I continue to teach in my current job. So Professor Desiree Lewis is in the Women and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape. She has published and taught on the subject of black and postcolonial feminist knowledge making for roughly three decades. Some of her much more recent work include neoliberalism and feminism in the South African Academy, epistemic ruptures in South African standpoint, knowledge making, academic feminism, and the fissmas for movement and governmentality and South Africa's edifice of gender and sexual rights. Lewis' recent work on food as material culture seeks to expand the radical possibilities of feminist knowledge making through postcolonial critiques of the anthropocene. Currently the lead PI that is a key investigator of a super institutional program funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation titled critical food studies, humanities approaches to food and food systems. As was suggested, this is an in conversation keynote so Desiree and I are going to be dialoguing around three major questions and then we are definitely going to be opening up for an engagement with the Q&A just as was done in the previous panel. Desiree, welcome, how are you doing? Let's start there. I'm fine, it's good to see you even though virtually. So yesterday I was part of a conversation or a panel on decolonizing and Africanizing knowledge and one of the things that struck me about that conversation was the kind of erasure, if you will, or around the trajectory of the historiography if you want to think of it like that of decolonizing knowledge and where feminism, so African feminist scholars sit in this conversation often when we talk about the big names that often male names somehow we don't feature in this conversation so take us through, if you will, a mapping of where African feminist or black feminist fit in this conversation. Yeah as you say the names that are recognized, the names that are publicized, the names that are cited, the names that pop up when P2 Google searches are the names of male authors, these are the founding father figures in decolonial knowledge making. And paradoxically I think it's very paradoxical that it's the gendered constructs that we know that we have become so ubiquitous, that structure how we think about the world and ourselves, these are the constructs that are actually legacies of colonial knowledge making and colonial categorization. So the failure to acknowledge gender and what Maria Lugones calls the coloniality of gender is a glaring omission in any effort to counter colonial epistemology. And yeah feminism is peripheral in popularized understandings of decolonizing knowledge. African feminist knowledge making is especially marginalized. African feminists have been seen as those whose contributions are practical, concrete and not theoretical, philosophical, epistemological, and of relevance to humanity as a whole. And I think this is connected to common sensical understandings of knowledge, including decolonial knowledge. Colonial categories curate very rigidly knowledge that is deemed to be universally valuable, even among many who seek to challenge colonialism. We find the persistence of binaries like practice versus theorizing embodied action versus cognitive thought, narration or expression versus interpretation. And these are the binaries that regulate what we understand as knowledge that really matters. And of course this categorization disparages very rich traditions, including pre-colonial ones of African women's archer, their leadership dating back several centuries, or more recently their agencies in boycotts and protests or their life narratives, autobiographies and storytelling. Yet African women have always created and disseminated epistemologies for guiding the counter-colonial evolution of societies believed to have no histories. African feminists such as Iphiyama de Yume and Oya Ronka Oya Rumi have tried to excavate this rich legacy and to signal its emancipatory potential for guiding post-colonial futures. They show how the rigid-gendered struggle of gendered categories through which we think about ourselves have been historically shaped. And that drawing on different legacies is vital to reimagining socially just, peaceful and non-exploitative worlds and value systems. I think it's certainly true that the E is a great deal of diversity and unevenness in the politics and thought that's redefined as African feminism. But despite this we can see African feminist knowledge is offering a standpoint. It speaks back kind of seeing the network of colonialism, patriarchy and neoliberal capitalism from below, which is something that's also shared in transnational, by transnational feminism. And I think it's important that this breadth in standpoint was evident in women's, African women's very early involvement in nationalism. These were entangled struggles. They were rooted in a standpoint knowledge of how intricately layers of power work. We really do fail to do justice to struggles to shift power when we hierarchize different forms of the justice or see them as layers requiring intervention one at a time. This is evident in the conclusions of Western-centric feminist assessments of African women in nationalism. African women were seen as not being feminists because they resisted colonialism alongside men and focused on class-to-racialized struggles, because they were seen to not articulate gendered struggles clearly. The term intersectionality has of course become de rigueur in many celebrations of decoloniality. But for centuries, radical women leaders, activists and thinkers who never used the term negotiated complex integrals of power and violence. So I think just by way of positioning African feminism, that's the way I do it. One of the pieces that you wrote that I keep on returning to again and again was the one on African gender research and post-coloniality. What challenges did you raise with that particular article and if you look back now, 10 or so years later, even more, what challenges do we still continue to confront or do you perceive at this current moment? I think when I was and I remain interested in and this came up in the discussion in the panel, the abiding decolonizing impulse to dismantle hegemonic knowledge. Some may feel and find this very much of my impatient students who want decolonial knowledge now. For me, the idea of decolonizing knowledge as an ongoing project is essential. I think to kind of imagine that there's going to be some miraculous moment beyond that. Yeah, it's become very troubling. So some feel that this emphasis on dismantling locks us into deconstruction without construction. That there should be a stronger focus on producing new knowledge. But this belief does simplify the controlling impact of dominant knowledge systems. So the influential decolonial thought of Edward Said, Francois and Vibre would immediately painstakingly excavates colonial tropes, baritones, myths and icons as a necessary and crucial process of discursive space clearing. And this discursive space clearing is essential. And in the publication that you referred to our focus on African feminist critiques of the colonial archive. And one argument was that the seemingly progressive ways of writing African women into history are in fact profoundly oppressive. African women were made hyper visible in this work only as exploited and victimized pawns in stories about others. And my argument was influenced by Charlie Romante's highly influential critique of the flood of Western Central writing about third world women in under Western eyes. And the argument is that what is colonial about certain knowledge making is not that it is overly hostile and violent or writes third world women out. On the contrary, it makes them hyper visible, but entrenched stereotypes about marginalized groups embedded in static cultures, traditional families and other worlds. In other words, it makes them hyper visible as ciphers and invisible as human subjects. And yeah, this paradox definitely persists in the global imaginary today. An anthropological gaze perpetuates the colonial script that these subjects can be imagined only as victims as those who must be saved as those locked into a defunct and valueless pastures. African feminism displaces these myths and the levels they operated at multiple levels. So, for example, in pursuing the deconstructive impulse of decolonizing Patricia McFadden unpacks the enduring impact of what she calls all the European appropriation of practices of studying Africa. And she registers how early colonial ethnography set in place a formula for the ongoing representation of African women in research in policymaking and even activism, often among Africans. Which, you know, gets back to my point about the absolutely important need to excavate and unravel in order to do undo the damage that is not only up there, but is also in the air. And of course, the policy of the epistemic violence here is not a result of the political motivations of writers or the advocates of this discourse, but a consequence of how entrenched the anthropological apparatus has been and continues to be. So yeah, McFadden's arguments made several years ago still apply. Currently, colonial stereotypes about women, African women being trapped by tradition, requiring the liberation promised by rights discourses and colonial modernity, being supplicants in relation to northern aid and rescue narratives flood our conceptual world. They are evident in digital media, newspaper reports, seemingly progressive popular culture and rights discourses and advocacy. And they are promoted with particular force in the visual texts that have now become such important conduits of dominant discourses. It's actually incredible how persistent the visual image of voiceless, passive, ravaged and burdened African woman, a victim of disease, poverty and tradition continues to be. It is also incredible how resilient the view is of Africa as being in particular need of rescue and salvation. Yeah, connected African feminist response to the colonial archive is the critique of development discourse and practice. Radical African women have condemned the brutal duplicity of development and modernization discourses for decades. They have done so as activists, as intellectuals in and outside the academy, and as working women who directly experienced the exploitative violence of developments underbelly. Development and modernization discourses try to drag on multiple subordinate groups into the colonial economy. Contrary to their claims to uplift such groups, they erode all vestiges of the indigenous or hardwired agency of subordinate groups. For example, through prescriptions about how to produce and manage food, or how to build peace and security, or how to use and manage land and even about how to organize themselves. Through globalized instruments and technologies that include the United Nations, the World Bank, and also often through Northern aid and rights advocacy, development and modernization are touted as panaceas with the suffering of the colonized and formerly colonized. And I think it's really important that development practice is maintained discursively and coercively in the present day. And increasingly African solutions have come to be associated with specialized rational and scientific knowledge with the wisdom of experts and consultants, the brittle and technocratic technologies of audits, auditing and top down measurement that we see today. And more and more local, indigenous, and often women-centered practice and knowledge come to be coded as inefficient, atavistic, and regressive. Yeah, I think it's interesting that the classic development paradigm from the 50s to the 70s has morphed into something more seductive into sort of more neoliberal and populistic technologies. But the development paradigm persists, even though it's framing where become more cautious and less obviously prescriptive. It's infiltrated seemingly African-centered activism in thought, much of which now relays the policies, goals, strategies, and policies. And yeah, policies prescribed by the North, much of the work of governments, policymakers, policy researchers, and academics routinely involve subjecting the fate of the colonized to scrutiny, measurement and intervention and often at the face of the African woman is the face of the colonized with a view to their transformation into efficient and disciplined contributors to the global economy. Yeah, development discourse has expanded into a terrifying arsenal, often normalized among and within ostensibly progressive organizations of prescriptions, dogmas, networks, field expertise and knowledge specialization of measuring where African women are at according to externally defined goals that must be made of defining and monitoring the progress they must make. Discussive tools for regulating African women's upliftment epitomizes the current imperial knowledge making and surveillance apparatus. Basically, this is an internationally ratified form of bullying. Thank you very much, Desiree. You know, some of your earlier points remind me of EverJoyce. EverJoyce wins 2004 piece on not very poor, powerless or pregnant, you know, and you will not believe the number of times I speak somewhere and people say, but what about the real African woman, which makes me wonder often what am I, if not a real African woman. But moving along, you know, from my perch here in London, some of the key debates that are circulating within feminist circles but also that are concerning to feminist and gender studies centers. You know, at this anti, you know, extreme right conversations around gender ideology, you know, the sort of erasures that are accompanying, you know, a lot of the scholarship, the movement building work that has led us to a place where certain things are no longer struggles that we think about. I think it's really that we think about the place, the public private divide, you know, the place of women in public spaces, ETC, from where you're seated. What do you see as some of the continuing contemporary challenges that feminist scholars, intellectuals and movement builders need to continue to grapple with in a much more concerted way. I would flag neoliberalism, which is now fully aligned with neo imperialism and which works in tandem with developmentalism but I think it's worth discussing separately. And the devastating impact of structural adjustment is long being central to African feminist intersectional analysis. This has been shown, the structural adjustment offers to deliver African countries from ruin, but most definitely does not do so. Feminists have exposed the method structural adjustment leads to development at growth. But what seems to me important is that neoliberal neoliberalism's role as a subject constituting process hasn't extended as far as it could. So neoliberalism is both an economic system with exploitative and draining effects on third world countries and the system of government mentality. It's reached globally has led specialist knowledge to be honest to the imperatives of the market. And this is a profoundly affected the status and role of higher education. The universities has been to undertake research and to teach priorities that have led them open to charters of elitism. With emphasis on a third mission in neoliberal planning, university teaching and research have been yoked to the academy's direct engagement with economic growth activities. And really are two implications of this instrumentalizing of knowledge and implications that have been flagged within African feminist thought and practice. One is that knowledge capital comes to serve the centers of global capitalism directly or indirectly. For example, relations around academic research come to mirror those associated with the extraction and processing of material commodity such as food. So the concentration of expertise, research specialization and resources in the north coexist with and feeds off the data gathering in the south. Knowledge expertise, especially as this concerns multiple subordinated subjects like African women comes to follow a colonial logic. Put simply, and as I mean I'm a man so be a tamale among others have shown the knowledge of subordinate groups is plundered and expertise and authority is consolidated in the north. And it's important stress that this exercise of colonial authority has a behind face. In fact, it is presented as a progressive or decolonizing act, since the argument is that knowledge about other groups is disrupting the center. And this leads to a connected point, which is that working towards knowledge inclusion is often seen as the solution to global knowledge in balances. As well the main problem here is that everyone should have equal access to the center. Yet all centers in so far as these exist are exclusionary and authoritarian. The strategies of gatekeeping, peer reviewing accreditation and publishing are never neutral. As African feminists have been insisting for years, when they seek to establish independent networks, journals and publishing ventures within Africa centers work on certainly to keep certain kinds of ideas and knowledges and viewpoints out. They also work to reinforce structures, mechanisms and positions of power at the center. So in our efforts to decolonize knowledge, we cannot afford to ignore the way in which the decolonial knowledge making machine can itself be instrumentalized. And I think a related point is to note that and I think this might have come up in previous discussions neoliberalism drives a particularly intensity in field specialization and competitiveness. In our neoliberal universities, academics are held captive by the neoliberal principle, which is naturalized as a norm, that to consolidate a field to claim expert parties in such a field to go on a funding point rather demonstrable impact in the field is a marker of excellence. This grounds for survival in a marketplace of knowledge we're making where you simply have to prove you're the expert according to the standards of the center. Progressive commentators on the neoliberal knowledge economy have shown how easily radical sites of knowledge production can become commodified bodies of theorizing and research into the market of the knowledge industry as objects of consumption, rather than as conduits in activism. So shadow behind T notes that the making of a space for radical knowledge, for example, feminism African feminism is often fully in line with the neoliberal project of multiculturalism. This incorporation leads intact the structures relationships and assumptions of radical knowledge contexts. It also shuts down any questions about these structures, since they seem to actually welcome the idea of a truly democratic knowledge comments. Yeah, I think I'll pause there for you. Do you have any comments to offer in relation to knowledge making that sits outside of institutions outside of the university. As well as again asking the question now do we really take seriously it's not so much a recommendation or prescription but it's searching back to what I spoke about at the start how do we really take seriously the ontologies and epistemologies produced outside of institutions, such as universities or research sites. I remarked on these as I said the start and I think it's important to stress their particular relevance in the context of ecological collapse that is the legacy of extractivist colonialism and capitalism. The anthropocentric plundering of our environment, alongside the brutal exploitation of colonized groups is rooted in anthropocentric knowledge systems that perceive nature and the non human only as resources for privileged groups. This colonization of the environment has worked alongside the colonization of certain human bodies and gives new meaning to what we understand by colonial practice and epistemic violence. In the academic scrambles who lay claim to new radical ways of knowing in the north, a new industry, the tradition of post humanism sets out to critique this anthropocentrism. And I'm referring you to things like Donna Haraway, Rosie Bradotti and Jane Bench and my many others. These are the feminists and the emphasis on matter as a gentle repudiates the anthropocentric belief that matters in her inert and exists only to be instrumentalized by humans. Yet, the amounts of knowing are incredibly neglectful of the ontologies and epistemologies that have long guided preclural and indigenous relations to nature and the non human explicitly or implicitly disparaged as primitive animism indigenous knowledges, which are often associated with women's engagement with nature, have been sidelined in the specialized and elitist work of post humanistic intellectuals in the north. The feminist that I have discovered recently, Joanna Sandberg, confronts this in reflecting on her own blind spots as a post colonial feminist from South America, and she asks, why did I not seek out scholarship rooted in non dualistic epistemic traditions. Indigenous authors in America, for instance, outline complex knowledge systems where in plants, animals and spurts are understood as beings who participate in the everyday practices that bring walls into being. These epistemic traditions are not organized in and through dualist ontologies of nature culture. She's basically saying that centuries before the recent growth of traditions of post humanism, African women's, while indigenous women's knowledge making, as well as their work and spiritual practice repudiated anthropocentrism of our current work. Sylvia Tamali recently produced a book on decolonization and African Afro feminism. Also acknowledges this she talks about Africa's eco centric world view, which was and she says, rather obtusely acknowledged by the world when Canadian feminist one Gary Matai was aborted the Nobel Peace Prize for a contribution to sustainable development. And she goes on to talk about the epistemic relationship between indigenous people and nature, which is manifested through the spirituality, ancestral myths, rituals, fables and so on. She goes on to say that these complex, complex sets of traditional belief govern the conduct of indigenous communities. Indeed, they constituted self enforcing institutions that did not require state to regulate compel submission. So Tamali identifies these early eco feminist traditions. And I think there are two other African feminist that I would like to mention who are deepening this and both are combining practice as farmers with knowledge production. And I think what is important about the work is the way in which they just towards what I suppose one could see as a level in the intersectional decolonizing of knowledge. As they show, and as generations of African women before them have shown, expansive freedoms can be imagined by discrediting hierarchical differences among human subjects, and also through knowledges that offer liberating ways of seeing and being in relation to the earth. Thank you very much for that, Desiree. A final one from me, which is the omnipresence of women as the subject of African feminist knowledge production. Where are we on that? Where are we? You know, Amadoume and Oyeronke initially, when you began in terms of their key contributions to destabilizing this idea of sex mapping onto gender in the sort of very rigid ways that, you know, early feminist work from the west, you know, led us to think to say that there were different traditions of thinking about gender across the Nigerian context, which they were writing about the ebos and the urubas. So the omnipresence of the woman as the subject of feminism. Your thoughts? Well, I think the omnipresence when you say that I'm assuming you mean the reduction of thinking conceptually about certain categories in trying to deconstruct categories by using those categories themselves. Look, I think that there have obviously been interventions and more recently I think the focus on thinking about the fluidity, which is, you know, something that is part of traditional epistemology of sexual orientation, of ideas about gender, has become much more widespread. And as interestingly being connected to global trends where there's been another kind of consolidating and shoring up of fixed identities. So I think what's happening at the moment is the surfacing of debates about what the problem really is. Is it about not being able to play by the entities or is it or should it be about that system of identification in the first place. It's a very complex debate and it's, you know, it's affecting. Activists globally, but it's a hardy way that we all need to have. I'm not sure if I've answered your question but it's kind of, yeah, I'm a response to what I think you might have asked. Absolutely that's that's that's exactly what I was asking us to to collectively reflect on and think with about categories what those do what they don't do what they take us back to as well. A feminist project of liberation emancipation and the categories that you know patriarchy reproduces as part of limiting those freedoms. Liberation. So there's a question on the chat around. I'm curious to know where this person is writing from, but I'll read the question how do we assert our perspectives as African feminist scholars in our research, without having to constantly defend it, or assert its scientific relevance and really curious where you're writing from but that's the question. I suppose I try to speak to that by talking about the importance of dismantling the framing in the first place. So the question to ask is whose notion of scientific relevance, even the idea of science. You know, science which is defined as definitive authoritative knowledge, which is generally positivist positive this knowledge is not necessarily superior to other kinds of knowledge. But to the contrary, it usually shuts down on possibility and uncertainty, which as we know is always an inescapable part of life. At the same time, I think the question comes from realizing that the hierarchy, the hierarchy in which we operate, in which we work, the hierarchizing of universities of knowledge is very real. And one does constantly have to insist on the relevance, the importance, the value of certain forms of knowledge. But I would say, certainly not. You know, it should certainly not be accompanied by measuring up to because that really is a betrayal. Yeah, I'll definitely add to that by I think, a certain that I think our job as as as scholars and all this is from South Africa. Okay, from Seoul, thank you university in Kimberly. I think there's there's a big problem in university spaces around as you know setting up the Canon and then you know following that up with the, you know, more recent scholarship which there are multiple ways to think creatively and expansively about who you're centering as part of your knowledge making processes which I think all of us as academics need to encourage our students and the spaces that we occupy to think much more expansively around that rather than consistently reproducing the same voices again and again and again. There seem to be no more questions in the Q&A so I'm going to ask you a final set of reflections if you will. So you say that your current project is around rethinking food systems and if could you share a little bit more about that project and what is it that you're seeking to do in the course of that work. Yeah, I think for me what is important here is the fact that food has been written about and explored in third world context, mainly in terms of bread and butter issues, and precisely in terms of, you know, paradigms of development and modernization that we think about. So the dominant world food system has a huge kind of elitist of knowledge that reinforces the idea that the north needs to save the rest of the world from starvation and what, and this goes hand in glove with ways of modifying seed, ways of managing the land with big food systems with capitalist agriculture. So a lot of the work about food in other words falls into this paradigm this food security so called food security paradigm and the notion of security is itself problematic. I'm a humanity scholar my field is literally studies. And when I say to people that I'm interested in food they do kind of go by. But this is not a social science or development studies or agricultural science approach to food. And it's a tend to use food to think about power relations, gender relations, the construction of identities, the cultural and social meanings attached to food, the women's worlds that are often disparaged. So it's it's innocence using food as a way to open up quite a few of the insights that I tried to raise, including for example what is indigenous knowledge. How does it open us up to ways of being ways of thinking about ourselves and our relations to one another, and surrounding world in ways that truly counter the violence associated with what we inherit from colonialism. Absolutely thank you so much Desiree. As we come to a close of what I've found to be a very enriching keynote, and I hope that those who have attended have also benefited from this conversation including you know clarifying time together. Some of the conversations that begun in the initial panel, you know vis a vis religion spirituality thinking about the university site and our role as academics within that. My final question to you is really to offer your set of closing reflections of thoughts around conversations on the colonizing knowledge and knowledge production processes. I find that you know the more we have these conversations the more people get confused about what is it that we are inherently asking for when you're saying to colonize knowledge. What is it that we are seeking to do in that process. So if you wanted to offer some clarifying feminist interventions around what the colonizing knowledge production from an African feminist perspective but also just from a much more broadly feminist perspective. Well, I mean as I've said it definitely involves looking at a range of power dynamics and taking very seriously the context in which we have conversations, the way in which knowledge making including critical knowledge and the debates themselves are taken up and used. I think we sometimes simplify the or underplay the extent to which knowledge functions in terms of a broader economy, where ideas are instrumentalized ideas are used, not because people are deliberately manipulating them, but because they enter into a certain kind of circuit. So yeah to be constantly vigilant and to be open to critique and listening to each other. And yeah one of the things that I have fun and I suppose this is true of myself when I was young, but I do find that there's an impatience that young students have had. And we cannot afford impatience we certainly need critique we need animation but we also need to be really really vigilant. Yeah. And I think one of the beautiful things that your presentation has done today is also to point to the importance of this transnational knowledge building conversation. You know to recognize knowledge production processes that are happening in the global south and how do we think collectively with that knowledge without always looking. You know to the US or you know to the European landscape as the basis from which to draw on feminist knowledge production and feminist intellectual knowledge. So colleagues, please join me once again in thanking Desiree for making the time these are complex times for all of us and I know we are setting aside space to think collectively in a moment that has also captured us in very difficult and complex ways and you know all of the losses and the mental health complications that also arise with being in isolation lockdown and managing cafes. So we do not underestimate your presence here. We hope that you're keeping safe and taking care of yourselves and your families and your minds and your hearts and your bodies after all, that is what the feminist project is about. Our bodies and our minds and our hearts and souls are totally connected to the work of freedom and justice that they're seeking to do and the world's we're seeking to change. Self care collective care, be attentive to that in this moment as Anthony Sanna as Santa Sanna Desiree for making the time. The next panel begins at 1245, please log on for that. And as we sign out, I believe you're going to be treated to some lovely music. So if you want to hang around for that, please do Desiree be well. Take care. Thank you. Thank you very much.