10 Questions with Feminist Academics

In this series we engage 10 feminist academics around 10 questions within and across their disciplines that are important for all to consider at this historical juncture. 

Bio

Odile Mackett is an associate professor in the University of Johannesburg’s Department of Anthropology and Development Studies. She is an economist by training and has an MCom in Applied Development Economics and a PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand. She also has a BA in International Studies (majoring Politics & Economics) and a BCom (Hons) in International Trade and Finance from the University of Johannesburg. She is a feminist labour economist and her research interests are related to the division, quality, and definition of both paid and unpaid work, how households and families are structured and formed around these types of work, and how the state interacts with households and the market to reinforce the gendered and racial division of work. She has broadly written on social security, poverty, and inequality, specifically as these factors relate to gender inequalities in society. She is an associate editor for the ⁠African Review of Economics and Finance⁠ and has a variety of resources for research students on her website and YouTube channel.

Credits

Produced by: The Feminist Centre for Racial Justice

Host: Vasiliki Vita

Sound design, editing, production: Ellan A. Lincoln Hyde

Music: Grateful by audiolibraryinfinite from Pixabay

10 Questions with Feminist Academics

In this series we engage 10 feminist academics around 10 questions within and across their disciplines that are important for all to consider at this historical juncture. 

Bio

Dr Eleanor Newbigin is a historian of imperialism and decolonisation in twentieth-century South Asia. Her research explores how the end of formal colonial rule reshaped governance, citizenship, family, and political economy in India, drawing on feminist and gender studies methodologies alongside rigorous archival work.

She is the author of The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India: Law, Citizenship and Community (Cambridge University Press, 2013), which examines how mid-twentieth-century reforms to Hindu family law reworked colonial hierarchies of gender, caste, and power in the postcolonial state. Her wider scholarship also addresses the history of economic thought in India and the colonial roots of contemporary ideas about wealth, poverty, and welfare.

Alongside her historical research, Newbigin develops creative and participatory approaches to engaging with imperial legacies, including collaborative theatre projects, public history workshops, and digital storytelling. Her current work examines how memories of the 1947 Partition are shaped within the UK diaspora, and how new technologies can enable critical re-engagements with colonial pasts.

Credits

Produced by: The Feminist Centre for Racial Justice

Host: Vasiliki Vita

Sound design, editing, production: Ellan A. Lincoln Hyde

Music: Grateful by audiolibraryinfinite from Pixabay

Spotlight on Feminist Movement Building School

In this final episode of our Spotlight Series, Awino Okech, Director of the Feminist Centre for Racial Justice (FCRJ), and Shereen Essof, Executive Director of Just Associates (JASS) have a reflective conversation on the three-year partnership co-creating the Feminist Movement Builders Schools (FMBS).

The schools, convened across Latin America and Eastern & Southern Africa, brought together 35 activists to strengthen feminist organising, political education, and collective power. 

Bio

Shereen Essof is a Zimbabwean popular educator and organizer.  Her work is grounded in an engagement with movements, community-based organizations and cultural collectives. She strives to understand power inherent in the interlocking nature of oppressive systems and from that understanding, to imagine, organize and build towards liberated futures.

Shereen has published widely including: Shemurenga: The Zimbabwean Women’s Movement. Weaver Press; My Dream is to be Bold: The Work to End Patriarchy. Pambazuka Press and Feminist Alternatives; Searching for South Africa: The New Calculus of Dignity. UNISA Press. 

She currently serves as Executive Director of Just Associates (JASS), a global feminist movement strengthening organization that equips and strengthens the leadership and organizing capacity of women leaders and their organizations in Mesoamerica, Southeast Asia, and East and Southern Africa. 

Credits

Produced by: The Feminist Centre for Racial JusticeSound design, editing, production: Samuel Oduor Music: Grateful by audiolibraryinfinite from Pixabay

Spotlight on Feminist Movement Building School

We are in conversation with participants from our second Feminist Movement Builders School convened in partnership with Just Associates in from August 2024-August 2025.

About the episode

In this episode, we speak with Larisa W. Chikanya, a gender, peace and governance specialist from Zimbabwe whose work spans feminist leadership, inclusive peacebuilding, and social justice across Africa.

Larisa reflects on what changemaking means in the current political moment, how feminist organising is shifting dynamics locally and transnationally, and how movements sustain themselves under repression. She also discusses the role of young women and queer organisers in reshaping leadership, and the importance of political education and feminist research in strengthening movement work.

BioLarisa W Chikanya is a gender, peace and governance specialist from Zimbabwe, with over six years of experience advancing inclusive peacebuilding, feminist leadership, and social justice across Africa. Her work centres on African feminisms, amplifying marginalised voices, and integrating gender perspectives into governance, political participation, and conflict prevention and resolution .

She has contributed to regional feminist initiatives, creating spaces for communities to strategise, organise, and take action for transformative change. Larisa brings a decolonial, intersectional lens to her work, bridging scholarship and activism to imagine futures where justice, inclusion, and equity guide leadership and social change.

Credits

Interviewee: Larisa W. Chikanya

Interviewer: Nadia Asri

Produced by: The Feminist Centre for Racial Justice

Sound design, editing, production: Ellan A. Lincoln-Hyde

Music: Broken by AudioWay, freesound.org.

Spotlight on Feminist Movement Building School

We are in conversation with participants from our second Feminist Movement Builders School convened in partnership with Just Associates in from August 2024-August 2025.

About the episode

🎙️ Content note: this episode discusses LGBTQ+ rights and community organising in contexts of risk.

In this episode, Nadia Asri speaks with Auma Maureen, a feminist organiser and artist, whose community-based project uses public art to archive queer life and resistance in rural Uganda.

Through the Feminist Movement Builders School, Maureen led a year-long feminist action research process that culminated in a powerful community mural — a living, collective archive of queer stories, painted in dialogue with the people who inspired it.

This conversation explores the power of art, storytelling, and imagination in contexts where visibility can be dangerous — and how creative practices become acts of care, resistance, and community-building.

👉🏿 Explore Maureen’s mural, created as part of the Movement Builders School in Kenya, on our website.

Bio

Auma Maureen is a rural feminist activist and Programmes Director at Twilight Support Initiative in Western Uganda. She advocates for structurally excluded people through grassroots organizing, access to justice, economic empowerment, health, and creative advocacy. Maureen believes in collective healing, storytelling, and transformative justice rooted in care and community resilience.

Credits

Interviewee: Auma Maureen

Interviewer: Nadia Asri

Produced by: The Feminist Centre for Racial Justice

Sound design, editing, production: Ellan A. Lincoln-Hyde

Music: Broken by AudioWay, freesound.org.

Spotlight on Feminist Movement Building School

We are in conversation with participants from our second Feminist Movement Builders School convened in partnership with Just Associates in from August 2024-August 2025.

About the episode

🎙️ Content warning: this episode contains discussion of sexual violence in conflict

In episode 26, host Nadia Asri speaks with Samrawit Assefa, a Gender-Based Violence specialist, working in and with communities in Tigray, where the ongoing conflict has been marked by unimaginable violence, including ethnic cleansing and the weaponisation of sexual violence.

Samrawit shares her reflections on what it means to organise amid crisis — how women and girls have resisted, healed, and rebuilt through feminist solidarity and care.

This is a conversation about courage, grief, and the power of collective action.

Bio

Samrawit has more than fifteen years of experience in the areas of Gender Based Violence (GBV) Prevention and Response and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence, both in development and conflict-affected humanitarian settings. She has worked with governmental, non-governmental, and community-based organizations and UN agencies to establish and improve GBV systems in various capacities to improve women’s and girls’ wellness.

Samrawit has worked directly with refugees, Internally Displaced People (IDPs), and local communities and has experience working globally, providing direct case management and psychosocial support services, and coordinating with different agencies to establish systems to support survivors of GBV. As a GBV specialist in Emergencies with the World Health Organization (WHO), I have worked within the Health Sector to strengthen and institutionalize GBV services in health facilities by developing tools, guidance, and SOPs. Samrawit is part of the SASA! global technical advisers with Raising Voices, a proven and innovative GBV awareness-raising approach. She is trained in Sexual Abuse and Exploitation investigation and has established a Community-Based Complaints Mechanism (CBCM) in refugee camps in Ethiopia, along with other organizations. She is an expert in facilitating Forum Theatre on topics such as Prevention of Sexual Abuse and Exploitation. She has conducted action research and contributed to the guidelines “Girl Shine” and “Traditions and Opportunities: A toolkit for GBV programs to engage community leaders in humanitarian settings”

Credits

Interviewee: Samrawit Assefa

Interviewer: Nadia Asri

Produced by: The Feminist Centre for Racial Justice

Sound design, editing, production: Ellan A. Lincoln-Hyde

Music: Broken by AudioWay, freesound.org.

About the Legacy Series

The legacy series is a long form conversation with senior feminists. These conversations take place over three or four episodes tracing feminist journeys and lessons over time.

About the episode

In the final episode of our Legacy Series with Françoise Vergès, we look forward to the politics of dreaming, imagining, and organising beyond the colonial systems of violence that shape our world, from the climate crisis to border regimes. 

We explore how decolonial feminism offers not just a critique, but a vision for environmental justice, collective liberation, and the right to breathe.

Bio

Françoise Vergès is a political theorist, curator and writer

She writes on the afterlife of slavery and colonisation, decolonial feminism, the museum, and climate disaster and regularly works with artists. For the 2025 Bannister Fletcher Fellowship, she is organizing workshops on “Imagining the Post-Museum,” with in London, the Whitechapel Gallery, Mosaic Room and the Sarah Parker Remond Center for the Study of Racism and Racialisation at UCL, and in Paris, Cité internationale des arts and ULIP.

She is currently working on a film about struggles in Reunion Island and her parents’ personal archives. In 2024, she was, along with sociologist Fabien Truong, a curator and writer of the first edition of La Ville dansée in Paris.

Credits

Interviewee: Françoise Vergès

Interviewer: Nadia Asri

Produced by: The Feminist Centre for Racial Justice

Sound design, editing, production: Ellan A. Lincoln-Hyde

Music: Mr. Trumpet by Ketsa, freemusicarchive.org

About the legacy series

The legacy series is a long form conversation with senior feminists. These conversations take place over three or four episodes tracing feminist journeys and lessons over time.

About the episode

In the second episode of our Legacy Series with Françoise Vergès, we move from memory to critique. Françoise unpacks her analyses of carceral feminism and the NGO-isation of justice work, asking what happens when feminist movements become professionalised or absorbed by the state.
She challenges us to name the forms of violence legitimised in the name of safety, and invites us to imagine alternatives rooted in abolition, accountability, and disobedient archives.

Bio

Françoise Vergès is a political theorist, curator and writer

She writes on the afterlife of slavery and colonisation, decolonial feminism, the museum, and climate disaster and regularly works with artists. For the 2025 Bannister Fletcher Fellowship, she is organizing workshops on “Imagining the Post-Museum,” with in London, the Whitechapel Gallery, Mosaic Room and the Sarah Parker Remond Center for the Study of Racism and Racialisation at UCL, and in Paris, Cité internationale des arts and ULIP.

She is currently working on a film about struggles in Reunion Island and her parents’ personal archives. In 2024, she was, along with sociologist Fabien Truong, a curator and writer of the first edition of La Ville dansée in Paris.

Credits

Interviewee: Françoise Vergès

Interviewer: Nadia Asri

Produced by: The Feminist Centre for Racial Justice

Sound design, editing, production: Ellan A. Lincoln-Hyde

Music: Mr. Trumpet by Ketsa, freemusicarchive.org

About the legacy series

The legacy series is a long form conversation with senior feminists. These conversations take place over three or four episodes tracing feminist journeys and lessons over time.

About the episode

In this first episode of our Legacy Series with Françoise Vergès, we begin with formation: how place, memory, and the anti-colonial struggles of Réunion Island shaped Françoise’s early consciousness.
Françoise reflects on growing up under French colonial rule, the figures who shaped her early political thinking, and the role of memory as a site of resistance. Together, we explore how the personal becomes political, and how remembering can become a radical act.

Bio

Françoise Vergès is a political theorist, curator and writer

She writes on the afterlife of slavery and colonisation, decolonial feminism, the museum, and climate disaster and regularly works with artists. For the 2025 Bannister Fletcher Fellowship, she is organizing workshops on “Imagining the Post-Museum,” with in London, the Whitechapel Gallery, Mosaic Room and the Sarah Parker Remond Center for the Study of Racism and Racialisation at UCL, and in Paris, Cité internationale des arts and ULIP.

She is currently working on a film about struggles in Reunion Island and her parents’ personal archives. In 2024, she was, along with sociologist Fabien Truong, a curator and writer of the first edition of La Ville dansée in Paris.

Credits

Interviewee: Françoise Vergès

Interviewer: Nadia Asri

Produced by: The Feminist Centre for Racial Justice

Sound design, editing, production: Ellan A. Lincoln-Hyde

Music: Mr. Trumpet by Ketsa, freemusicarchive.org

Spotlight on Feminist Movement Builders School
These episodes are a conversation with participants from our second Feminist Movement Builders School convened in partnership with Just Associates in August 2024.

About the episode

In this episode of Runway to Feminist Justice, Nadia Asri speaks with Christie Banda, a feminist leader from Malawi. Christie reflects on her leadership journey, the power of collective feminist strategies, and the transformative potential of feminist Action Research.

As part of FMBS, Christie is one of the participants leading a collaborative feminist action research project examining the prevalence of conversion practices experienced by LBQ women in Malawi. She discusses the political and practical challenges of designing and conducting research in this context, and why knowledge production is central to feminist resistance and movement building.

This conversation speaks to the need to document community-based realities in ways that are participatory, strategic, and grounded in care.

Bio

Christie Banda is a feminist gender justice leader, social policy strategist, and Founder of the Woven Agenda Foundation, as well as Co-Founder of the LBQ Women Coalition in Malawi. With over a decade of experience at the intersection of research, advocacy, and community empowerment, her work spans transformative initiatives in gender equality, LGBTQI+ rights, and accountable governance. Christie’s impact is grounded in deep partnerships with grassroots movements and policy institutions. She has played a pivotal role in shaping national and regional responses to gender-based violence, child marriage, and sexual and reproductive health (SRH), and continues to lead inclusive policy change through intersectional feminist frameworks.

Credits

Interviewee: Christie Banda
Interviewer: Nadia Asri
Produced by: The Feminist Centre for Racial Justice
Sound design and editing: Nadia Asri