Call for Applications: Feminist Movement Builders’ School

This school follows a successful pilot school held in Mexico City in August 2023. The movement builders’ school is a five-day intensive learning space that offers a mix of practical tools and theory intended to support strategising by developing a deeper understanding of structural exclusions underpinned by African feminist analysis.

This is a two-part school for experienced activists who want space to reflect and deepen their knowledge to inform organising strategy. Applicants will be required to commit to attending the first school in August 2024 and returning a year later for the second part in August 2025.

Focus

• The feminist movement builders’ school is based on the premise that feminist movements are central to how big transformational power shifts have occurred across societies. They also believe that feminist analysis that takes seriously questions of race and class offer them better ways to think about the systemic factors that generate inequalities.
• Through the schools’ methodological approach, they will strengthen the collective analysis on belonging, identity, and citizenship in a global context where there are increasing attacks on basic rights, threats to bodily autonomy, and increasing transnational mobilisation by state and non-state actors on the interlinked issues of gender, race and class. These schools are designed to help them reshape both discourse and practices to challenge the manifestations of exclusions as witnessed through closing civic space, femicide, and the rising criminalisation and violent attacks on gender and sexualities.

Guiding Principles

• Co-creation and intellectual generosity: They approach the school as a community of organisers located in and outside the academy in conversation with each other across generations and contexts. They invite attention to these differences and power relations embedded within them. They are mindful of not reproducing unequal power relations and will instead cultivate diversity for the conversations.
• Care: They want to create an intellectually nourishing space in which they extend grace and care to each other. Even if they disagree, they will aim to have conversations about complex issues with curiosity and care.
• Space: They want to ensure everyone has space to engage in the manner they feel useful. This means they will invite consciousness of how they occupy space.
• Joy: The issues they will discuss have material implications for all of them. They will ensure that across the school they lean into joy as a space from which they can imagine possibilities.
• Connect: They aim to find connections to develop a language to understand the global and regional dimensions of gender and racial injustice.
• Inclusivity: They set up the space as one that takes gender as a construct and one that African knowledge systems show them looks like more than one thing. They will create a space that is gender expansive and one in which they aim to not reproduce harm.
• School Pedagogy 
  • Popular education, interactive lectures, group work, case studies
  • Link theory to practice
  • Emphasise collective and experiential ways of learning
  • Centre the body in its fullness – heart and mind – in how they learn and reflect

What you will get out of the school?

• Build a shared understanding of the transformative power of movements
• Develop applied knowledge on the importance of transnational solidarity for social change
• Expand access to tools, concepts, and research approaches to support your work

Eligibility Criteria

• The school will be fully funded for 20 participants from Eastern and Southern Africa. The school will be conducted in English.
• They are seeking applicants who are:
  • Africans based and working in Eastern and Southern Africa
  • A leader in the community
  • Embedded in women’s rights and/or feminist, queer movements
  • With at least ten years of actively working as an organiser with/and supporting feminist and/or queer movements
  • Want to think strategically about making change happen
  • Committed to participating in a follow up school in August 2025
  • Have a demonstrable plan for building lessons from the school into your ongoing movement work.

For more information, visit JASS.