CREA’s Feminist Leadership, Movement Building and Rights Institute Residential Program

The Institute engages feminists from across the region to build a substantive understanding of the present with all its challenges and possibilities. It interrogates concepts and structures that have a bearing on the strategies through embedding patriarchy and gender in concepts of nation, identity, religion, polity and development. To make meaning of what feminist struggles have transformed, and how new forms of patriarchy are part of existing inequalities.

The Institute is designed on the premise that feminist leadership can be strengthened and have greater impact when women’s rights activists and advocates have greater conceptual clarity and strategic approaches that go to the roots of inequality rather than dealing with its symptoms alone. The Institute aims to encourage and enable participants to:

• Interrogate: Concepts such as nation, identity, power and development that affect the struggles and strategies by reshaping the discourse and practices of patriarchy and gender.
• Explore: Different forms of leadership through feminist journeys, histories and standpoints across generations.
• Build: New and collaborative modes of resistance in the face of emerging configurations of power. A team of feminist activists from the global South will teach at the Institute using classroom instruction, group work, theatre, simulation exercises, films, music and case studies. The process of learning is based on four core pedagogic principles.
• Locate: Locate the everyday, ‘micro’ individual and organisational practices in the macro context of the larger women’s movement and of other struggles for gender equality and justice.
• Reflect: Deepen curiosity and self-reflexiveness among participants by facilitating conversations that traverse geographies, generations and diversity of concerns and political standpoints.
• Expand: Build solidarity across borders by bringing into focus the shared sense of being South Asian. This including a deeper understanding of the common heritage, historical interlinkages as well as ruptures and differences. The idea is to explore together what constitutes South Asian Feminist practice — both as an assumption and an aspiration.

With this, participants will be able to critically assess women’s movements in South Asia and explore concrete strategies to strengthen links between women’s movements and other social justice movements to advance women’s human rights more collectively.

Institute Pedagogy

Activists, practitioners and academicians will teach the course using classroom instruction, group work, case studies, fiction, and films.

• The Institute emphasizes linking theory to practice;
• The participants will learn to critically analyze policy, research, and their own program interventions, using a rights-based approach;
• The Institute is not a training or workshop, and attempts to recast the idea of collective and experiential ways of learning;
• The Institute emphasizes learning led by world-class faculty.

Logistics

• The Institute will be held from 24th January – 1st February, 2024 in Sri Lanka. Participants will be expected to arrive on 24th January and are expected to be present throughout the entire duration of the Institute, i.e., for 7 nights, and 8 days.

Institute Costs

• CREA will cover tuition, accommodation and meals for all participants during the course. Accommodation will be on a twin-sharing basis.
• A limited number of travel scholarships are available (visa fees and travel insurance are not included).
• Those not receiving a travel scholarship are responsible for making their own arrangements for travel, visa and insurance.

Criteria

• FLMBaRI South Asia is for activists, service-providers, community organizers, researchers and human rights practitioners, working on issues of sexuality, sexual and gender diversity and diversity of sex characteristics/LGBTIQ rights, sexual rights, sexual and reproductive health and rights, rights of persons with disabilities, HIV/AIDS, public health, violence against women/gender-based violence, health, and/or gender, nationally, regionally or globally.
• 30 participants will be selected to attend. Participants should be embedded in human rights and/or feminist movements or civil society, or be working closely with them.
• They invite applications from academics, artists, activists, and media practitioners etc., particularly those from structurally excluded groups based in India. Full-time students are not eligible.
• All applicants must be fully vaccinated against COVID and have copies of their vaccination certificates to enable travel to Sri Lanka.

For more information, visit CREA.