Radhika Govinda

In Feminist Politics, Intersectionality and Knowledge Cultivation, Radhika Govinda engages with intersectionality – as critical theory, as critical methodology and as critical pedagogy – to make sense of feminist politics in India and beyond, and knowledge-making on feminist politics, as such. In doing so, she makes a case for theory-making, conducting empirical research and classroom teaching to be understood as integral parts of knowledge cultivation, each feeding into the other. Differently put, the book encapsulates Govinda’s engagement, spanning fifteen years and four case studies, exploring what insights an intersectional lens throws up, and how these insights complicate our understandings of marginality, privilege and solidarity in the field of women’s and gender studies, in feminist classrooms, in women’s and social movements, in particular NGO-led feminist activism, state-led development initiatives and digital feminist campaigns, and in everyday social relations in rural and urban spaces. Uncovering, interrogating and disrupting the politics of coloniality and feminist complicity is an important running thread in the book. Through a reflexive account of her own location and practice in the academy at the cusp of the global north and the global south, Govinda highlights the importance of being attentive to intersectional positionality and to the contextual specificities of engaging in feminist politics and knowledge-making in the age of global neoliberalism.

In Feminist Politics, Intersectionality and Knowledge Cultivation, Radhika Govinda engages with intersectionality – as critical theory, as critical methodology and as critical pedagogy – to make sense of feminist politics in India and beyond, and knowledge-making on feminist politics, as such. In doing so, she makes a case for theory-making, conducting empirical research and classroom teaching to be understood as integral parts of knowledge cultivation, each feeding into the other. Differently put, the book encapsulates Govinda’s engagement, spanning fifteen years and four case studies, exploring what insights an intersectional lens throws up, and how these insights complicate our understandings of marginality, privilege and solidarity in the field of women’s and gender studies, in feminist classrooms, in women’s and social movements, in particular NGO-led feminist activism, state-led development initiatives and digital feminist campaigns, and in everyday social relations in rural and urban spaces. Uncovering, interrogating and disrupting the politics of coloniality and feminist complicity is an important running thread in the book. Through a reflexive account of her own location and practice in the academy at the cusp of the global north and the global south, Govinda highlights the importance of being attentive to intersectional positionality and to the contextual specificities of engaging in feminist politics and knowledge-making in the age of global neoliberalism.

This collection of essays brings together auto-ethnographic, critical, and comparative reflections on doing feminisms in the academy in contemporary India and the United Kingdom. Written by emergent and seasoned academics from a range of disciplines and and geopolitical locations, these essays explore the transformative potential, dilemmas, and challenges of teaching, learning, researching, and working as feminist academics. The contributors engage with a wide variety of issues: identity and difference; institutional and classroom pedagogies; reflexivity and accountability; and the production and circulation of feminist and non-feminist knowledge. This collection also provides the frame and the lens through which to view the wider landscape of contemporary higher education. Anchored in feminist scholarship and written in an accessible style, Doing Feminisms in the Academy will be an essential read for anyone interested in feminist, women’s, and gender studies.