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- Convenors:
-
Katie McQuaid
(University of Leeds)
Ross Wignall (Oxford Brookes University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores how gender-transformative and intersectional methodologies can reimagine anthropology as a practice of solidarity and care, confronting polarisation and systemic injustice, and co-creating more just, connected, and equitable futures.
Long Abstract
In an era of planetary and poly-crisis, polarisation manifests across gendered, racialised, ableist, classist and colonial fault lines, entrenching existing inequalities and fuelling intersectional injustices. This panel invites critical reflections on the potential of gender-transformative methodologies to respond to these dynamics, not simply as analytical tools, but as practices for transforming power, cultivating care, and building solidarities, enabling us to reimagine anthropology’s role in a fractured world.
Drawing on feminist, decolonial, creative and participatory approaches, we seek to examine how collaborative and action-oriented research can move beyond extractive and colonial modes of inquiry towards processes of co-creation and an ethics of care with communities most affected by systemic injustices. We ask how integrating gender-transformative approaches into our fieldwork, collaborations, and pedagogy can help us collectively name and confront the interlocking forces of heteropatriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism that fuel inequality and sustain polarisation, in order to embed intersectional justice within our work.
We invite panellists to share the complexities of their grounded ethnographic cases, creative engagements, productive ‘failures’, and reflexive methodological practices, to collectively consider how feminist praxis can unsettle dominant epistemologies and structures, bridge social divides, and mobilise new forms of collective agency. In sharing experiences we seek to position gender-transformative and decolonial methods as vital to anthropological practice, reimagining research as a space of encounter, care and ethical collaboration, where plural voices, situated knowledges, and embodied solidarities can resist division and normalise and nurture alternative imaginaries of justice and care. In doing so, we ask not only how anthropology can study polarisation, but how, through transformative praxis, it might help unmake it.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper explores different attempts at collaborative methodologies regarding care practices in Palestine. Drawing on feminist, queer and decolonial approaches, it reflects on the possibilities and commitments of co-producing research navigating the imposed academic/activist dichotomy.
Paper long abstract
This paper reflects on an ongoing PhD project exploring Queer Care in Palestine as a temporally and spatially situated anti-colonial practice. Building upon previous research on Radio Alhara and international solidarity, it examines how care, mutual aid, and collective resistance are reconfigured under ongoing occupation and genocide. Combining visual ethnography, Relief Maps, and decolonial, feminist, queer and collaborative methodologies, the project situates care simultaneously as theory, method and praxis. It also interrogates the institutionalized manufactured tension between academic legitimacy and academic praxis, while envisioning alternative future(s) grounded in liberation and radical hope. Building on ongoing fieldwork in Palestine (May 2024, October 2025), this research explores queer-feminist solidarity as a form of decolonial praxis that challenges the dominant narratives surrounding Palestine. It traces how translocal networks of resistance mobilize radical care, art, and collective knowledge production against settler colonialism, pinkwashing, and neoliberal co-optation. Methodologically, the projects experiment with zine-making, DIY media, collective podcasts, concerts, listening sessions, photographic exhibitions, short-video and collective mapping. These practices are approached not only as modes of dissemination but as epistemological tools that privilege embodied knowledge, memory and affect, while challenging extractive and colonial research relations. By exploring visual ethnographic practices, this research tries to merge the academia/activism equilibrium with art. At the same time, it exists in constant tension with institutionalized forms of knowledge production that fail to acknowledge the validity of this equilibrium. Still, from the margins, we continue to occupy space and create new ways of building hope and alternative future(s) based on liberation.
Paper short abstract
Based on participatory research with girls and young women in Sierra Leone and Cameroon, this paper explores African feminist gender-transformative methods that centre girls’ voices. It examines mentorship and creative practice as tools for care, agency, and resisting polarisation.
Paper long abstract
This paper draws on African feminist participatory action research with girls and young women involved in technical and vocational education and training in Sierra Leone and Cameroon. Based on the Upskilling for Future Generations (Gen-Up) project, it reflects on gender-transformative methodologies that foreground girls’ voices as central to both knowledge production and social change.
Rooted in African feminist traditions that emphasise lived experience, relationality, and collective care, the paper explores mentorship-based and arts-based participatory methods designed to counter extractive research practices. Through peer mentoring, youth-led research, photovoice, performative outreach, and collaborative reflection, girls and young women articulated everyday experiences of gendered constraint, economic precarity, and aspiration, while also shaping the direction of analysis and local advocacy.
Rather than treating participation as a technical method, the paper frames PAR as a gender-transformative praxis that redistributes authority, values embodied and situated knowledges, and builds solidarities among young women navigating intersecting gendered and colonial inequalities. It also reflects on ethical complexities, including power, care, emotional labour, and the long-term responsibilities attached to creative outputs. The paper argues that African feminist methodologies enable anthropology to become a space of encounter and care, capable not only of analysing polarisation but of actively working to unmake it through collaborative and justice-oriented practice.
Paper short abstract
This paper brings together two activist-researchers’ perspectives from Europe and Senegal to examine how transnational no-border networks enact co-resistance and decolonial solidarity while negotiating persistent, intersectional power asymmetries.
Paper long abstract
This paper brings together two activist-researchers’ perspectives: one rooted in Dakar, Senegal, active in transnational no-border resistance including the Transborder Caravan in France, and one based in Salzburg, Austria, whose fieldwork extends to Dakar. Drawing on overlapping yet differently situated experiences, we rethink solidarity in struggles against the European Union’s racialised migration governance. Our collaboration is based on shared, long-term activism and divergent positionalities, shaped by race, gender, and institutional privilege. We place these differences at the centre of the analysis, treating positionality as a crucial lens through which tensions and contradictions of transnational solidarity become visible.
Theoretically, we ground the paper in decolonial thought and Black feminisms, which foreground the persistence of coloniality in knowledge and power structures and show how embodied, intersectional experiences of oppression generate different forms of resistance (Grosfoguel 2007; Mohanty 2011; Olufemi 2020). Critical Whiteness Studies further illuminates how ‘whiteness’ functions as context-specific, structuring force, even within anti-racist no-border networks (DiAngelo 2021). We argue that friendship operates as political practice, enabling co-resistance and extending debates on decolonial solidarity (Oghalai & Varela 2023).
Empirically, our analysis builds on engaged ethnography within no-border networks across Europe and Senegal. We show how no-border activism in Europe is often sustained through feminised, volunteer-based infrastructures, whereas in Dakar, activist practices are shaped by different gendered configurations, lived migration experiences, and colonial continuities, producing distinct forms of organising. Overall, our findings reveal how transnational no-border networks enact co-resistance and decolonial solidarity while negotiating persistent power asymmetries.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on research on vulvodynia and participatory workshops in Rome, this paper frames chronic pelvic pain as a socially embedded condition. Using creative, gender-transformative methods, it shows how secular and religious participants can co-design actions for health justice and safeguarding.
Paper long abstract
This paper engages with debates in medical anthropology and participatory action research to reflect on co-creative, gender-transformative methodologies as practices of justice and care. Drawing on the research Vulvodynia as A Silent Pain (2025-2028) and a series of workshops conducted in Italy, we explore how knowledge on chronic pelvic pain can be collectively reworked to address structural and cultural barriers to healthcare access. Rather than treating vulvar pain as a purely biomedical condition, the research positioned it as a socially embedded experience shaped by gendered moralities and regimes of silence. How ecclesiastical contexts, with their own peculiarities, can facilitate/hamper vulvar health access?
Methodologically, the project foregrounded co-creation as an epistemological stance challenging extractivism. Participants—both secular and consacrated individuals from different parts of the world—were invited to critically engage with taboos surrounding sexuality, pain, and vulvar anatomy, making explicit their bias and forms of resistance that often hinder access to information and care. The encounter challenged reductive secular/religious dichotomies about sexual health, revealing the possibility of transversal alliances.
The gender-transformative and justice-oriented dimension of the workshops emerged through collective design of interventional plans. Participants developed context-sensitive strategies—ranging from educational initiatives in primary schools in Nigeria, parishes in Austria, and Indian factories, to training programs for midwives operating in mobile units in rural Madagascar and Tanzania—attuned to local cultural specificities and available resources. Rather than an abstract principle, proposed actions embrace transformative justice as a situated and relational practice rooted in care, accountability, and commitment to safeguarding people in situations of vulnerability.
Paper short abstract
This article proposes designing ethnographic encounters to co-create micro-moments of emotional justice—moments when people feel seen and heard. Such encounters work with emotions and draw on the anthropologist’s emotional positionality as a site of mutual vulnerability.
Paper long abstract
How do we want to practice anthropology in a world that is falling apart? This article proposes the design of ethnographic encounters with a purpose: co-creating micro-moments of emotional justice, understood as the recognition that occurs when people feel seen and heard, both by themselves and by others. Creative forms of expression can cultivate this recognition, opening spaces for new understandings and meanings by research participants and anthropologists alike. Designing ethnographic encounters in this manner offers two twists to the affective turn in anthropology: first working not on, but with the emotions of research participants; second, drawing on the anthropologist’s emotional positionality as the context for mutual vulnerability. For the case of return aspirations amid Syria’s regime change, the article examines the potential of poetic engagements to provide insights into dynamic and relational meaning-making. The article argues that emotional justice can constitute a source of ethnographic authority for anthropologists.
Paper short abstract
Women’s cooking in the Global South, often framed as “traditional” or “modern,” reflects systemic inequalities. An anthropological lens reveals cooking as a site of care, relational labour, and collective agency, highlighting women’s expertise in shaping just, inclusive energy futures.
Paper long abstract
In dominant energy and development discourses, women’s cooking practices in Global South contexts are frequently framed through a polarising binary of “traditional” versus “modern”, where fuels and cookstoves are moralised as indicators of progress or failure. Yet women’s energy choices are shaped by macro-level political and economic dynamics over which they have little control, reflecting broader gendered and systemic inequalities that structure everyday life. These include policy processes insufficiently attuned to women’s needs, male-dominated financial decision-making, limited access to credit and financial education, and persistent conditions of energy insecurity.
Rather than approaching women’s cooking practices through narratives of lack, constraint, or the often-derogatory label of “traditional,” an anthropological lens reveals everyday cooking as a site of care, relational labour, and collective navigation of structural injustice. Through cooking, women engage in skilled negotiations of affordability, time, gender norms, and social responsibility that sustain collective wellbeing, enacting forms of solidarity that are frequently invisible within dominant development frameworks.
Drawing on action-oriented research from the JustGESI project with women’s cooperatives and community groups in Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania, this paper treats cooking as an ethnographic entry point for examining power, care, and inequality across scales. By learning from what women already do - how they mobilise embodied knowledge, social networks, collective resources - the paper challenges deficit-based and colonial epistemologies that render women’s practices static or backward. Instead, it positions their situated expertise as central to feminist knowledge production, collective agency, and the co-creation of more just and inclusive energy futures.
Paper short abstract
This paper will reflect on photovoice as a methodological practice that exemplifies many of the principles of decolonial feminist theory, drawing on ethnographic encounters with a heterogenous cohort of older adults to explore its potential to confront polarising discourses.
Paper long abstract
Photovoice is a practice rooted in decolonial feminist theory, Wang & Burris (1996) initially devised photovoice as a method with the potential to engage hard-to-reach groups who are most affected by injustices. It has been used as a tool to inform policymakers about the lived experiences of these groups. Photovoice engages with many principles of feminist theory, by acknowledging participants as experts in their own diverse experiences. The act of taking photographs is said to empower participants. As participants decide what to photograph, they disrupt dominant epistemologies of a hierarchal researcher-participant relationship through co-creation.
In this paper, I will outline my reflections on using this creative, participatory approach as part of an ongoing project that explores older adults’ experiences of medicine-use. A key concept underpinning this project is that medicine-use is socially embedded, occurring through the complex interplay of social relationships and societal level discourses on medicine-use. In using medicines, older adults must navigate relationships with clinicians, family, carers etc., as well as the structures that facilitate their medicine-use. They are subject to considerable structural and social burdens. These include but are not limited to expectations of ideal ‘sick-role’ behaviour, and stigmatising conceptualisations of older adults as vulnerable objects of biomedical scrutiny, alongside the various intersectional inequalities’ individuals experience (Hawking et al., 2020, Kaufman, Shim & Russ, 2004). The paper will explore how photovoice can be a tool for resisting these polarising discourses and facilitating anthropological practice that is engaged with feminist pedagogy and strives to embed intersectional justice.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how women living with HIV in Chile navigate gendered and moralized care labor. Drawing on feminist multimodal ethnography, it examines institutional stigma, moral regulation, and everyday tactics through which care becomes a site of survival, resistance, and dignity.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how gendered and moralized forms of care labor are produced, regulated, and contested within Chile’s public healthcare system through the lived experiences of women living with HIV. Drawing on feminist and multimodal ethnography conducted in southern Chile, it explores how women navigate institutional settings that simultaneously demand reproductive, affective, and moral labor while subjecting them to stigma, surveillance, and suspicion.
Within neoliberal health regimes, women living with HIV are positioned as both recipients and providers of care: expected to embody responsibility, adherence, and maternal morality, while performing the emotional and relational labor necessary to sustain treatment, family life, and social belonging. Institutional practices in healthcare—ranging from clinical encounters to prevention discourses and welfare logics—produce moral distinctions between “good” and “deviant” patients, shaping access to care and recognition as legitimate subjects of health and citizenship.
At the same time, these moral economies are not passively endured. Through collaborative visual and arts-based methods, this paper traces how women actively negotiate and rework stigma by reframing care as a collective, ethical, and political practice. Everyday tactics such as selective disclosure, mutual support, and creative expression emerge as forms of resistance that challenge dominant moral orders surrounding sexuality, productivity, and deservingness.
By situating HIV-related care within feminist anthropological debates on labor, moral regulation, and institutional power, this paper argues for understanding care not only as feminized labor but as a contested terrain where legitimacy, survival, and dignity are continuously negotiated.
Paper short abstract
The paper is a critical analysis on why anthropology should assume its inevitable status as an active agent in society, while addressing choices made in my PhD’s methodology within the field of future studies, and why anthropology can be a political (as in Szymborska's"Children of the Age") gesture.
Paper long abstract
Before the current global humanitarian, political, and environmental crises, can the social sciences be an active agent in the face of retrotopia, i.e., the West's inability to relate to the future as it projects catastrophes onto it?
The potential of the social sciences in stimulating imagination, beyond ethnocentrism and temporocentrism, is immense. However, the focus on the past makes them intrinsically incapable of thinking about the future.
In the context of retrotopia in the West and its possible ontological origins, I propose a methodology for future studies, with reciprocal, collaborative, multidisciplinary practices, guided by an ethics of possibilities. Working alongside the collective Mulherio das Letras Indígenas, we will create a diverse set of utopias, based on indigenous ontologies, firstly through fieldwork, by exchanging letters throughout 1 year, which contain stories of the origin of humanity from their peoples, and questions about the future and its utopic (yet plausible) possibilities. The methodology is based on prior anthropology’s future studies' proposals; and it follows intellectual movements in South America with constructive perspectives of the future, where myth, dreams, and poetic language are predominant. All choices were made as reactions to the oppression of indigenous women, the lack of hope in the youth, and the need for feminine, constructive, fertile views on humanity and global reality, giving voice to marginalised groups, their views on progress and their future-making process. The article is a critical exposure on the non-neutrality of anthropology’s/ists and purpose beyond academia.
Paper short abstract
The paper examines how care, gender, and embodied practice intersect in unequal urban sports spaces by comparing ethnographic research in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro to rethink care and highlight solidarities that challenge structural violence.
Paper long abstract
We bring together our ethnographic research of taekwondo practitioners in Buenos Aires and amateur football players in Rio de Janeiro to explore how care, gender, and bodily practice intersect within sports spaces shaped by structural inequalities. Working in two distinct yet comparable urban contexts, we accompany athletes who learn and train skills while also facing discrimination and violence in their everyday lives.
In sporting contexts, care often unfolds nonverbally through gestures (Mol 2010). On the other hand, the common definition of care as observing relationships that maintain, repair and aim to build futures (see Tronto & Fisher, 1990) requires scrutiny when applied to sporting spaces where aspirations for recognition or success intersect with unequal power relations within teams and neighbourhoods. In big cities, training sports practitioners are vulnerable to symbolic and physical violence based on gender, class, sexuality, or race. Many athletes describe regular training as sensing individual physical activity and community that yield resources for coping with daily life. Our fieldwork positions us not only as observers but also as training partners and temporary allies, drawn into collaborative relations that challenge hierarchical research dynamics.
These encounters show how sports communities craft their own forms of resistance and care, continually negotiating agency and belonging. By weaving together our experiences in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, we critically review care in sports research and imagine pathways for anthropology to practice solidarity and co-create justice in violent urban contexts.
Paper short abstract
It examines a rock art site in India based on fieldwork as part of author's doctoral research. It engages with gender not as a means of identifying identities, but as a framework of how everyday practices and forms of labour are acknowledged or marginalised within archaeological interpretation.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines a rock art site in Central India where the author conducted first-hand fieldwork as part of her doctoral research. It engages with gender not as a means of identifying artist's gendered identities, but as a framework for examining how everyday practices and forms of labour are valued, acknowledged, or marginalised within archaeological interpretation.
Field details and the study show repeated repainting over time, with overlapping motifs and reused surfaces, indicating ongoing minor activity rather than preservation. The patterns imply repetitive, maintenance-related actions rather than sporadic efforts and interventions. The paper reflects on how such everyday practices form a normative mode of interaction with painted surfaces, shaping how rock art was lived with and altered across time.
Instead of attributing these practices to specific genders, this paper examines how archaeology has historically interpreted or ignored them. Feminist archaeologists have demonstrated that archaeological narratives often emphasise monumental and heroic acts while neglecting everyday activities such as maintenance, repair, and repetition. These practices have often been understood as women’s work and consequently devalued, reflecting a gendered interpretive bias rather than an absence of material evidence.
By emphasising maintenance, repetition, and selective neglect as essential aspects of rock art practice, this paper shifts the focus from gender as a feature of past bodies to gender as a means of understanding how norms of everyday practice influence archaeological value. In doing so, it contributes to archaeological anthropology by linking gender to the organisation and interpretation of routine engagement with rock art landscapes.