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.

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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