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Decolonising Feminist Publishing

This talk will present a chapter from a book-in-progress, tentatively called Dissonant Intimacies: doing transnational feminism in the global South. While the bulk of the book concerns higher education in India and South Africa, this chapter turns to feminist decolonising imperatives operating out of the global North. I reflect on how the doing of transnational feminism at this scale might forge something beyond a reiteration of Western epistemic hierarchies and Northern institutional agendas around the production and circulation of feminist knowledge (or not). I focus on attempts – including my own – to decolonise feminist publishing, from making academic publishing less exclusionary and extractive to an overhaul of commercial publishing entirely. These have been met with unexpected challenges and outcomes, whether to do with academic precarity in the North or the desires for Southern scholars to be visible to publics there. In this talk, I think together with feminist colleagues in our joint efforts to materialise different institutional and epistemic infrastructures for feminist knowledge production and circulation. 

Srila Roy is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Her long-standing research and teaching expertise is in the area of transnational feminist studies. Her latest books are the co-edited, Intimacy and Injury: in the wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa (Manchester University Press, 2022) and the sole-authored, Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India (Duke University Press, 2022). Changing the Subject was the winner of the Distinguished book award of the Sexualities section of the American Sociological Association and the best book award of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies section of the International Studies Association.