Leela Fernandes' years of teaching women studies courses at Rutgers--where she has seen frustration, paralysis and depression take hold of young students grappling with the hard realities of social activism--led her to examine the state of contemporary feminism and social justice movements. The result is an accessible social critique that goes directly to the heart of the issues. Transforming Feminist Practice takes a hard, unrelenting look at: * Social justice organizations--their need to show results (for funding), the egotism that filters in, and the replication of power bases that work against social justice goals * Academia--its emphasis on publishing, the pretensions and posturing that result, and the use of western contexts to study non-western cultures * Identity politics--that, though necessary for policy change, make it difficult to forge bridges for social justice work Fernandes' solution refocuses the struggle and opens dialogue for a new era. She suggests that feminists, as well as other social justice activists, find a non-institutional, personal spiritual base that will give them the humility and strength needed for their work. Citing the active political effect of spiritual leaders like Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr., she challenges contemporary activists to rethink what they need to do personally to sustain a thoughtful, ethical base for a lifelong struggle. Leela Fernandes is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Women's Studies at Rutgers University, specializing in feminist approaches to the study of class politics. She is the author of Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills, as well as numerous articles and book reviews. Originally from India, she has lived in the U.S. for the past twenty years.

The acceleration of economic globalization and the rapid global flows of people, culture, and information have intensified the importance of developing transnational understandings of contemporary issues. Transnational Feminism in the United States examines how transnational perspectives shape the ways in which we create and disseminate knowledge about the world within the United States, and how the paradigm of transnational feminism is affected by national narratives and public discourses within the country itself. An innovative theoretical project that is both deconstructive and constructive, this bookinterrogates the limits of feminist thought, primarily through case studies that illustrate its power to create new fields of research out of traditionally interdisciplinary lines of inquiry. Leela Fernandes discusses ways to approach, analyze, and capture processes that exceed and unsettle the nation-state within the transnational feminist paradigm. Examining the links between power and knowledge that bind interdisciplinary theory and research, she shines new light on issues such as human rights as well as academic debates about transnational feminist perspectives on global issues. A thought-provoking analysis, Transnational Feminism in the United States powerfully contributes to the field of Women’s Studies and related cross-disciplinary scholarship on feminist theory and gender from a global perspective. Leela Fernandes is Professor of Women’s Studies and Political Science at the University of Michigan, and author of India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform; Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills; and Transforming Feminist Practice.

Radiating Feminism: Resilience Practices to Transform Our Inner and Outer Lives is a practical guide to embodying feminist principles not just in our politics, but also in our very ways of being. Bringing together intersectional feminism with mindful reflection and embodied practice, this book offers practical wisdom for living by feminist principles in our daily lives. Each chapter includes practices and interactive activities to help navigate common challenges along feminist journeys. The book also draws on wisdom from feminist leaders and contemporary conversations from social justice movements. Both inspiring and guiding, the book will provide readers with the skills to cultivate resilience to face the many barriers to feminist social transformation. Radiating Feminism will be of use to students of Gender Studies, Social Work, Psychology, Community Health, and the Social Sciences, as well as anyone with a longstanding or fresh commitment to feminism and social justice.

Women continue to be extremely under-represented in the architectural profession. Despite equal numbers of male and female students entering architectural studies, there is at least 17-25% attrition of female students and not all remaining become practicing architects. In both the academic and the professional fields of architecture, positions of power and authority are almost entirely male, and as such, the profession is defined by a heterosexual, Eurasian male perspective. This book argues that it is vital for all architectural students and practitioners to be exposed to a diversity of contemporary architectural practices, as this might provide a first step into broadening awareness and transforming architectural engagement. It considers the relationships between feminist methodologies and the various approaches toward design and their impact upon our understanding and relationship to the built environment. In doing so, this collection challenges two conventional ideas: firstly, the definition of architecture and secondly, what constitutes a feminist practice. This collection of up-and-coming female architects and designers use a wide range of local and global examples of their work to question different aspects of these two conventional ideas. While focusing on feminist perspectives, the book offers insights into many different issues, concerns and interpretations of architecture, proposing through these types of engagement, architecture can become more culturally, politically and environmentally relevant. This 'next generation' of architects claim feminism as their own and through doing so, help define what feminism means and how it is evolving in the 21st century.

A classroom resource for instructors that includes full syllabi and teaching modules, Feminist Practices will be of interest to anyone who teaches in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Feminist Practices is intended for use in classrooms and to spark creative ideas for teaching a diverse array of topics. What makes a practice feminist? What is at stake in claiming the feminist label? Whether within a university context or in larger national and global ones, feminist projects involve challenging established relations of power (critique), envisioning alternative possibilities (theory), and employing activism to change social relations. By taking diverse forms of feminist practice as its focal point, this course reader investigates how to study the complexity of women’s and men’s lives in ways that take race, gender-power, ethnicity, class, and nationality seriously. Feminist Practices also shows how the production of such feminist knowledge challenges long-established beliefs about the world. Topics covered include • Gendered labor, • Commercialization of sexuality and reproduction, • Love and marriage in the twenty-first century, • Violence against women, • Varieties of feminist activism, and • Women’s leadership and governance. Feminist Practices draws upon articles published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society to explore the nature of feminist practices in the twenty-first century and the range of issues these practices address. Organized thematically the collection captures the complexity of a global movement that emerges in the context of local struggles over diverse modes of injustice.

In Practising Feminism, contributors drawn from a range of backgrounds in anthropology, sociology and social psychology, explore different ways of practising feminism and their effect on gendered identities. The contributors examine feminism and gender identities in different cultures, feminism as a politics of transformation, the call for recognition of heterosexuality as a politicised identity, the practical role of feminism in nationalist struggles, power relations and gender differences, and the methodological implications of feminist practices. They all discuss identity, difference and power and their importance to feminist political practice. Practising Feminism is an important contribution to the neglected middle ground between post-modern deconstructions of difference and identity, and continued feminist concern with grounded power relations and the validity of experience.

"In this latest volume to emerge from the work of the Feminist Therapy Institute, Ballou, Hill, West, and their contributors have done a powerful job of explicating current themes in feminist therapy practice, with a lovely balance of theory and application. The careful attention to the economic and social demands of the current political climate and their impact on feminist practice is particularly valuable for advancing feminist analysis of the role of psychotherapy in social transformation." --Laura S. Brown, Ph.D. ABPP, Director, Fremont Community Therapy Project Seattle, WA "In the twenty-plus years since the original Handbook of Feminist Therapy was published, members of the Feminist Therapy Institute and other forward-thinking professionals have continued to push and prod-both themselves and mainstream therapists-to examine the underpinnings of the psychotherapy endeavor. In this volume, the editors and contributors present an organized overview of the most up-to-date thinking about feminist therapy and draw attention to the alliance between feminist therapy and multicultural counseling, critical theory, and liberation psychology. Whereas most mainstream therapy models have progressed beyond a view of the therapist as an objective agent, they generally do not provide a model for understanding the therapist's and, for that matter, the client's beliefs, experiences, and world view. The contextual ecological feminist model explicated here articulates a means of examining the contextual and ecological elements of person's worlds. "The authors of this volume have nicely illustrated feminist therapy's key tenets-to illuminate the multiple spheres of influence in clients' lives, to empower clients as well as ameliorate their distress, to appreciate the linkages among sociostructural, cultural and relational influences, and to work for social justice-in well-drawn theoretical explanations and carefully detailed case examples that bring us to the cutting edge of contemporary feminist therapy." --Maryka Biaggio, PhD Psychologist, Consultant, and Writer, Portland, Oregon