SESSION 10

AFRICAN URBANISMS THROUGH FEMINIST LENSES: CRITICAL PRAXIS AND SOUTH-SOUTH DIALOGUES

Critical feminist lenses are required for a greater understanding of African urbanisms in terms of critical engagements, transformative practices, and alternative futures. This session will bring together feminist studies that draw from decolonial approaches and intersectionality to examine gender and transformative urban practices in African cities, in dialogue with other geographies of the global South. We are interested in empirical findings as well as methodological approaches about the intersection of social, political, and spatial dimensions of multiple and interlinked forms of transformative practices and feminist praxes. We call for studies of social and political feminist practices and articulations, as well as their implications on individual and collective identities, on the production of space(s) and on the imagination of present and future urban models and possibilities. We are interested in highlighting different instances and experiences of radical care and solidarity networks, among other modes of resistance, and their relationship with the production of cou11ter hegemonic spaces and imaginaries. Examples include and are not limited to women's multiple forms of struggles to acquire and maintain access to land in urban and rural settings, promote family-based agriculture system and democratize urban mobility and transportation systems, as well as achieve broader political representation at different dimensions (from local to national within customary and statutory systems). We are particularly interested in studies that frame feminist practice as negotiative agency to address multiple forms of insecurities, in discussions of gender performativity and feminist identity, and on the relationship with current practice and articulations of alternative futures.