Somali Immigrant Mothers’ Experiences of School Engagement: Implications for School Leaders

Purpose: This critical phenomenology study examines the experiences of Somali mothers’ involvement with an urban school in London, United Kingdom. Specifically, the study explores Somali mothers’ experiences and responses in navigating the coloniality of gender discourses imbedded in school structure and culture. The research questions that guided the study concerned the gender-based tools that Somali mothers use to navigate the school structure and culture and how school leaders can recognize and tap into parental knowledge and ways of being to serve these communities. Methods: This study is based on the stories of five Somali immigrant mothers. Data collection included focus groups, field memos, site observations, and school archival data. Data were analyzed through hermeneutic interpretation of whole-part-whole. Findings: Somali mothers use three important elements—identity, resistance, and traditions—to respond to coloniality of gender in school as they negotiate tensions between the Somali conception of motherhood and western notions of gender. The findings emphasize the practices rooted in Indigenous Somali culture and gender roles as assets. Implications: This research argues that the matripotent leadership practices of Somali mothers can inform theory, practice, and policy, as these practices offer a more collective and humanizing approach to leadership centered in ideals connected to a non-Western conception of motherhood, gender, and gender dynamics.

Extractivism and Territorial Dispossession in Rural Colombia: A Decolonial Commitment to Campesinas’ Politics of Place

Linked to extractive practices, territorial dispossession can be traced back to the colonisation of Abya Yala. From a decolonial commitment, this article complicates notions of dispossession and extractivism as merely emerging from war in Colombia and focuses on their presence in Campesinas territories. Based on the conceptualisations of the coloniality of power and coloniality of gender, I narrate how territorial dispossession and extractivism are felt in women’s ‘body-lands’ through foreign tourism/conservation development and new export crops in two rural veredas in the Colombian Andes and in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta where I conducted participatory visual projects in 2016. From a relational understanding of place, I also demonstrate the ways that the rural population is resisting and negotiating within these processes. Ultimately, I make a call for feminist scholars to politically commit to the dismantling of the coloniality of gender, and to the resistances to territorial dispossession and extractivism (epistemic and economic) that rural women are leading in place in the Global South.

Racialized Popular Feminism: A Decolonial Analysis of Women’s Struggle with Police Violence in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas

The action of the women of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas to avoid, prevent, counter, and denounce police violence, both infrapolitically and in the public transcript, are associated with the rise of a political consciousness that is gendered and racialized in the context of the genocide of Brazil’s black population. Their resistance, rooted in “Amefricanidade” and the lingering coloniality of gender, is best described as characterized by an intersectional consciousness of injustice. A ação das mulheres das favelas do Rio de Janeiro para impedir, prevenir, combater e denunciar a violência policial, tanto na infrapolítica quanto na esfera pública, está relacionada ao surgimento de uma consciência política de gênero e também a racialização em um contexto de genocídio da população negra no Brasil. Sua resistência, arraigada na “Amefricanidade” e na persistente colonialidade de gênero, é mais bem descrita e categorizada como consciência interseccional de injustiça.

Latin America, Decoloniality, and Translation

This chapter reflects on the feminist decolonial turn in Latin America by taking as its point of departure the debates on the coloniality of power and of gender. It analyzes how decolonial feminisms might unsettle hegemonic feminisms through the practice of translation—based not only on a linguistic paradigm, but more importantly, on an ontological one. In applying the notion of translation as equivocation, derived from Amerindian perspectivism, to discussions of the coloniality of gender, this chapter explores how some Latin American feminists were enacting a decolonial politics avant la lettre. It argues that translation becomes a key element in forging alternative feminist decolonial epistemologies, as well as a practice enabling partial connections among the various feminist formations in the Americas.