The International Relations Office is delighted to have been able to provide funding for a variety of international projects and research. Ana Dinerstein from the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at Bath is one of the recipients of IRO funding which supports the activity of WOVNet. Below, she describes the project she is part of and what the funding has allowed her and her colleagues to do.
We are an international network of female scholar–activists-artists working in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, UK and USA. Women on the Verge was created in 2015, convened by Dr Ana Cecilia Dinerstein (Social and Policy Sciences, Bath).
The aim is to bring to light pioneering women’s innovative epistemologies, and methods of research enquiry and forms of theorising in the social sciences, the arts and humanities, that is often absent in published critical theory scholarship. The network is based upon the reality of knowledges and practices that are developing in urban and rural territories across the world today.
Led mainly, but not exclusively by women, the areas of discussion include:
- cooperative forms of production and consumption,
- anti-oppressive education,
- ecological wisdom and sustainability
- water management
Experimental pedagogies require cutting-edge methods of social enquiry and theorising, and WOVNet is aiming to account for and contribute to the radical innovation that is opening a sea of possibilities at the grassroots. Women are weaving alternatives facilitating the innovation of their own local environment with national and global repercussions.
Some of these ideas and empirical research were published in an edited collection titled Social Sciences for An-Other Politics. Women Theorising without Parachutes, Palgrave MacMillan (2016). Since then, we have continued contributing (individually and/or with our own research teams) to the disciplines of:
- anthropology
- geography
- international Relations
- sociology
- women studies
- feminism
- decolonial, Marxist and critical theory
WOVNet aims to open multiple conversations with those social movements and community organisers - most of them women - who are seeking to develop antiracist, non-patriarchal, ethical, ecological, communal, and democratic societies.
The IRO funding has allowed the network to develop and expand and has given opportunity to think about building capacity to work on empirically led theory and epistemologies, as well as exploring the best ways to disseminate knowledge to a wide-ranging audience.
During the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have kept conversing and learning about ourselves and our knowledge, culture, and participation in collective projects (local and global) with different groups in society.
Our goals for 2021/2022 are to use the remaining funding to continue consolidating by
- participating as a collective in the feminist section of the Degrowth Conference (The Hague, August 2021)
- to convene a two-day workshop to explore application for funding for a project on Women and the Social Sciences in the XXI Century);
- to plan a book series with alternative publishers e.g. Retos (Mexico); and
- devise a strategy to consolidate and disseminate our network activities (website, presentations).
See more at: https://www.anaceciliadinerstein.com/members
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