Book Forum: Fiona Mackay on Feminist Politics, Intersectionality and Knowledge Cultivation

Feminist Politics, Intersectionality and Knowledge Cultivation is a brave and beautiful book. I read this book at proof stage and was struck by the centrality of Radhika’s own journey and how it dovetails with the overall story told by the book. It is unflinchingly honest and moving – allowing for vulnerability, through Radhika’s account of her own personal and intellectual journey as a feminist academic and global south scholar in the global north. 

The book spans fifteen eventful years and is an exercise in the power of storytelling. As with all good auto-ethnography, Radhika uses personal experience to reflect upon and illuminate wider, crucial theoretical praxis and political questions, especially around intersectionality and knowledge struggles.  Some of these auto-ethnographic narrations relate to a project that Radhika led and which I also worked on, Doing Feminisms in the Academy: Identity, Institutional Pedagogy and Critical Classrooms in India and the UK. Usually, it's only when academics become professors and do inaugural lectures, that they try to pull together all the different strands and animating questions within their work, and even then, few do so with the skill that Radhika does in this book. Radhika weaves together fieldnotes, poems, dairies and observations with fragment of autobiography, critical theory and reflections on pedagogy and classroom experiences; all while giving due weight and space to complexity, and the troubling nature of complexity.  

Chapters 2  and 3 are about the development of women’s and gender studies in India and the UK, and the dilemmas of putting intersectional pedagogy into practice in the classroom. Recalling our project, Doing Feminisms in the Academy: Identity, Institutional Pedagogy and Critical Classrooms in India and the UK required intensive exchange visits, seminars and workshops, which resulted in an academic collection and an accessible comic book version. The engagement between the global south and the global north is usually one-way, but this project enabled great clarity through comparison; shining a light on the taken for granted-ness of some of our privileges in feminism and gender studies in the UK. The creation of that book was a period of mutual learning and exchange. Radhika is quite a tough taskmistress – hard on herself, but also on us! We all worked hard, but it was also a great deal of fun, including working alongside Rukmini Sen, Krishna Menon and their colleagues at Ambedkar University, Delhi. We saw at close quarters Radhika’s careful, passionate and reflexive approach to research, pedagogy and education, and the difficult work of trying to decolonise academic knowledge and practice, including managing micro aggressions and institutional racism.  Feminist Politics, Intersectionality and Knowledge Cultivation – and Radhika’s wider work and practice - has challenged me to think harder and more critically about my own positionality. It has often been uncomfortable. What needs to change for white feminists to move beyond lip service, to meaningful engagement? We don’t always have the space to reflect on our own vulnerability but that can be incredibly generative. This is a much-needed book to sustain us in these dark times. 

References 

Radhika Govinda Feminist Politics, Intersectionality and Knowledge Cultivation 

Radhika Govinda et al (eds) Doing Feminisms in the Academy: Identity, Institutional Pedagogy and Critical Classrooms in India and the UK. 

Prof. Fiona Mackay is a feminist political scientist at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on gender reforms during periods of restructuring and institutional change, as well as public policy. Fiona is the founding Director of GENDER.ED and now serves as Governance and Policy Advisor for GENDER.ED