Latin American Feminisms “Go Global”: Trends of the 1990s and Challenges for the New Millennium

Álvarez, Sonia E.

doi:10.4324/9780429501135-15

Cited by 44 publications

(20 citation statements)

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“…Other work shifted the attention from the incorporation of actors to institutionalization of the women's movement itself. Since the late 1990s concerns have been expressed about the 'NGO-ization' of the women's movement which was seen to have the effect of deradicalizing feminist claims as the women's movement started orienting itself towards mainstream politics and funding logics (Lang 1997;Alvarez 1998;Menon 2004). More recently, scholars have articulated the need to "go beyond tropes of autonomy and purity associated with the NGOization paradigm" (Roy 2015: 112) for a more nuanced analysis of the work of feminist NGOs (e.g., Bernal and Grewal 2014; de Jong forthcoming).…”

Section: Feminist Debates On Co-optation and Their Predecessorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The co-optation of feminisms: a research agenda

Jong

Kimm

2017

International Feminist Journal of Politics

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Section: Feminist Debates On Co-optation and Their Predecessorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The co-optation of feminisms: a research agenda

Jong

Kimm

2017

International Feminist Journal of Politics

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“…In contrast to the dominant view of NGOs as inherently democratizing, a critical body of scholarship argues that NGOs underwent a transformation of identity, institutional forms, tactics, and discourses during the 1980s and 90s, largely in response to the pressures of neoliberal economic restructuring, which compromised their role as catalysts for social change (e.g., see Alvarez ; Kamat ; Markowitz and Tice ). Many such organizations that had once been informal or loosely organized collectives dedicated to consciousness raising and community organizing evolved into professionalized bureaucratic organizations delivering services to the poor in partnership with state institutions and donor organizations.…”

Section: Situating the Story: Grassroots Organizations And School Reformmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In making this shift from community‐based organizing to school‐based service provision, Alianza dropped the more radical aspects of its work and took on activities that closely aligned with the aims of neoliberal reform. To interpret this turn of events, I draw from literature on the professionalization and depoliticization of grassroots nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (e.g., Alvarez ; Kamat ; Markowitz and Tice ). This literature examines how grassroots organizations, despite radical democratic aims, sometimes reproduce neoliberal hegemony in ways that are quickly naturalized and hence unchallenged.…”

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confidence: 99%

Negotiating Tensions: Grassroots Organizing, School Reform, and the Paradox of Neoliberal Democracy

Nygreen¹

2017

Anthropology & Education Quarterly

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Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork at a community-based organization (CBO) engaged in parent organizing for urban school reform, this paper examines how organizers engaged with the imperatives of neoliberal reform and the broader neoliberal policy context. It highlights organizers' agency but also shows how hegemonic discourse constrained their agency. It argues CBO involvement can contribute to educational neoliberalization and to neoliberal notions of democracy that, paradoxically, employ processes of symbolic inclusion and material exclusion (Miraftab 2004). [parent organizing, grassroots organizations, neoliberalism, democracy, school reform] Education scholars are rallying around grassroots community organizing as the latest answer to persistent structural inequality in schools. A growing body of research literature on what is typically called "community organizing for school reform" (Mediratta et al. 2009) bolsters the case for this approach and documents successful campaigns in which low-income parents or youth, working through nonprofit community-based organizations (CBOs), mobilized for and won specific reforms at the school, district, or even state level (e.g.Warren and Mapp 2011). Community organizing holds a certain romantic appeal among educational scholars, activists, and reformers from the Left as well as the neo/liberal mainstream, who position it as an empowering, democratic, and "bottom-up" approach to school change in contrast to dominant, top-down, technocratic approaches (Warren 2014). I share many scholars' enthusiasm for grassroots organizing in education, and this enthusiasm led me to undertake the research featured in this article. However, with its focus on documenting successful campaigns, much of the literature on educationbased organizing glosses over the ideological contradictions, tensions, and dilemmas inherent in this work. As well, this literature tends to take for granted rather than problematize the neoliberal policy context that is the terrain on which organizing work is carried out. It rarely interrogates how people working within and through CBOs engage with the hegemonic discourse and imperatives of neoliberal education reform, and with what effects.This article contributes such an analysis by focusing on ideological contradictions, tensions, and dilemmas that emerged as one CBO, Alianza, worked to organize Latina/o immigrant parents in a large, high-poverty, racially and linguistically diverse, urban school district. Drawing from two years of ethnographic fieldwork at Alianza, a self-defined Freire-based popular education organization, I explore how its educator-organizers negotiated tensions between the values of popular education and the imperatives of neoliberal education reform. Popular education is a theory and practice of education for social change, often associated with the work of Paulo Freire who popularized many of its key concepts (e.g., Freire 1999). Popular education aims to cultivate critical consciousness, collective empowerment, and political action among...

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“…Economic austerity shrunk the size of the state and also, as Schild (1998) argues, restructured the parameters of political action. For this reason, many social movements, especially women's movements, that developed in the second half of the 20 th century incorporated anticapitalist and anti-politics positions (Alvarez 1998). Social movements offered disenfranchised citizens a way to challenge the territoriality of the state and restructure social and political life (Slater 1998, Jelin 1998.…”

Section: Social Movementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An understanding of certain feminist theoretical perspectives is important to contextualize the rise of modern women's movements in Latin America, which many authors recognize as gender-focused movements arising since the 1970s (Jelin 1990b;Jaquette 1991, Alvarez 1998). In particular, many self-described Third-World feminists have helped shift international feminist discourses away from the liberal feminist portrayal of "Third World" i.e., non-Western women as helpless victims oppressed by their culture and/or religion.…”

Section: Feminism and Women's Movementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Local Media Representations of the Colombian Women’s Peace Movement La Ruta Pacífica De Las Mujeres

Kersjes¹

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v and the women of the theater group, Kelly and Teresa, Olga, Shima, Sandra, and Alejandra-for taking the time out of your very busy schedules to sit down with me. Each one of you provided a unique and often unexpected perspective that shaped my research project in very exciting ways, and offered nuance and history that would not have been possible to gather anywhere else. A very warm and special thank you to Olga Lucia Ramírez Ramírez, who made all of my interviews with the members of La Ruta Pacífica possible. Without your kindness and help in Medellín my thesis would not have been possible. Thank you for believing in my work and for working so hard to connect me with members of the movement. Thank you to all of my wonderful friends, housemates, and graduate school comrades, whose encouragements, assistance, empathy, laughter, and love absolutely made my success possible. Thank you to my family, for loving me and never taking me too seriously. And finally, a shameless thank you to my little dog Lily, for waking me up early, getting me away from the computer for walks outside, and for making me laugh every single day. I love you, Lily Elf. vi

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Latin American Feminisms “Go Global”: Trends of the 1990s and Challenges for the New Millennium

Cited by 44 publications

References 1 publication

The co-optation of feminisms: a research agenda

The co-optation of feminisms: a research agenda

Negotiating Tensions: Grassroots Organizing, School Reform, and the Paradox of Neoliberal Democracy

Local Media Representations of the Colombian Women’s Peace Movement La Ruta Pacífica De Las Mujeres

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