Over the course of the last six years, the ‘Sustaining Power: Women’s struggles against contemporary backlash in South Asia’ (SuPWR) project has undertaken research to understand when, how, and why women’s struggles succeed in retaining power and sustaining their gains against backlash.
This research, undertaken in collaboration with 16 diverse women’s struggles across four countries in South Asia (Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan), has provided us with invaluable findings and insights.
Join us for a half-day event, where SuPWR researchers will present key empirical and conceptual insights from the project. You will also hear from leading global feminists from SuPWR’s International Advisory Board as they reflect on these findings in relation to their own geographic, disciplinary, and thematic expertise.
What do we now know? Theorising strategies at feminist frontlines
09:00 – 11:00
How should we theorise contemporary gender backlash, given its multiple and varied forms? In what ways has backlash reshaped feminist organising across the region? And, most crucially, what works to resist backlash and advance feminist futures in the face of mounting local and transnational challenges?
With a view to informing both feminist scholarship and activism, this session presents key empirical and conceptual insights from the project and how these contribute to interdisciplinary debates across feminist and social movement theory, development studies, and political science. Grounded in the perspectives of activists on the frontlines of countering backlash in South Asia, these findings reflect five years of collaboration and learning across a particularly turbulent time both regionally and transnationally.
Grounded in the perspectives of feminist activists at the frontlines of countering backlash, we take stock of the shifting political and intellectual terrains, reflect on strategies and resilience of movements and collectively imagine pathways for sustaining feminist power in turbulent times.
Chair
- Anuradha Joshi, IDS Director
Speakers
- Deepta Chopra, SuPWR Principal Investigator and Professorial Research Fellow, Institute of Development Studies
- Priya Raghavan, IDS Research Fellow
- Samreen Mushtaq, IDS Research Fellow
- Maryam Khan, SuPWR Co-Investigator & Country Lead (Pakistan) Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives
- Shandana Mohmand, IDS Research Fellow
- Mona Sherpa, SuPWR Co-Investigator & Country Lead (Nepal), CARE Nepal
- Mubashira Zaidi, SuPWR Co-Investigator & Country Lead (India), Institute of Social Studies Trust
- Sohela Nazneen, IDS Research Fellow
- Maheen Sultan, SuPWR Co-Investigator & Country Lead (Bangladesh), BRAC Institute of Governance and Development
Panel session: ‘Pathways to Solidarity’
11:30 – 13:30
Specialist engagement by International Advisory Group members The closing session will bring together leading global feminists from SuPWR’s International Advisory Board (IAB) to reflect on SuPWR’s findings in relation to their own geographic, disciplinary, and thematic expertise. Their responses will help situate insights from South Asia within wider transnational scholarship and activism on countering gender backlash and building feminist solidarities, while also connecting this moment to earlier historical conjunctures of feminist struggle, resistance, and renewal.
This collective conversation will trace resonances, divergences, and shared challenges across contexts. As both a closing exercise in collective sense-making and an opening toward envisioning and building future solidarities, the session will invite participants to connect the dots across regions and histories, and to reflect on what these findings mean for feminist organising and knowledge production now and in the future.
Chair
- Deepta Chopra, SuPWR Principal Investigator and Professorial Research Fellow, Institute of Development Studies
Speakers
- Anne Marie Goetz, SuPWR IAB member and Clinical Professor, Center for Global Affairs, New York University
- Niraja Gopal Jayal, SuPWR IAB member and Avantha Chair, King’s India Institute, Kings College London
- Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay, SuPWR IAB member and Associate, KIT Institute
- Georgina Waylen, SuPWR IAB member and WJM Mackenzie Chair in Government, University of Manchester
- Naila Kabeer, Emeritus Professor of Gender and Development, London School of Economics