Challenging Women's Agency and Activism in Early Modernity

The organizational choice of grouping chapters by verbs was appropriate given the book's title and focus, but given the genre of an edited collection growing from a conference, often the chapters read as individual pieces rather than a conversation about agency that is picked up in a new way by each contributor. [...]the book mirrors the realities of a broad conference, and I find myself wishing for the Q&A section where the contributors are invited to make connections across disparate case studies and interests-one can sense these connections, but they are not explicit. The authors link the Women's Building, a Los Angeles-based women's art collective in the late twentieth century, to early modern women's social networks and consider the ways that traditional digital network mapping does not work for women artists. [...]the book gestures to discussions of agency within enslavement and colonialism in the introduction, but this is noticeably absent from individual chapters.

Networking Voices against Violence: Online Activism and Transnational Feminism in Local-Global Contexts

Contemporary feminism manifests itself in the form of blogs, hashtags, e-magazines, and digitally planned protests through online communities that address the prevailing concerns of feminists in the digital age. This feminist approach to digital activism aims to reclaim the power of technology which is inherently hegemonic and masculinist by creating alternate spaces and modes of protest. Transnational feminism is increasingly being shaped by online discourses and the new digital space enables social movements in shaping feminist solidarity and complex netizen identities. This paper adopts discourse analysis of online contents that question the prevalent patriarchal system in South Asia and thus situate it in the changing socio-cultural context globally. Popular hashtag movements in various countries such as #YesAllWomen, #notallmen, #MeToo, #SheInspiresMe, #WomenMarch4Change, #WhyLoiter, #IWillGoOut, #AuratMarch #GirlsAtDhabas, #SafeCityIndia #PinjraTod as well as other online forums which raise the voices of women against various forms of violence will be analysed with a view to uncover their multi-layered impact. These multifaceted discourses on gender-based violence have reached a wider audience across the world through social media, and academic webinars during the Covid-19 pandemic have also largely contributed to the debate. The resonance of these dialogues has transcended the local to the global level;a close study of the transnational character of these digital messages in social media aims to examine the strict demarcation between the public and the private, thus challenging the concept of gendered spaces. This paper employs a multidisciplinary approach to methodologically analyse the online resources and nature of activism in India and investigate its global relevance. Additionally, the paper will also explore how the online campaigns are establishing networks notwithstanding time and place, by interrogating and understanding the relationship between online activism and its significance in conceptualizing transnational feminism.

Researching intimate partner violence. Gender, intersectionality, and policymaking

Despite decades of activism, research, theory development, and policymaking, the problem of intimate partner violence remains a major societal and health problem. While, in ‘normal’ times, one in three women experience physical or sexual violence during their lifetime by their partners, emergencies and epidemics serve as catalysts for violence against women, resulting in two- or even threefold increases in the number of reported cases. [...]factors such as age, ability, displacement, and immigrant status induce additional risks and vulnerabilities for victims of violence (UN Women Headquarters, 2020). [...]the recent Group of experts (GREVIO) evaluation report on the implementation of the Istanbul Convention in the Netherlands (Council of Europe, 2020) highlighted that such individualised approaches fail to recognise the gendered power dynamics and inequalities maintained and enhanced by this type of violence. In the article ‘Economic Abuse Amongst Dutch Women (Formerly) Victimised by Intimate Partner Violence and Abuse’, Van Gelder, Ligthart, Astro and Oertelt-Prigione make use of a mixed method approach to investigate how economic abuse operates as ‘a silent but distinct form’ of IPV.