Transnational Feminist Action and Solidarity – 2
Feminist Movement Builders’ School Part 2
Kenya, 2025
Knowledge Building as Power Building
In August 2025, 20 feminists and activists from across Southern and East Africa came together for the second part of the Feminist Movement Builders’ School (FMBS); a year-long journey co-led by JASS and the Feminist Centre for Racial Justice (FCRJ).
After months of conceptualising and experimenting participants reunited in Kenya to share their work and reflect on how it has redefined what it means to build and sustain feminist organising in the current context.
Feminist action research sat at the heart of this work – a process involving research with communities, and not about them. Participants used feminist methodologies to investigate and respond to challenges around peacebuilding, disability justice, queer expression, extractivism, and movement sustainability. Each project tested new ways of connecting learning, organising, and transformation.
Part II of the School was more than a continuation; it was a celebration of knowledge as power. Participants presented their action research projects and creative investigations and explored how feminist knowledge creation can strengthen resistance, reimagine justice, and open new spaces of possibility.
The Value of a Feminist Movement Builders’ School at this time
Across Africa and globally, feminists are organising in times of extraordinary pressure. Governments have intensified repression, using NGO regulations, ‘family values’ rhetoric, and criminalisation to restrict feminist work on abortion, queer rights and sex work. Human Rights Defenders increasingly face harassment, with the growing violence of digital surveillance and terrorism charges weaponised to silence dissent. At the same time, funding cuts and conditionalities have re-shaped NGO landscapes, and socio economic and political precariousness, compounded by climate breakdown, placing increasing strain on the lives of activists and taking a personal toll. The weight of these pressures were repeatedly raised as central concerns.
Given this context, the FMBS offers what movements urgently need — space to slow down, think together, and experiment with how power can be built differently.
Through this process, the School reaffirmed that knowledge is power when it’s built collectively and used politically.
Key Learnings and Concepts
Three core ideas shaped the reflections and research of the 2025 School. Each offered a lens to understand how feminist movements sustain courage, imagination, and resistance in the face of repression.
Participants explored feminist ethics of care and accountability, from informed consent to emotional safety, as practices that embody the movements we’re trying to build. Research is not neutral. It is a political act of care, and it must protect the people who make it possible.
They engaged with queer imaginaries, as an extension of the framework of Belonging, Citizenship and Identity introduced in part 1 of the school, and an examination of the beliefs that frame queer lives as un-African, immoral, or invisible, and discussed how their research findings challenged these assumptions underscoring that countering erasure requires more than visibility; it requires research that disrupts dominant logics and affirms belonging. The School’s conversations opened radical possibilities for how queer experiences can transform the way we imagine justice, kinship, and belonging in African feminist movements.
The school treated counter-narrative work as a central knowledge strategy: a way of reading behind dominant stories, naming whose power and interests they serve, and building and amplifying alternative narratives that mobilise communities toward justice.
The FMBS wove together research, ethics, queer imaginaries and narrative work as tools for unsettling power, seeding solidarity and building collective feminist futures.
Action Research Projects
The Public Showcase of the Action Research Projects: Collective Learning in Action
The School culminated in a public showcase in Nairobi, where participants shared their projects with activists, researchers, and allies. The event was both celebration and reflection, a space where feminist knowledge, art, and organizing met.
Each project was unique in form and focus, spanning zines, murals, podcasts, documentaries, and digital magazines, but all shared one conviction: that feminist movement building is itself a form of knowledge creation.
This work travelled beyond the school, with research findings now circulating in communities and campaigns, sustaining dialogue on issues from queer rights to peacebuilding. The cohort reported strengthened confidence, sharper tools for analysis and expanded networks across borders and struggles.
Here’s a glimpse into the action research projects:
Rogue Women
Rogue Women is a digital magazine that honours the lives and work of Black African feminists and activists across three historical periods: colonial, post-colonial, and contemporary. It celebrates their courage, resistance, and impact in dismantling patriarchy, while documenting the evolution of African feminist movements. It is a feminist archive, preserving overlooked stories and inspiring a new generation to continue the fight for justice, equity, and liberation.
Intersectionality
Intersectionality is a documentary that amplifies the voices of sex workers and formerly incarcerated women in Kenya as they navigate unjust and oppressive systems. More than a film, it is an act of listening and witnessing—centering the stories of those who have lived these struggles firsthand. Through their narratives, the documentary exposes how overlapping layers of identity, marginalisation, and resistance shape daily realities. At the same time, it honours the strength, dignity, and agency of women whose lives reveal the true meaning of intersectional struggle and feminist resilience.
Community Mural Project
The Community Mural Project is a grassroots arts initiative from Kasese District that builds resilience, identity, and solidarity among structurally silenced women in the Rwenzori region in Uganda. Co-created through collective dialogue, the mural is both an artistic expression and a political statement—depicting the struggles, hopes, and aspirations of queer and marginalised communities. In a context shaped by stigma, violence, and repressive laws such as Uganda’s 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act, the project offers visibility, healing, and advocacy through creative storytelling and public art.
Women Mediators of Wau
Women Mediators of Wau documents the work of six women mediators who sustain fragile coexistence in South Sudan’s conflict-affected Wau Municipality. In a context where formal justice is weak and disputes over land, resources, and identity persist, these women prevent violence and nurture peace through indigenous, identity-rooted practices—Ndogo kinship, Dinka maternal authority, Balanda hospitality, Kresh artistic resilience, and Bongo “beer talks.” Their mediation stabilises relationships and restores dignity where state systems cannot reach. Based on ethnographic profiles and collaborative knowledge production, this study makes the case for the recognition and resourcing of grassroots women mediators as essential peacebuilders.
Here News
Here News is a magazine that documents the lived experiences of women with disabilities as they navigate the criminal justice system. From the colonial roots of psychiatry in the 19th century to present-day practices, disability has too often been treated as a site of control—where patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy converge. Through stories, writings, and creative reflections, Here News calls attention to these injustices while insisting that women with disabilities be heard, respected, and recognised as central to feminist movements.
*Felicia Mburu, the author of Here News magazine, passed away on September 8, 2025.
Art Therapy for IDPs
This project created a space for internally displaced people (IDPs), especially young women and girls, to process and express their experiences of conflict through art. The project used creative practice as both a coping mechanism and a form of resilience-building, while also documenting and preserving collective trauma. By transforming personal stories into visual records, the initiative cultivated understanding, strengthened community bonds, and served as a tool for advocacy in the face of displacement and violence.
Somali Women’s Social Justice
This project explores the structural barriers that exclude Somali women from leadership and decision-making. Rooted in a deeply patriarchal context where 90% of women undergo female genital mutilation/cutting and Islamic interpretations are often used to justify exclusion, the project asks what this absence of representation means for women’s rights and futures. Through focus group discussions and the use of art as an expressive tool—particularly vital in communities with high levels of illiteracy—women shared their experiences and aspirations, creating space for both reflection and resistance.
Tujijenge Project
This project brings together LBQT+ persons and women across generations to challenge entrenched patriarchy, heteronormativity, and capitalist control over sexuality, citizenship, and bodily autonomy. Using Feminist Popular Education (FPE) and Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR), the project convened 15 participants for three days of dialogue and creative exercises—charades, timelines, and group discussions—that turned lived experience into shared analysis and strategy. The outcomes included a community charrette training guide, integration of feminist macroeconomic perspectives, and the launch of the Future Ya Citizenship podcast. By validating personal narratives as knowledge, the project affirms everyday resistance and resilience while co-creating tools to dismantle systems of oppression.
Feminist Solidarity and Collective Care
The Feminist Solidarity and Collective Care (FSCC) Action Research project explored the lived experiences of LBQ University students in Zimbabwe and Botswana. The project utilised participatory storytelling, art, and transnational dialogue methodologies. It revealed the pervasive exclusion, violence, and institutional neglect, and stigma faced by LBQ students in Botswana and Zimbabwe.
In the Quiet
In the Quiet is a documentary that centres the voices of 10 LBQ women who endured attempts at conversion in their families, communities, workplaces, and religious institutions. The research reveals both the persistence and the futility of these practices—demonstrating that they do not change women’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression. By naming and documenting these violations, the project fills a critical knowledge gap and challenges institutions that exercise “power over.” At the same time, it affirms LBQ women as agents of resistance and change, creating evidence and tools for advocacy with allies and service providers.
In Their Own Words
When we spoke about decolonising funding, I realised how sensitive language is for queer communities. The landscape is shifting—some words open doors and attract resources, while others shut them down. Funding itself is political.
—Participant from Uganda
At a community activist centre there was this huge map of Africa listing all the freedom fighters. I asked—where are the women who fought alongside the men? I went down the rabbit hole of reading about what African women were doing, and found that women were the ones keeping the movements alive. They were organising, working with lawyers, creating schools and clinics. Yet we don’t know enough about them because of patriarchy and colonialism.
—Participant from Zambia
Religion and culture are often used as tools of oppression, silencing people who are queer, like me. Most of us are criminalised, made to feel we don’t belong—and that is one of the deepest wounds of human existence.
—Participant from Kenya
I believe that women are agents of resistance, yet patriarchal culture and religious interpretations by men are used to suppress us. What I learned is that solutions cannot be found only in familiar ways—we need to think outside the box, drawing on intersectional approaches and the wisdom of other communities and movements.
—Participant from Somalia
We must read more—otherwise our minds will stagnate. When you read, you argue from a place of knowing, not from reaction. Our activism cannot be based on reactions.
—Participant from Malawi
Watch highlights from the School
