What

Women Radically Transforming a World in Crisis, JASS’ inspiring new dialogue series, was born in response to the need for new spaces for political conversation, community, and strategizing at a time of lockdown and isolation.  And to reach and engage as many women as possible, we are using community radio, webinars, phone apps, podcasts, and social media.

Why

The “dialogues” take their inspiration from the bold feminist agenda created for the 25th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women. We had imagined this anniversary year as a chance to bring a robust feminist agenda to a variety of political spaces. In preparation we had joined other activists to create a bold feminist statement (from which we took the title of our dialogues) that we could use as a rallying point and set of demands. We had seen it as a way to speak to women’s advances since 1995, the current threats to our gains and to engage in a fresh articulation of demands. Most important, we planned to approach the opportunity afforded by B+25 to advance our movement building work and to impact the political conversations with a bold grassroots feminist agenda.

And then, almost overnight, the space to physically come together for shared political learning and conversation literally closed to halt the spread of COVID 19. But the need for political conversation only grew as the glaring injustice, violence and inequity of our world was laid bare by the pandemic and the state’s response to it.

Yet with every crisis, however, comes an opportunity to rethink and reorganize ourselves creatively.  While we had imagined participating in and claiming existing political spaces, we now face the need to create our own spaces, albeit in largely virtual ways.