Negotiating Activism: Women of Colour Crafting Antiracist Feminist Organizational Change

• Main Author: Shaikh, Sobia Shaheen
• Other Authors: Ng, Roxana
• Language: en_ca
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: women's organizations; antiracism; feminism; activism; social movements; intersectionality; institutional ethnography; political activist ethnography; organizational change; organizational behaviour; critical research; organizational accountability; activist responsibility; non-profit organizations; NGOs; accountability; 0626; 0452; 0631; 0703; 0630; 0453; 0733; 0340
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/65446

Starting from the standpoint of antiracist feminists in Southern Ontario, Canada, I examine the everyday social organization of antiracist feminist activism. Using key concepts from institutional ethnography and other critical research methods, I explore how women of colour activists engage, contest and modify existing social relations within women’s organizations to craft antiracist feminist organizational change. I describe how women of colour negotiate their antiracist, feminist and social justice commitments in ways which both respond to, and are constitutive of, contradictory social relations within women’s organizations. An analysis of in-depth interviews with women of colour activists reveals dialectic processes of accountability in their everyday antiracist feminist practice. Activists are accountable, on the one hand, to hierarchical relations within the daily practices of women’s organizations, and, on the other hand, to other feminist, antiracist and social justice activists. I describe how relations of accountability, named respectively, organizational accountability and activist responsibility, socially organize women of colour’s everyday experience of antiracist feminist activism. In particular, I argue that organizational accountability must be understood as relations of hierarchical answerability within the organization that extend outside the organization, while activist responsibility needs to be seen as the relations by which activists become accountable to other activists in the enactment of an explicitly antiracist feminist praxis. I describe further how women of colour creatively and consciously do antiracist feminist activism by mobilizing and negotiating both sets of relations of accountability to develop antiracist feminist social and organizational change. I highlight the importance of everyday activist work by revealing the ways women of colour seize the potential for crafting antiracist feminist change through relations of accountability. Significantly, this study offers a conceptualization of everyday antiracist feminist activist practice as a negotiation of relations of accountability.