Book Talk | ‘Feminist Politics, Intersectionality and Knowledge Cultivation’ | Centre for Women and the Law

The Centre for Women and the Law (CWL) is organising a book talk event by Dr. Radhika Govinda, Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Director of GENDER.ED, University of Edinburgh, on her book ‘Feminist Politics, Intersectionality and Knowledge Cultivation.’ The event will be held on Tuesday, April 8, 2025 between 5 pm and 6.30 pm at the NLSIU library basement.

Dr. Ashwini Tambe, Director of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Professor of WGSS and History, George Washington University, who is currently in Bengaluru as a Fulbright scholar will be the discussant of the book. Dr. Debangana Chatterjee, Assistant Professor, Social Sciences, NLSIU & Co-Director, CWL, will be the moderator of the discussion.

Registration is mandatory for visitors from outside the NLS community. You can register for the talk here.

Title and Abstract of the Discussion

‘Insights, Dilemmas and Hopes in Cultivating Knowledge on Feminist Politics in India’

This discussion is a meditation on some of the insights, dilemmas and hopes I have encountered when engaging in knowledge-making on feminist politics in India and beyond. It draws on my engagement – spanning fifteen years and four case studies – with questions of intersectionality, coloniality and neoliberalism in feminist activism, development practice and knowledge production. I reflect on the construction and continued use of the ‘third world woman’ trope, the impact of professionalization of feminism on knowledge-making, the exclusion and erasures in such knowledge-making, and the challenges in decentring northern hegemony in women’s and gender studies and in decolonizing feminist classrooms. My motivation behind these reflections is to disrupt the idea of sanitised linear accounts of feminist knowledge production. The discussion is drawn from my new book, ‘Feminist Politics, Intersectionality and Knowledge Cultivation’.