Our collaborative and participatory transnational project, ‘Neoliberalism, Gender and Curriculum Transformation in Higher Education: Feminist Decoloniality as Care’ (FEMDAC) involves early-career women academics from three South African institutions (the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Stellenbosch University and Durban University of Technology) and two in the United States of America (USA) (the Universities of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and New Mexico). Black women are the most underrepresented group in higher education globally. Even if Black women have access to becoming academics, the burdens of institutional racism and patriarchy combined often leave them feeling isolated and exploited, with arduous prospects of promotion. Further, even though Black women are registering and completing doctoral degrees in higher numbers, they still tend to be underrepresented in senior academic and leadership positions.
“The aim of the FEMDAC project is therefore three-fold: 1) to create a community of praxes (CoP) that brings together a network of women academics from public universities across the two countries to collaboratively develop scholarship on the nature and influence of gender, its intersectionalities and neoliberalism on their research and teaching capacities; 2) to examine the ways in which the women understand and contribute to scholarly debate about the competing discourses of neoliberalism and gender inequality on the one hand, and debates around decoloniality, decolonisation and transformation in higher education on the other; and 3) to explore the ways in which Black women academics understand, respond to and resist the gendered and neoliberal policies, structures and processes in universities.” Over the course of the project (2019-2024), FEMDAC expanded to include over 35 participants, staff, and investigators from more than a dozen higher education institutions from South Africa and the USA. Despite negative challenging conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic, which further widened gender disparities in academia, FEMDAC participants not only persisted, but thrived and elevated as demonstrated by their rates of scholarly publications, promotions, new executive leadership roles, and other academic accomplishments.
Source: Moletsane, R., Carolissen, R., Sader, S., & Mthiyane, N. (2023). Metaphor drawing as decolonial research and feminist care among Black women academics in selected South African higher education institutions in times of crises. Agenda, 37(2), 11–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2023.2253633