The Gender at Work Podcast

Episode 32: What's Love Got to Do With It? With Kumi Naidoo and Amitabh Behar

This final episode of our series "What's Love Got to Do With It" features Kumi Naidoo and Amitabh Behar. Kumi is a South African human rights and climate justice activist who is currently President of the Fossil fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative and former head of international organizations including Civicus, Greenpeace and Amnesty International. Amitabh is the Executive Director of Oxfam International who has with decades of experience in human rights, economic inequalities, governance accountability, philanthropy, democracy, social justice and building citizen participation. Both are globally known civil society leaders. In this conversation, Kumi and Amitabh reflect on weaving love, solidarity and justice in activism amid rising authoritarianism, polarization, economic inequality and climate crisis. Kumi talks about the need to reframe our messaging to avoid "us versus them" and to build bridges to people beyond existing movements and to avoid pessimism. Amitabh stresses the need to combine love with structural change and justice and to confront patriarchal institutional cultures that undermine internal change. The episode ends with a cautious but hopeful call for bold, systemic rethinking of movement strategy. Please listen in and send us your thoughts!

Episode 31: What's love got to do with it: Carly Hare, Ava Bynum and Masha Chernyak

It isn't often that we interview social justice activists working in the United States but in the last few years the US context has dramatically worsened. Democratic freedoms have been curtailed, women's rights have been eroded, immigrants are being expelled and incarcerated, and we are seeing armed responses in several major cities to civil society protests. So, in this episode we talk to three extraordinary US social justice leaders: Carly Hare, an equity activist and advocate for the collective power of community solutions who comes from the Pawnee/Yankton nations; Masha Chernyak, an immigrant from Russia, who worked for more than a decade at the Latino Community Foundation where she boldly centered love in all of its programs, helping build the largest Latino donor network in the nation and a Latino Nonprofit Accelerator that has changed the game for grassroots nonprofits; and Ava Bynum a resource mobilizer, organizer, and movement leader. Ava is the Director of Impact at Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), where they work to resource social justice movements, lead workshops, coach donors, and raise critical funds to support collective liberation efforts. We asked them to explain how they center love and solidarity in their work to challenge current moves against democracy and human rights in the US. All of them acknowledge that solidarity work isn't light and it isn't easy. Carly navigates the different communities she belong to – tribal, family, inter-racial communities – and asks "how do you skill build, how do you hold enough space to love and believe that people can be mobilized? And then how do you hold enough self-love to not put yourself in harm's way". Masha reflects on how she used to be laughed out of the room when she led strategic planning sessions where she put love squarely at the center but she prevailed. Recounting the words of Shiree Tang she says "when the house is burning, what else do you do? ... We need to make love just as sexy and powerful as fear." Ava says clearly that "it's really hard to organize people you don't love or at least have some openness to." Speaking as someone who has worked with poor white communities in Appalachia and other rural areas in the US, she has important lessons to share. Do these strategies change systems of oppression?  Listen in and hear their views!

Episode 30: What's Love Got to Do with It? With Pregs Govender and Srilatha Batliwala

In our second episode on exploring love as a basis for organizing and solidarity, we interview Pregs Govender (South Africa) and Srilatha Batliwala (India) – both globally well-known feminist activists and authors. Pregs aligns love with the inherent dignity of human beings and speaks eloquently of how oppressive systems, from apartheid in South Africa to Israel's genocide against the Palestinian people, use power to eradicate our humanity. What can we do about it? Srilatha offers brilliant insights about how we need to reconstruct our narratives to build inclusive societies and intentional alliances across movements.  Both agree that our greatest defeat is when we are made to feel hopeless and helpless. They encourage each one of us to nurture our own sense of love, keep enacting it, build collective power with love and replenish ourselves through the earth's energy.   As Pregs says,  "Lie on the ground, look at the sky, get into water and see ourselves as part of nature. We are not separate. Find pathways from apathy to empathy, how to break and end silences about the oppressive forces, systems, narratives, how to recenter every single moment, every single day when you are being shattered."   Join us in this moving and inspiring conversation.

Episode 29: What's love got to do with it: Nyaradzai Gumbonzvanda

In the new season of the Gender at Work podcast – What's Love Got to Do With It? – we ask the question - can love in the vision of Audre Lord, bell hooks, Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Mahatma Gandhi and so many social justice leaders worldwide, help us in shifting systems of oppression. How does social justice action from the basis of love help us to transform ourselves while also eliminating the profound cruelty and manipulation we see all around us? And how are women and gender equality leaders incorporating these questions and values into their practice? We also explore ideas and practical solutions that are based on love, on connection, coexistence, and understanding. Our opening episode features Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, the Deputy Executive Director of UN Women. Nyaradzayi, a Zimbabwean national and lawyer, has a long history of activism on issues of women's rights and gender equality. She is the founder and former executive director of the Rosario Memorial Trust in Zimbabwe and prior to that served as the General Secretary of the World YWCA. Nyaradzayi was appointed the first African Union Goodwill Ambassador on Ending Child Marriage. What is love? For Nyaradzayi it means "saying no to discrimination". She says that "we need a world that respects diversities" and that "if we have love, we have courage". We are inspired by this brave and eloquent feminist warrior who draws on her vast experience to lead with justice from the halls of the UN to rural communities and organizations around the world and who explains how to organize with love.

New Season Teaser - What's love got to do with it?

Episode 28: Are Feminist Foreign Policies Actually Feminist?

In this episode of the G@W podcast, we delve into Feminist Foreign Policies and look at some of the opportunities, challenges and contradictions inherent in them. We also explore some of the collective aspirations of feminists for Feminist Foreign Policies. These would be important questions to ask at any time but now they are especially important as some of the very governments that have announced Feminist Foreign Policies support Israel's genocidal war on Gaza or are themselves major arms manufacturers. Now is a good time to probe and understand how 'feminist' the growing slew of Feminist Foreign Policies actually are. We are going to hear five different and thought-provoking ideas about feminist foreign policies in this episode. This will include perspectives from Nadine Gassman, President of the National Institute of Women of Mexico, Margot Wallstrom, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sweden, Hibaaq Osman, founder and leader of Karama, Anne Marie Goetz, Clinical Professor of Global Affairs at New York University, and Foteini Papagiotti, Senior Policy Advisor at ICRW.

Episode 27: Gender Apartheid – Help or Hindrance?

Many feminists around the world believe that there is a war on against women and some are calling it "gender apartheid". The global campaign to end gender apartheid focuses particularly on Iran and Afghanistan. In this episode we explore this term "gender apartheid" – where it came from and what some of the Femilemmas around it are.  We look at its usefulness in addressing what is happening to women and girls in Iran and Afghanistan today. We speak to Dr. Sima Samar, the former Minister of Women's Affairs in Afghanistan and former chair of the Afghanistan Human Rights commission. We also hear from Roxanna Shapour, an Iranian and senior analyst from the Afghanistan Analysts Network, who has extensive experience in Afghanistan and in communications and media with the BBC and the UN, and we listen to Afghani women's voices through the research of DROPS, the Organization for Policy Research and Development Studies based in Afghanistan and its leader, Mariam Safi. Join us and tell us what you think!   Note to our listeners: We recorded this episode prior to the horrific violence in Palestine and Israel. We join many others who are calling for an immediate cessation of the war on Gaza and accountability for crimes against humanity. Our next episode will focus on Feminist Foreign Policy and explore the complexities, contradictions and hypocrisies that emerge when governments and feminist networks proclaim their alignment with feminist principles without addressing fundamental power asymmetries and the devastating consequences of unfettered militarization.

Episode 26: The Femilemmas of Allyship – Voices from Beirut

In this episode, three graduate students from the American University of Beirut, Maria Hamarneh, Elvira Abi Zeid and Leil Younes, question male allyship for women's rights and feminist values in a social media context heavily influenced by toxic misogynists targeting young men and boys. They reflect on the ways that, as in many parts of the world, women's rights are under attack and work on gender equality is being undermined or rolled back, including by ultra-right wing, fundamentalist groups. Nisreen Alami, a Palestinian feminist activist who lives in Jordan and who is also a Gender at Work Associate, joined the conversation. Nisreen opens another dimension of the Femilemma by questioning the value of transnational feminist allyship when critical contextual and historical realities are left out. As she says, "misogyny has become very good at using transnational tools and feminism has not been very successful at being a truly transnational movement." These are important Femilemmas with no easy answers. Come on in and listen and let's hear your views!

Episode 25: Femilemmas Pop-Up

Femilemmas about gender identities, about who is a feminist, about inconsistencies when government leaders claim feminist mantles and so on, have been percolating for years. We held a Femilemmas PopUp at the 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women in New York in March to hear what Femilemmas were on the minds of participants there.  In this episode we share a few - Anne Marie Goetz (New York University, New York City) explores the Femilemmas inherent in feminist foreign policies; Andrea Cornwall (Kings College, London) lays out the complex and evolving Femilemmas around 'gender';  Deepa Mattoo (Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic, Toronto) spoke about how they resolved a Femilemma by adopting a gender inclusive policy for all services, and Fidele Rutayisire (Rwanda Men's Resource Organization) addressed the Femilemmas of men as feminists. Are these your Femilemmas? How would you respond? What femilemmas are you grappling with? Join the conversation!  We want to hear from you!

Next Season Teaser - Femilemmas

In this teaser, Aruna and Joanne bring up the theme of their upcoming season: Feminist dilemmas, or, as they refer to it, Femilemmas.