Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond

Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond asks and considers: What is feminist parenting? Is it something for all parents? What does it mean to be a feminist parent in practice? The collection aims to fill a gap on feminist parenting in the existing literature by bringing timely post-Western perspectives. More specifically, the anthology’s main contribution is its explicit focus on feminist parenting from the margins to the global periphery: from Africa and its diaspora, from the Global South to Europe and America. The 27 parents from diverse backgrounds, walks of life, and countries gathered in this anthology share powerful responses to the above questions by narrating their experiences of some of the challenges, dilemmas, promises, and compromises of parenting with a feminist perspective. The volume is one of the first collections published with first-person essays describing very touching, beautiful, and sometimes painful stories of what it means and more importantly what it costs to become a feminist parent with an intersectional approach. In doing so, the authors of this book aim at (re)claiming parenting as a necessarily political terrain for subversion, radical transformation, and resistance to patriarchal oppression and sexism.

 

Rama Salla Dieng, PhD, is a Senegalese scholar and writer. She is a Lecturer at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, and a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships of the same university. Rama is the Programme Director for the MSc Africa and International Development and her research focuses on African feminisms, feminist political economy, agrarian studies and gender and development in Africa. She currently serves on the Council of Development Studies Association UK, and convenes the Decolonising Development Study Group. Between 2010 and 2015, she worked at the Policy Research Division of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa's Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP) in Senegal. Rama has published a novel La Dernière Lettre with Présence Africaine in 2008. She has contributed to an Edited volume by Gender Links on Polygamy: At the heart of the Matter (2009), and an edited volume on Democracy and Development: Perspectives of Young African Researchers (2013) published by l'Harmattan. She holds a PhD and a MSc in International Development from SOAS, University of London and a Master in International Cooperation from Sciences Po Bordeaux, France.

Andrea O'Reilly, PhD, is Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at York University. O'Reilly is founder and director of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, and founder and publisher of Demeter Press. Rama Salla Dieng, PhD, is a Senegalese writer, academic, and activist. She is currently a Lecturer in Africa and International Development at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh.