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Research has established that women academics and particularly Black women academics continue to be marginalised in universities (Mahabeer, Nzimande & Shoba [10]). Linking feminist decoloniality and an ethic of care as foundational framework Decolonial feminism is a conceptual lens that has an implicit assumption of an ethic of care but does not formally theorise the nature of caring. Part 2: Feminist decoloniality in HEIs across the African continent Part 2 of the Special Issue focuses on feminist decoloniality in HEIs across the African continent. [Extracted from the article]

While several studies detail the experiences of university students with racial and gender harassment, bullying, and microaggressions, few explore these phenomena among Black women faculty members in higher education transnationally. This article makes a novel contribution by examining Black women's agentic responses to marginalising experiences in higher education. Black women's extraordinary efforts to succeed in westernised universities built on the subjugation of and from the labour of their ancestors, awareness-raising about their negative experiences, and strategies to change colleagues' behaviours defy 'business as usual' in higher education. Neoliberalism, Gender and Curriculum Transformation in Higher Education is a multi-site project led by Professor Relebohile Moletsane (Moletsane & Mabokela 2019), who partners with Black women to support their academic and scholarly success. This article reviews results of a survey administered to participants to document their experiences and explore the interventions designed by Moletsane's Feminist Decoloniality as Care (FEMDAC) investigators at universities in South Africa and America. This article describes four ways in which researchers effectively operationalise feminist decoloniality as care, by: 1) truth-telling about the impact of neoliberal institutions on the daily lives of Black women academics; 2) locating the source of academic woundedness not solely in the individual behaviours of bad actors but in systemic oppression; 3) creating opportunities for women to see the similarities in their experiences transnationally and to recognise ways in which institutional structures marginalise them; and 4) mutual support, a team mentoring approach, and reproducing Black excellence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the never-ending 'war' on drugs, the battle over maternal substance abuse, always on shifting and contested ground, is escalating. Medical researchers have become increasingly vocal in their protests against [...]

The Black Radical Congress (BRC) began with a belief that a new kind of formation was necessary to organize people of African descent for a revolutionary change, so as to be able to move from old ideas of vanguardism and centralism to ideas of self-organization and self-mobilization. African American feminists organization started with a knowledge base and experiences of community members and challenged the male-centered humanists by integrating gendered analysis to race consciousness.

This study used statistical topic modeling to examine 800,000 documents within HathiTrust and JSTOR databases to identify the kinds of discourses in books, poetry, newspapers, and journals related to African American women. We examined a range of conversations that emerged, between 1746 and 2014, revealing insights about, and from African American women. We identified a metadata revision methodology that served to rescue 150 documents for or about Black women that were either not previously cataloged or cataloged in such a way that Black women's experiences are either lost or erased. This project's use of computation is unique in that it allows for the quantitative surveying of such a large dataset while charting a qualitative assessment to determine if and how texts capture the experiences of African American women. Using a technique called 'intermediate reading', texts are verified for their applicability. This strategy of search, recognition, rescue and recovery (SeRRR) may aid curators of information in making Black women's voices more accessible within the digitized record. The SeRRR strategy will allow scholars to use a form of 'call and response' with metadata to understand the lived (and death) experiences of Black women as Alice Walker did during her search for Zora Neal Hurston. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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An Africana feminist framework is presented that considers the ways in which inequality resulting from a historical legacy of political conflict and other dimensions intersect to impact upon the accomplishment of Millennium Development Goals with regards to environmental sustainability and child malnutrition in Zimbabwe. Demographic and Health Surveys are analysed from 1988 to 2011 to examine whether differential access to water and sanitation is predicted by ethnic differences in Zimbabwe, and is predictive of chronic malnutrition. Safe water and sanitation are in short supply, and logistic regression analyses provide evidence that residents in Shona and Ndebele-dominated provinces generally have better access to these resources. Uneven distribution of these development resources has a deleterious impact on early childhood nutrition. This work elicits results that give rise to child health-related policy recommendations that may inform post-2015 discussions of Sustainable Development Goals, namely that within-country ethnic differences must be taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Western researchers often do not incorporate the voices of African women in their research endeavors; and a serious engagement in women's health activism in Zimbabwe cannot happen without this preliminary step. Endarkened feminist epistemologies have theorized a social science that refuses to sidestep African women's perspectives. As a corrective to conceptual quarantining of Black (African and African diasporic) feminist thought, the exciting body of literature in the field broadly characterized as Africana feminism has helped to legitimate the languages, discourses, challenges, unique perspectives, divergent experiences, and intersecting oppressions and privileges of African women's and girls' lives. In this article, we develop an emerging Africana feminist methodology to propose building a scholarship and activism database as well as guide an exploratory discussion of health activism in Zimbabwe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computational analysis and digital humanities are far from neutral processes and sites unimpeded by the political, social and economic context in which they emerged and are utilized. As an interdisciplinary field, the digital humanities have transformed the relationship of humans to computers broadly conceived. At the same time, the methods, theories, perspectives and the concomitant digital tools developed are being criticized for reproducing the social divisions that exist in society. The effort to recover Black women's subjectivities from the digital minefield is not without its challenges, reflected in our study which searched approximately 800,000 books, newspapers, and articles in the HathiTrust and JSTOR Digital Libraries. The goal was to identify perceptions and lived experiences of Black women that emerged and the resulting knowledge that developed. The project team discovered multiple challenges related to the rescue and recovery of Black women's standpoints or group knowledge. This essay explores how even as computational analysis has embedded biases, it can be utilized to recover the experiences of Black women from within the digitized record. Thus, computational analysis and all that it encompasses not only makes visible Black women's experiences, but also expands the scope of the digital humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the criticism by Black feminists on American Christians' antiwar (dis)engagements. It argues that Black feminist organizational structures lend to progressive activism, particularly antiwar activism. It also explores the opposition by African-American Protestant Evangelical ministers and parishoners to white Protestant Evangelical leadership and their sentiments on the U.S. aggression in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

This article reports qualitative interview data from a study of participant-generated outcomes of two harm reduction programs in the United States. We address the question:'What does success in harm-reduction-based substance user treatment look like?' Providers in this study understood harm reduction to adhere to notions of 'any positive change,' client centeredness, and low-threshold services. Participants reported changes in demarginalization, engagement in the program, quality of life, social functioning, changes in substance use, and changes in future goals and plans. The nature of these changes is difficult to articulate within traditional notions of success (i.e., abstinence, program completion, etc.). We conclude that participants in harm reduction programs experience tangible positive changes but that legitimation of these changes calls for a reconceptualization of 'outcomes' and 'success' in the current context of substance user treatment and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 2003, the US government launched a military invasion and occupation of Iraq. This was one more phase of the US National Security Strategy doctrine that promises militarism, war, and disruption in various sovereign states. These wars abroad and the unprecedented powers of government and police agencies in the USA represent powerful intersections of patriarchal authority, racism, militarism, and elitism. Africana communities have a long history of resisting repression both directly and indirectly related to US foreign policy. Social scientists writing from a black feminist perspective have described how such mutually constructing forces of race, class, gender, and nation have influenced the lives of people of color, women, and the poor in American society and have highlighted the historical and sociological importance of resistance by these oppressed groups. Specifically, this paper addresses ways in which a black feminist analysis and praxis offer useful perspectives on activism concerning issues of peace and justice post 9–11–2001. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional constraints hinder the activist scholar who seeks to create alternative models for scholarship and social transformation. In this paper, I discuss results from a survey administered to Africana scholars on the Association of Black Sociologists listsery and other discussion groups servicing progressive scholars and students on the Internet. The primary objective of the survey was to elicit comments on ways that Africana scholars balance activism with scholarship. The survey results indicate that there are many levels on which activists scholars can make a contribution to humanity. These include the intellectual labor of articulating our unique perspectives that we promote within our disciplines, our service as consultants to grassroots organizers, and our progressive applied work in our field. Once we embrace the activist-scholar orientation, our struggle is to strike an appropriate balance among the three different types of contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines some of the contributions of subjugated peoples' knowledges to ‘western’ social science, particularly focusing on the development of analyses of race, class, and gender as interlocking spheres in which domination occurs. Often work on race, class, and gender intersectionality is taught and is understood as an outgrowth of academic western feminist inquiry that is attempting to acknowledge and embrace difference and eschew essentializing women's experiences. While feminist discourse has been an important site for the development of the intersectional framework, I argue that an important historical basis for social scientific thinking that addresses the intersection of race, class, and gender lies in activism and scholarship as exemplified by that of Anna Julia Cooper, Ida Wells Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Amy Jacques Garvey, Cheikh Anta Diop, Audre Lorde, Kwame Toure, and others whose thinking about the social world has been shaped by their own western and non-western political and cultural experiences and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban growth in low- and middle-income countries has intensified the need to expand sanitation infrastructure, especially in informal settlements. Sanitation approaches for these settings remain understudied, particularly regarding multidimensional social-ecological outcomes. Guided by a conceptual framework (developed in parallel with this study) re-envisioning sanitation as a human-derived resource system, here we characterize existing and alternative sanitation scenarios in an informal settlement in Kampala, Uganda. Combining two core research approaches (household survey analysis, process modeling), we elucidate factors associated with user satisfaction and evaluate each scenario's resource recovery potential, economic implications, and environmental impacts. We find that existing user satisfaction is associated with factors including cleaning frequency, sharing, and type of toilets, and we demonstrate that alternative sanitation systems may offer multidimensional improvements over existing latrines, drying beds, and lagoons. Transitioning to anaerobic treatment could recover energy while reducing overall net costs by 26-65% and greenhouse gas emissions by 38-59%. Alternatively, replacing pit latrines with container-based facilities greatly improves recovery potential in most cases (e.g., a 2- to 4-fold increase for nitrogen) and reduces emissions by 46-79%, although costs increase. Overall, this work illustrates how our conceptual framework can guide empirical research, offering insight into sanitation for informal settlements and more sustainable resource systems.