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This paper is a reflective piece on a PhD workshop on “feminist organising” organised in November 2017 by the three authors of this paper. Calls to resist the neoliberalisation of academia through academic activism are gaining momentum. The authors’ take on academic activism builds on feminist thought and practice, a tradition that remains overlooked in contributions on resisting neoliberalisation in academia. Feminism has been long committed to highlighting the epistemic inequalities endured by women and marginalised people in academia. This study aims to draw on radical feminist perspectives and on the notion of prefigurative organising to rethink the topic of academic activism. How can feminist academic activism resist the neoliberal academia?

This study explores this question through a multi-vocal autoethnographic account of the event-organising process.

The production of feminist space within academia was shaped through material and epistemic tensions. The study critically reflects on the extent to which the event can be read as prefigurative feminist self-organising and as neoliberal academic career-focused self-organising. The study concludes that by creating a space for sisterhood and learning, the empowering potential of feminist organising is experienced.

The study shows both the difficulties and potentials for feminist organising within the university. The concept of “prefiguration” provides a theoretical framework enabling us to grasp the ongoing efforts on which feminist organising relies. It escapes a dichotomy between success and failure that fosters radical pessimism or optimism potentially hindering political action.

The paper aims to examine the potential feminist politics of teaching: is there a clear connection between feminism and teaching, and is there a particular feminist way of teaching? Through notions of engaged political pedagogy (as developed by bell hooks Jacques Rancière), it proposes an intersectional and dissensual approach to teaching, as a primary way of practising feminist politics within academia.

The paper sets out to explore the possibility of a feminist pedagogy of teaching. Drawing on works by social and feminists theorists as well as by radical pedagogues, it negotiates these various standpoints, finding similarities and differences, in order to formulate ways in which we can more fruitfully conceive of teaching as politics.

The paper proposes that the classroom proves one of the most radical spaces for possibility within academia. Through an engaged, dissensual pedagogy, in which both students and teachers work together in mutual recognition of each other's knowledge, the feminist teacher can enthuse political change both within and outside of the classroom.

Teaching is often viewed as a less important part of academic work. This paper, in contrast, proposes the classroom as one of the spaces where we as feminist academics can have the most impact. Providing a theoretical methodology of a potential feminist teaching pedagogy, this paper adds a well‐needed exploration of the relation between teaching and feminism, and a defence of teaching as politics.

The purpose of this paper is to question the idea of “passing a test” within activist ethnography. Activist ethnography is an ethnographic engagement with social movement organizations as anti-authoritarian, anarchist, feminist and/or anti-racist collectives. It is based on the personal situating of the researcher within the field to avoid a replication of colonialist research dynamics. Addressing these concerns, we explore activist ethnography through feminist standpoint epistemologies and decolonial perspectives.

This paper draws on our two activist ethnographies conducted as PhD research in two distinct European cities with two different starting points. While Léa entered the field through her PhD research, Claire partly withdrew and re-entered as academic.

Even when activist researchers share the political positioning of the social movement they want to study, they still experience tests regarding their research methodology. As activists, they are accountable to their movement and experience – as most other activist – a constant threat of exclusion. In addition, activist networks are fractured along political lines, the test is therefore ongoing.

Our contribution is threefold. First, the understanding of tests within activist ethnography helps decolonizing ethnography. Being both the knower and the known, activist ethnographers reflect on the colonial and heterosexist history of ethnography which offers potentials to use ethnography in non-exploitative ways. Second, we conceive of activist ethnography as a prefigurative methodology, i.e. as an embedded activist practice, that should therefore answer to the same tests as any other practice of prefigurative movements: it should aim to enact here and now the type of society the movement reaches for. Finally, we argue that activist ethnography relies on and contribute to developing consciousness about the researcher’s political subjectivity.

Feminism has provided a sustained challenge to the widespread occurrence of violence against women (VAW). Yet despite the tremendous efforts of feminist activists and academics, it continues to be one of the most tolerated crimes in the world. This paper offers an account of the author’s experiences teaching about VAW in higher education (HE) and an overview of how specific approaches to teaching this subject can provide an empowering space for students who have experienced such violence. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Drawing upon the works of feminists committed to ending VAW, transformative education as envisioned by Paulo Freire and Foucault’s work on knowledge and power, the author proposes a feminist informed teaching practice that facilitates empowerment through: giving voice to women who have experienced violence; exploring and promoting the transformative potential of education and; challenging traditional and dominant forms of knowing.

A recognition of the social, historical and political context in which violence occurs, and how traditional knowledge about it is accepted, is vital in empowering women who have experienced violence to challenge dominant discourses that do not fit with their own perceived reality.

Whilst there is currently a growing interest in the barriers to HE participation, the author seeks to explore the ways in which some of the barriers can be addressed that students may face whilst on HE courses, particularly in relation to self-awareness, empowerment and healing.

New Public Management (NPM) has been assumed to be a challenge to patronage and paternalism. However, feminist scholars have challenged such an image and argued that NPM has been the representation of men's languages and bodies from which gender inequality is perpetuated. This paper examines how NPM introduced in academia has perpetuated gender inequality, examined through the abjected meaning of women's languages and bodies to conform to NPM's defined ideal bodies of abstract workers.

Indonesian universities from two different geographical locations were chosen as sites to conduct the research, using interviews with 30 women academics.

This study revealed that gender inequality in Indonesian universities is persistent because women academics have practiced “an adapting stance” via employing a gendered strategy of adaptation toward two patriarchal systems: the abjection of maternal bodies and its associated discourse of motherhood, and the religious-driven roles and expectations interpreted in cultural norms and traditions.

This research has brought forward a new way of understanding the persistence of gender inequality in academia via the “adapting stance” of women academics through the lenses of the abjected body and language of women, coupled with religious aspects that regulate that body.

Women‘s studies has emerged as a recognised academic specialty in recent years. We explored the social structure of the field by analysing bibliometrically all scholarly articles (n = 1,302) and acknowledgements (n = 595) appearing in three pioneering journals over a twenty year period. We analysed authors (n = 1,504) and acknowledgees (n = 3,252) in terms of gender. We also conducted a content analysis of all editorial statements (n = 135) published by the three journals. Our results demonstrate the highly gendered nature of the field and the incompatibility of its publicly stated objectives.

This paper aims to present a conceptual model that identifies and relates the different approaches and thematic areas in the research area of tourism and gender.

The design of the conceptual model is based on a critical review of the literature and the evolution of feminist paradigms and theories.

The aforementioned theoretical frameworks are the basis for the further development of feminist studies and a gender perspective in the tourism industry research area, including research design, objectives, methodologies, analysis and result’s presentation.

Based on literature review, is theoretical.

Presentation of a conceptual model around the gender perspective in tourism, that leads to the identification of important research opportunities in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the challenges and complexities in conducting research faced by scholars utilizing postcolonial feminist frameworks. The paper discusses postcolonial feminist key concepts, namely representation, subalternity, and reflexivity and the challenges scholars face when deploying these concepts in fieldwork settings. The paper then outlines the implications of these concepts for feminist praxis related to international management theory, research, and writing as well as entrepreneurship programs.

This paper discusses the experiences of the author in conducting fieldwork on Turkish high‐technology entrepreneurs in the USA and Turkey by focusing explicitly on the challenges and complexities postcolonial feminist frameworks bring to ethnography and auto‐ethnography.

The paper suggests that conducting fieldwork guided by postcolonial feminist frameworks faces challenges related to representation inclusive of the author and the participants in the study. It offers subalternity as a relational understanding of subjects in contrast to comparative approaches to the study of business people. The paper also discusses how positionality impacts reflexivity through gender, ethnicity, and class relations.

This paper offers a critical perspective on conducting research related to non‐Western subjects by addressing issues arising from feminist and postcolonial intersections. It is a valuable contribution to those researchers who are interested in conducting feminist research particularly with non‐Western people and cultures.