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This contribution explores the history of women and feminism in the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) using concepts from feminist radical political economy. A feminist approach changes the categories of economic analysis to offer a new interpretation of an older history: the formation of the Women’s Caucus. I reread the early history of the feminist project in economics through the lens of social reproduction to understand the influence of life experience on practice, particularly on the 1971 women’s walkout during a URPE conference, and on economic theory. Highlighting women’s multiple roles, as graduate students, mothers, wives, girlfriends, and/or caregivers – but ultimately as women – reveals social reproduction as a site of radical politics and demonstrates the importance of reproductive labor for understanding solidarity. In doing so, the analysis provides an example of how a feminist perspective contributes uniquely to economics.

This chapter provides the introduction of the book and argues why gender and feminism matter in theory and praxis in the 21st century. It includes the conceptual interrogation of the meaning of gender and feminism and its practice in western and non-western contexts; global currents in feminist struggles; thematic organization of the book; and the future under ‘feminist eyes’. The thread of shared struggles among diverse groups of women based on selected themes — movements, spaces and rights; inclusion, equity and policies; reproductive labour, work and economy; health, culture and violence; and sports and bodies — situates Canada as a western society with avowed egalitarian ideals favouring gender equality and social justice, but with its own issues and concerns like women in other countries facing their own challenges.

This paper seeks to evaluate how some of the core general principles of heterodox political economy (HPE) can be applied to the issue of how HPE has managed to undergo resurgence and development over recent decades.

Four major principles of heterodoxy are applied successively to this issue: historical specificity; contradiction; heterogeneous agents and groups; and circular and cumulative causation.

These principles assist in comprehending how HPE is able to develop its own concepts, networks, publications, academic departments, teaching and policy‐relevant material.

HPE has had considerable success in developing a conceptual apparatus, which helps to explain the emergence of much of its edifice being developed in academic and policy circles. The performance of HPE has been impressive.

The conceptual apparatus of heterodoxy can be applied to real world situations; specifically a component of world history over especially the past 40 years.

This is the first time such a theme has been explored in the literature.

This chapter reviews developments in the intellectual and activist work of African feminists and gender scholars over the past two decades. African feminists and gender scholar activists have broken with dominant epistemologies to frame their own sites of knowledge production and feminist identity, reflecting shifting conditions in local and global contexts. The knowledge they generate is rooted in a tradition of scholarship, activism, and engagements with state institutions and with transnational and regional feminist movements. I discuss (1) contexts in which African feminist standpoints have emerged over the past 20 years, (2) developments in women and gender studies programs, and (3) ways in which African feminist scholars in the continent and diaspora have stimulated intellectual engagement and activism through feminist research and publishing, collaborative scholarship, influencing policy, and new forms of activism.

Like the quixotic character that never knew that he was speaking all through his life in pure and simple prose, Gandhi never realized that what he was preaching and practicing throughout his life was in fact the basic principles and theories that could be subsumed under the contemporary discipline of political economy (PE). Gandhian political economy (GPE) is replete with many of the characteristics of classical and Marxian political economy and these are mentioned at relevant places throughout this work. It also assimilates some of the major features of contemporary heterodox political economy, in particular, the class analysis of Neo‐Marxism; gender, ethnicity and class analysis of Feminist political economy; the analysis of justice, ethics and institutional trust of social political economy; the analysis of the significance of institutions and institutional change of the institutional‐evolutionary political economy; and the importance of the interdisciplinary focus on contemporary issues like development and international political economy.

The proliferation of homelessness and housing precariousness, along with a dramatic growth in food banks, are two signs that while parts of the UK economy may be recovering from the 2008 financial crisis and recession, the same cannot be said for the living conditions of much of the poor and working class population. Much of the media discussion has centered on the ways in which these social ills have been caused by government policy, particularly cuts to social and welfare services introduced under the banner of “austerity.” I argue in this paper, however, that a narrow focus on austerity risks obscuring some of the longer-term structural transformations that have taken place under neoliberal capitalism, namely: (1) financialization and (2) the privatization of social reproduction. Situating these two trends within a longer history of capitalism, I argue, allows us to understand the contemporary housing and food crises as specific (and highly gendered) manifestations of a more fundamental contradiction between capital accumulation and progressive and sustainable forms of social reproduction. Doing so further helps to locate the dramatic proliferation of household debt, which has been supported by both processes, as both cause and consequence of the crisis in social reproduction faced by many UK households.

The authors bring diverse feminist perspectives to bear on social entrepreneurship research and practice to challenge existing assumptions and approaches while providing new directions for research at the intersections of gender, social and commercial entrepreneurship.

The authors apply liberal feminist, socialist feminist and transnational/post-colonial feminist perspectives to critically examine issues of gender in the field of social entrepreneurship.

By way of three distinct feminist lenses, the analyses suggest that the social entrepreneurship field does not recognize gender as an organizing principle in society. Further to this, a focus on women within this field replicates problematic gendered assumptions underlying the field of women’s entrepreneurship research.

The arguments and suggestions provide a critical gender perspective to inform the strategies and programmes adopted by practitioners and the types of research questions entrepreneurship scholars ask.

The authors redirect the conversation away from limited status quo approaches towards the explicit and implicit aim of social entrepreneurship and women’s entrepreneurship: that is, economic and social equality for women across the globe.

The authors explicitly adopt a cultural, institutional and transnational analysis to interrogate the intersection of gender and social entrepreneurship.

This chapter explores how feminist and women-owned media/organisations in Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania navigated the impact of COVID-19. Three debilitating realities contextualise this study. The first is the fact that feminist media find themselves trapped in a global existential struggle following the steady collapse of traditional media’s economic models. Second, women’s owned media by their nature are marginal and undermined by hegemonic patriarchal power structures and third, COVID-19 spared no media. The pandemic devastated the media industry globally especially print, and community-owned media such as women’s owned media. The chapter is informed by political economy of feminist media theories with a main focus on principles of media viability. It draws from interviews with managers and senior reporters at leading feminist and women-owned media/organisations in the three countries. The findings shed light on how operations, human resources, content and financial sustainability were navigated and reshaped in a flawed health, political and socio-cultural systemic context that threatened to annihilate the case media. We highlighted the innovative solutions and resolve indicative of the resilience, determination and agency that these women-owned media/organisations exercised in the face of the crisis at the time, something others can learn from.

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in rural Manitoba and throughout the Philippines with temporary foreign workers employed at a small inn and conference centre and their non-migrant kin, this chapter offers an introduction to and expansion of feminist engagements with social reproduction and global care chains. This chapter illustrates the importance of feminist analysis of migration trajectories and labour processes that fall outside of the conventional purview of gender and migration studies. To this end, it suggests that in addition to interrogating the conditions and rational under which reproduction comes to be articulated and experienced as labour, consideration of how divergent forms of labour also constitute and shape reproduction can provide significant insight into the social consequences of neoliberal capitalism, while revealing the ways in which the gendered and racialized parameters of reproductive and intimate labour come to be reproduced.