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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.

This paper aims to be a critical reflection on the author's position as a Black female academic in the academy, and comes from a motivation to raise Black consciousness about the importance of Black feminist scholarship.

The author identifies the unique position of Black feminism, which has had to define itself apart from second‐wave feminism of the 1970s, which marginalised non‐White women and the Civil Rights movement, which marginalised women. The oppression faced by Black feminists is apparent in the shifting platforms of identity that Black feminists occupy in the academy. Another obstacle is the restricted and incomplete picture of feminism in the academy, which sidelines Black feminist writing. One of the ways to raise awareness is to focus on the corpus of Black writing and to re‐position it within academic core curricula, rather than relegating it to specialised courses.

It is found that Black feminism is marginalised in the academy in scholarship and representation. It is also found that students are more receptive to ideas about feminism when approaching the subject indirectly.

One limitation of the study is an absence of theoretical literature from a UK context.

The paper highlights the marginalisation of Black feminism in the academy.

The subjects of “feminism in academia” and the representation of “Black and minority ethnics in the Academy” have been explored in scholarship. However the combination of these terms, namely the role of the Black feminist in the academy, is a comparatively unexplored subject. Hence, the originality of this paper.

Scholars and activists working both within and outside the massive health-related machinery of government and the private sector and within and outside communities of color address the same fundamental questions: Why do health disparities exist? Why have they persisted over such a long time? What can be done to significantly reduce or eliminate them?

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of dilemmas that emerge at the theoretical and practical interfaces of ethnographic fieldwork and feminist advocacy. This is done by examining the researcher’s role in the field and the complex relationships between the researcher and the researched.

Critical self-reflections and autoethnographic analyses of fieldwork experiences in the author’s home country in South Asia are used to explore these dilemmas.

Using situated examples from a typical organisational setting involving both the oppressive and the oppressed, the researcher’s participant observation is found to be conflicted between critical participation and critical observation. Conscious and/or unconscious critical participation through enactment of feminist ethics by combining researcher and advocacy roles allows a route to assuage these conflicts. Practical strategies used to accomplish this are also discussed.

Although the practical strategies discussed in this paper are culturally and organisationally specific and hence limited by them, it is hoped that suitable variants will emerge for readers from their discussion. Further research is needed to investigate the variety of ways in which the researcher-advocate positionality proposed in this paper can be strategically adopted conditional on cultural and organisational contexts, feminist research questions, and researchers’ abilities and constraints.

This paper seeks to shed light on the dilemmas of feminist ethics faced by critical feminist researchers conducting ethnographic fieldwork. It also discusses ways to enable researchers to circumvent these dilemmas in both epistemologically productive ways by collecting rich data and in ontologically enriching ways by allowing some enactment of feminist ethics. To this end, a positionality of the feminist researcher-advocate is conceptualised that does not enforce constraints of extreme positionalities of either a conventional ethnographer or an action researcher.

Besides illustrating the need to stretch beyond traditional boundaries of participant observation, the researcher-advocate positionality also allows feminist researchers to make small, but directly tangible impact towards gender equality in their field setting. Implications for researchers’ emotional, and cognitive safety are also discussed especially when they identify with one or more minority identities.

This paper contributes to discussions on the theory of methods by highlighting the benefits of enacting feminist ethics as a way of critical participation in research settings.

This paper intervenes in existing literature on entrepreneurship and inequalities by proposing a novel reframing of intersectionality as a threshold concept, an important idea that enables us to deepen and progress the understanding of complex subjectivities.

Drawing from education studies, intersectionality is explored through the five key features of threshold concepts: (1) transformative, (2) irreversible, (3) integrative, (4) bounded and (5) troublesome. We offer a set of reflection questions for what we call “doing intersectionality.”

We develop a metacritique of the way in which the concept of intersectionality has thus far been treated in feminist theory and applied in entrepreneurship studies – namely, as the culmination of thinking about difference and inequality, decoupled from its roots in collectivist analysis and Black and anti-racist feminism. The paper invites scholars of entrepreneurial inequalities to both engage and look beyond an intersectional lens to better elucidate the range of historically emergent social hierarchies and systems of power that shape their phenomena of interest.

Through reframing intersectionality as a threshold concept, this paper challenges entrepreneurship researchers to view intersectionality as a foundational starting point for the conceptualisation of complex interactions of social structures, and the structural inequality and power relationships present within their research, rather than a destination.

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 takes seriously the feminist adage that “the personal is political” by critically exploring my experiences as an early career scholar of gender and entrepreneurship studies to offer vital context for the contributions of my work and future research agenda, in light of the current historical moment of interconnected political, public health and environmental calamity.

The author presents reflections on her positionality, philosophical and political commitments, and theorises from her experiences of racist distraction and intersectional marginality in contemporary academia, considering their implications for incoming and aspiring gender and entrepreneurship scholars whose research agendas are still in development.

Racism functions as a persistent distraction from overall research agendas and activities, and delimits the lane of perceived contributions. However, collectively challenging it in work and study presents a vehicle by which intellectual and affective experiences of academic work may be enriched, and a spacious and expansive legacy of critical scholarship built that will be resonant for years to come.

The paper argues that although racism will doubtlessly continue to cause immense distraction, it presents an invitation to create positive social change, through collectivising with a community that aims to shape a liveable, equitable and imaginative academic future.

In this introductory chapter, we discuss the impetus for this edited book. We introduce activist, critical and feminist criminological theorizing and research on gender, intersectionality, criminalization, and carceral experiences. The scene is set for the chapters to follow by providing a general overview of gender, criminalization, imprisonment, and human rights in Southeast Asia with particular attention being paid to Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, and the Philippines. We consider trends and drivers of women’s imprisonment in the region, against the backdrop of the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-Custodial Measures for Women Offenders, also known as the Bangkok Rules, which were adopted by the United Nations General Assembly just over a decade ago. We reflect on the dominance of western centric feminist (and malestream) criminological works on gender, criminalization and imprisonment, the positioning of Southeast Asian knowledge on the peripheries of Asian criminology and the importance of bringing to light, as this book does, gendered activist scholarship in this region of the world.

The call for more women to start up and grow businesses as a vehicle for economic vibrancy is a prevailing discourse in the UK. There have been calls for greater co-ordination between research, policy and practice to create collaborative spaces whose focus is to influence and shape structures and processes beyond the individual or community level to a macro level of enterprise policy. However, calls have not specifically focussed on the issues of gender or other categories of social difference. This study aims to understand how such co-ordinations can be established to enable progress within the women’s entrepreneurship space through the development of collaborative spaces fusing research, policy and practice and how they should be structured to ensure inclusion through the process as well as enabling greater inclusion as part of the collaborative space outcome.

Taking a critical feminist perspective, the study draws from extant literature on women and minority networks research from the women in leadership, diversity and inclusion fields as a lens through which to frame the analysis of women’s enterprise policy in the UK, research and practice.

The study highlights the importance of collective feminist action drawing upon post-feminist sensibilities and an Engaged–Activist Scholarship approach. Such collective feminist action appreciates the importance of the micro as an enabler to progressive action at the macro level to enact structural and system change within the entrepreneurial ecosystem. A framework for inclusive and collaborative entrepreneuring space development is offered.

This paper offers policymakers, researchers and practitioners a framework as a practical way forward to ensure efforts are progressive and enable structural and systemic change.

The paper offers a framework for developing inclusive and collaborative entrepreneuring spaces to ensure progression by lifting the focus to a macro level of change to enable inclusion as part of the process and outcome of such collaborative spaces.