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Metal saved my life. It is not the first time and it probably will not be the last. The death of my mother when I was twenty-one meant that I was alone, and if it had not been for metal, my grieving process may have been the end of my story. The death, of course, is one thing, but mourning is something that surfaces many years after the event. If I had not bought my first guitar the year she died, the last nineteen years of my life would follow a very different narrative.

I firmly believe that metal and metal performance prevented my suicide and any plans for revenge. It matched my pain, sonically, texturally, musically and aesthetically. It initiated a cathartic process that I have returned to since, because it offers me emotional and psychological balance that other music forms do not. This may be a purely subjective engagement, but that is precisely the point.

Remembering this time in my life is not easy, and can often come in hesitations, blanks and painful memories. By using interpretive performance autoethnography, a methodology that Laurel Richardson calls CAP or creative analytic practice (Richardson, 2000, p. 929) means:

[it] allows the researcher to take up a person’s life in its immediate particularity and to ground the life in its historical moment. We move back and forth in time, using a version of Sartre’s progressive-regressive method. Interpretation works forward to the conclusion of a set of acts taken up by the subject while working back in time, interrogating the historical, cultural, and biographical conditions that moved the person to experience the events being studied

Through this methodological application, this paper seeks to analyse how metal and metal performance helped me write my trauma into a performing life that ultimately liberated me from my grief.

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 takes the form of an open feminist letter, a complaint and a manifesto presented to the Critical Management Studies (CMS) Academy. It is posted with urgency at a time when Patriarchy is resurging across the globe. My complaint is against the misogyny and the moral injury done to all of us and to our participants through our detached, disembodied, non-relation, pseudo-objective, masculine ways of becoming and being CMS scholars. Drawing on the thinking of Hélène Cixous, I offer five gifts as strategies to break with the masculine reckoning and open up our scholarship to féminine multiplicity and generativity: loving not knowing, return to our material bodies, rightsizing theory, knowledge made flesh-to-flesh and women’s writing. I visit, and suggest our scholarship will benefit from visiting, Cixous’s School of the Dead and her School of Dreams. I advocate for social theatre/performative auto/ethnography as a way to effect change in organisations. Finally, I present a manifesto for women’s writing that can help take our scholarship ‘home’ and contribute to the creation of flourishing organisations. This letter is a Call to Arms.

This chapter examines the current incarnation of African literature as written by a younger generation, less concerned with writing back to the colonial empire, and more with examining issues of migration and the consequences of living in diaspora. It contrasts the concerns and experiences of the older generation of African writers such as Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiongo with the current generation, especially Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Mukoma wa Ngugi.

It engages in literary and cultural analyses of selected texts, revealing how a range of current issues, such as women’s rights, are discussed therein.

A new generation of African writers, many having already been through the migratory experience before writing, are engaging a range of issues that are no longer identical to those concerning writers of the immediate colonial experience. Issues of sexuality, migration and post-independence challenges become prominently articulated.

Women’s rights were raised by an earlier generation of African women writers and are seen now not so much as radical positions but as assessments of how men and women are socialised. The ways in which people are encouraged or discouraged from articulating full equality as part of the larger critique of post-independence African states is a focus.

This chapter focuses on an early British female writer's course offered at Ripon College, a small liberal arts institution in Ripon, Wisconsin, USA. The course was first offered during the spring of 2017 as Donald J. Trump began his term as president of the United States. The students and instructor aimed to make their classroom a place for honest and open discussions about the difficult socio-political environment as they continually sought connections between their own social concerns and those of the early women writers they studied. The essay focuses specifically on the group's study of eighteenth-century British author Eliza Haywood, her novella Fantomina, and her periodical The Female Spectator. Through their study of these texts, the group came to understand how their own stories mattered. They saw that their creativity was a tool with which they could navigate and resist political change. This realization manifested itself in the creative capstone project for the course – a student-author periodical based on The Female Spectator. The essay explains the instructor's pedagogical approach toward this project and features samples of the students' writing from both the periodical and their end-of-term reflective writings.

This chapter offers a critical outline of the Egyptian feminist movement. It traces the forms of feminist activism and the demands raised by Egyptian feminists throughout the twentieth century and into the new millennium.

The study uses the tools of feminist theory and women’s history in charting a critical outline of the Egyptian women’s movement and feminist activism throughout a century of Egyptian history. The study attempts to identify the main features of the movement in terms of the demands raised by women and the challenges and achievements involved within the socio-political national and international contexts.

The Egyptian feminist movement is divided here into four waves, highlighting the intersections between feminist demands and national demands, as well as Egyptian women’s struggle for their rights. The first wave is seen as focusing on women’s right to public education and political representation. The second wave is marked by women’s achievement of constitutional and legal rights in the context of state feminism. The third wave is characterised by feminist activism in the context of civil society organising. The fourth wave has extended its struggle into the realm of women’s bodies and sexuality.

The study limits itself to forms of women’s agency and feminist activism in the public sphere.

This chapter is an original attempt at outlining the Egyptian women’s movement based on the demands raised and challenges faced. The chapter also suggests the existence of a sense of continuity in the Egyptian women’s movement.

The five play texts You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock (Phyllis Klotz, 1994), Glass House (Fatima Dike, 2002), Born in the RSA (Barney Simon, 1994), Has Anyone Seen Zandile? (Gcina Mhlophe, 1994), and So What’s New? (Fatima Dike, 1998) are introduced providing a brief insight into the strength of women as they struggle to make a living for their children in the face of extremely adverse political conditions, both in urban areas and in their households, as well as their suffering and grief for the loss of children caught up in the political struggle. Marginalised and struggling African women represented the most vulnerable members of the urban community. The reader is introduced to the voices within the play texts and how they represent both white and black South African women and how they on women’s lives from different backgrounds, classes and race thereby providing insight into their diversity of experiences and the censorial and penal repercussions women were forced to endure for contravening political Afrikaner ideology and statutory law.