Conference Agenda

This paper explores how local, women-led organisations in three gang-present communities of the Cape Flats, Cape Town, create spaces of resistance to different forms of urban violence through maternal solidarity and political visibility. Centering on self-organised, feminine circles, it investigates how mothers—key actors in reproducing the community’s social fabric—navigate violence. By focusing on mothers’ embodied experiences, this research interrogates the spatial and political dimensions of their everyday lives, situating these within feminist and decolonial frameworks.

Grounded in feminist geopolitics and everyday geography, the study seeks to answer: How do women-led organisations in gang-present communities construct spaces of expression and resistance for mothers victims of violence(s)? Using qualitative methodologies, the research draws on 62 semi-structured interviews conducted between May and September 2024 with mothers in three gang-present neighbourhoods on the Cape Flats. These interviews were complemented by observations, participatory visual methods (e.g., drawings and photographs), and 24 informal conversations with community leaders, policymakers, and academics.

Findings reveal that women-led spaces serve multiple functions: they foster solidarity among mothers through shared grief and healing processes; they provide crucial resources such as legal advice and psychosocial support; and they enable mothers to reclaim visibility and political power through organised actions like marches, workshops, and food kitchens. Moreover, community events often incorporate music, singing, and dancing, which serve as powerful tools for building emotional solidarities between mothers around gangsterism. These maternal spaces embody resistance to the spatial and emotional violence inflicted by gangsterism, the consequences of apartheid, and systemic violence. The paper also highlights how these maternal spaces act as sites of counter-mapping, challenging dominant narratives about gang violence by emotionally reconfiguring the community’s gendered geographies.

This paper contributes to feminist and decolonial studies of violence by demonstrating how maternal figures challenge the emotional and spatial dimensions of violence through embodied practices of care, solidarity, and resistance. By situating these acts within the broader context of urban violence, it highlights the role of maternal spaces as critical new sites of local power dynamics.

This essay examines the urban atmospheres of terror in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from the perspective of women residents. Drawing on two ethnographic projects conducted in various favelas in 2016 and 2019, I argue that terror, as an urban atmosphere, is deeply rooted in a long history of racialized and gendered violence, and that its persistence in the contemporary urban landscape is a consequence of the coloniality of power. The analysis begins by exploring the layers, textures, and complexities of urban atmospheres of terror, providing a deeper understanding of their racialized and gendered nature. It further examines the transformative power of the body in reshaping these urban atmospheres, focusing on how favela women cultivate alternative affective atmospheres within their communities. Drawing on Afrodiasporic and decolonial feminist thinking, I show how Afrodescendant women in the favelas resist and transform these atmospheres, creating spaces that challenge the coloniality of power and its spatial manifestations, such as urban borders. I conclude that a key aspect of favela women’s urban politics and resistance to coloniality is rooted in the body and the affective dimensions of urban life.

The Nakba in Palestine has had what one may call a 'peeling effect' on west-centric [supposedly] feminist politics and international relations. Corridors of power that are in general strongly supportive of women's rights, with their engagements with supranational bodies and countries of the majority world laying strong emphasis on 'women and girls', and some of them claiming to uphold 'feminist' foreign policies, have all fallen from grace. While these realities were beyond obvious prior to the unleashing of the present-day version of the Nakba in October 2023, the developments since then have had a marked effect on the emotional geographies and spatial realities, in the west and the majority world/s alike. This paper conceptualizes the Nakba as a quintessentially gendered genocide, where the emotional geographies of gender politics as we know them are put into serious critical questioning.

What do bodies [alive and no longer alive] of people of all genders, the violence they experience in life and death [caught in what can be termed as the first live-streamed genocide] tell us about the [supposed] innovations in feminist politics in the western world? What can we say about the rift between extensive academic work on emotional geographies of violence, [supposedly] feminist policymaking and power politics in the western world?

Drawing from an ongoing project, I make a case for a new feminist politics that departs from a fresh slate, which may [or may not?] have the grit to face the multiple genocides and embodied violences of [to quote from the title of a forthcoming monograph] 'the Age of Fascism'.

For over two decades, Global North countries have waged a silent yet persistent war against racialized bodies at their borders. This war—manifested through militarized language, apparatuses, and tactics—targets migrants, particularly those from the Global South, and is deeply rooted in colonial fantasies of a world divided between wealthy, "developed" white nations and impoverished, "underdeveloped" black ones. These colonial legacies continue to shape contemporary border regimes that seek to control, deter, and kill a humanity deemed excessive.

The violence of this war extends from the Euro-African borders in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, to Australia’s borders, and the Mexico-U.S. border, creating spaces of oppression that are both gendered and racialized. In response to the creation of violent and deadly borders, everyday spaces of resistance have emerged—spaces where bodies and emotions are mobilized to challenge the dehumanization of black and brown people on the move. The violent outcomes of the war on migrants are deeply felt at the level of racialized and gendered bodies, and these same bodies are at the forefront of resistance efforts.

Drawing on geographical literature—particularly border studies—and through spatial feminist ethnography in Senegal, this paper explores how migrant activists and women’s collectives create spaces of dissent in response to border violence. These spaces, rooted in embodied and emotional practices, actively challenge the logic of inferiorization and annihilation that underpins the war on migrants. By focusing on the intersection of emotions, embodiment, and space, I argue that these forms of resistance not only contest the violence of borders but also foster translocal solidarities that refuse the colonial logics of exclusion.