Programme de la conférence

Women’s disproportionate unpaid care and domestic work is invisibilized through orthodox neoliberal policy, especially in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the predominant measure of economic growth and success. This invisibilization and undervaluing of women’s acts as a barrier to gender equality while reinforcing gender blind policy.

This paper will share the initial findings of a feminist participatory action research project under the Atlantic Fellowship Programme on Social and Economic Equity that collectively analyses, makes sense of, and develops alternative narratives of the values of women’s unpaid care and domestic work, imagine and visualise herstories and explore feminist fiscal justice alternatives.

This project aims to create a collective space to visibilize women’s true value to the economy and society thereby exposes the inadequacy of orthodox neoliberal economic metrics, followed by visualising alternatives through art. It will do so by working with three global advocacy communities whose focus lies on women’s rights and economic justice from a feminist perspective; the Women’s Rights Caucus, the Tax and Gender working group of Global Alliance for Tax Justice and a Feminist fiscal justice group. Through a series of three reiterative workshops using participatory and feminist action research methods and arts, participants from the three communities will collectively analyse, make sense of, and develop alternative narratives of the values of women’s unpaid care and domestic work and explore feminist fiscal justice alternatives. A visualisation will act as a method of resistance, social change and a record of global alternative herstories challenging the current global social-economic system of oppression and exploitation.

The 31st IAFFE Annual Conference, hosted by the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research (ACEIR), University of Cape Town, South Africa under the conference theme, ENVISIONING FEMINIST ECONOMICS STRATEGIES FOR AN EQUITABLE AND SUSTAINABLE WORLD, provides an opportunity to share initial findings and get critical feedback from feminist economists.

The EU Textile Circularity Strategy sets the framework for the European textile industry for the coming decade and requires the industry to provide more detailed proposals for further implementation and regulation of this transition towards a circular process of reusing textile waste, the so-called fibre to fibre recycling. Although markets for textile waste are not well-developed, the EU textile industry is one of the largest global players in these markets, and there is a widespread support for change towards a more sustainable approach under customers, manufacturers, and policy makers at the local, national, and European level, as well as under global trading partners.

In this paper, we draw on data from an action research project on the transition towards fibre to fibre recycling in the European fashion/textile industry, undertaken at the Centre for Resilience and Sustainable Development at the University of Cambridge in the spring of 2023 to demonstrate how to create evidence space that integrates a gender lens as part of a wholistic treatment from research design to delivery. By combining complex systems analysis with political economic theories in this action-research approach, we can reduce systematic blindness to women’s work and position in market economy reform as showcased from the research conducted on the fashion/textile industry in Europe. We also argue that to improve a higher degree of research confidence creating ‘useful knowledge’ for a more sustainable textile industry and circular economy, feminist concerns and a gender lens should not be an afterthought or a stand-alone analytical approach, it should be automatic and integrated at every stage of the research – design, development, analysis, delivery, and dissemination - to address the challenges of the future.

Made possible by grant "NERC Cross - Disciplinary Research for Discovery Science," Department: Land Economy Principal, Cambridge University, Investigator: Dr. Nazia Mintz - Habib, Project Title: Is Fashion without Plastic Possible?, Date: 2022-2023.