Welcome to Global Feminisms at the University of Michigan
The Global Feminisms Project (GFP) collects interviews with women’s movement activists and women’s studies scholars in sites around the world.
The archive includes interviews with women from Brazil, China, Germany, India, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, and the United States.
Access to the interview transcripts and videos is available in the original language or in English. When using material from the interview transcripts and/or other materials on this Web site, we expect that sources will be properly credited. Citations may be to the website as a whole, to a particular page (such as the lesson plan for teaching about intersectionality), or to a particular interview transcript (example transcript).
Watch the Zoom recording of the February 10, 2023 Global Feminisms webinar “Stories of Long COVID Advocacy in the United States”, here! (Transcript)
Watch the Zoom recording of the October 9, 2021 Global Feminisms conference “Teaching Global Feminisms: Using Activist Interviews Across Disciplines”, here!
Lesson plans may be accessed under “Topical Lesson Plans Using the Global Feminisms Project” in the Teaching dropdown menu above.
Contextualizing Feminist Voices Podcast
Our podcast series, Contextualizing Feminist Voices, was recorded in 2021 to provide additional information on the project’s materials. Each episode is brief (less than 10 minutes), with a project collaborator interviewing an expert who can provide context for the other materials and interviews.
Our second installment of the series, Teaching with the Global Feminisms Project, focuses on how individual teachers have used GFP materials in their courses.
Lesson Plans
Instructors are encouraged to use our topical lesson plans to teach about the diversity of women’s experiences and feminisms. The lesson plans are organized by key terms; instructors may also use the website’s search function to find lesson plans that include the key concepts, methods, or country sites they want to teach.
These lesson plans were developed with a generous project grant from the University of Michigan Humanities Collaboratory.
What’s New at Global Feminisms
Congratulations to United States GFP interviewee Loretta Ross on being named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow!
Read #Womanifesto: What Nigerian Women Want, an important document in Nigerian women’s movement efforts, here. GFP partnered with CEW+ to host interviewee and #Womanifesto collaborator Abiola Akiyode-Afolabi on campus in the Fall of 2022.
On June 13, 2021, GFP interviewee Dora María Téllez was detained by the police in Nicaragua; on February 3, 2022, she was sentenced to 15 years in prison on the charge of “aggression against the national sovereignty” and barred from holding any public office in the future. Read the La Prensa article about the arrest (English translation) and Mónica Baltodano’s biographical piece about Téllez (English translation).
In June 2022 Sueann Caulfield, Claudielle Pavão, and Renata Saavedra worked alongside GFP interviewees Laura Castro and Marilda de Souza Francisco to organize the “Global Feminisms Seminar” in Brazil. The conference focused on the uses of the archive in teaching as well as reflections on oral history and feminist activism.
Listen to Andreea Coscai’s Who Holds Up Half the Sky – Podcast on Chinese Feminism, which focuses on critical issues from censorship of Chinese feminists to the broader meaning of feminism and transnational solidarity. In this podcast, Andreea, a 2022 Bennington College graduate, also interviews GFP staff members Özge Savaş and Wang Zheng.
Read a recent New York Times story about women activists in Poland: Polish women offer refugees safe passage from Ukraine.
Read the 2021 UN report on “New Feminist Activism” here!
