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This paper considers the geographical study of black women's lives through a reflection on Jacqueline Tivers' (1978) "How the other half lives: the geographical study of women." While feminist geographers have drawn on black feminist thought, the limited presence of black women academics within the discipline of Geography contributed to a lack of sensitivity to the distinctiveness of black women's geographies. The paper notes the considerable body of work that has emerged since Tivers' paper, including that which challenges the universalisation of concepts of women, gender, family, and the household, especially in relation to black women's lives globally. It asserts the globality of black women's "lifeways" – especially the interconnections between continental Africa and the African diaspora – and suggests that a more relational approach to the study of black women's lives could inform geographers' understanding of gendered and racial structures of oppression and alternative geographies of resistance and freedom. This paper considers the geographical study of black women's lives through a reflection on Jacqueline Tivers' (Area, 10, 1978, 302) "How the other half lives: the geographical study of women." While feminist geographers have drawn on black feminist thought, the limited presence of black women academics within the discipline of Geography contributed to a lack of sensitivity to the distinctiveness of black women's geographies. The paper notes the considerable body of work that has emerged since Tivers' paper, including that which challenges the universalisation of concepts of women, gender, family, and the household, especially in relation to black women's lives globally. It asserts the globality of black women's "lifeways" – especially the interconnections between continental Africa and the African diaspora – and suggests that a more relational approach to the study of black women's lives could inform geographers' understanding of gendered and racial structures of oppression and alternative geographies of resistance and freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses perspectives in Africana feminist thought. While, not an exhaustive review of the entire diaspora, three regions are discussed: Africa, North America, and the Caribbean. Despite great cultural diversity between and within these geographies, there are, too, great commonalities in Africana women's lived experience under colonialism and slavery. It is these shared experiences that helped shaped and develop this distinct brand of feminism, which is universally concerned with the ways women manage and challenge multiple oppressions. Additionally, the feminism that emerged out these experiences is fundamentally commissioned with the task of breaking down and deconstructing racist and sexist ideologies that devalue their humanity. This brand of feminism is, likewise, charged with the duty of transforming societies through both intellectual and pragmatic approaches. Across Africa and her diaspora, Africana women share a rich and powerful history of resistance, despite attempts to silence and make them invisible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One popular strategy of opposition to practices of female genital cutting (FCG) is rooted in the global feminist movement. Arguing that women’s rights are human rights, global feminists contend that practices of FGC are a culturally specific manifestation of gender-based oppression that violates a number of rights. Many African feminists resist a women’s rights approach. They argue that by focusing on gender as the primary axis of oppression affecting the African communities where FGC occurs, a women’s rights approach has misrepresented African women as passive victims who need to be rescued from African men and has obscured the role of certain international institutions that have perpetuated the oppression of African women. In this paper, I defend these critiques by arguing that the use of a women’s rights framework to combat practices of female genital cutting among African communities has often been practically ineffective and morally inappropriate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exigency of a global female gender theory has generated an on-going debate. Feminism, due to its inadequacies birthed womanism, an African-American variant. Womanism in turn purports to interpret Black female experiences globally. Although some African women have identified with womanism, this paper examines to what extent womanism delineates the indigenous African women's experiences, worldviews and perception. In addition to exploring the various positions of female African literary luminaries, this paper outlines some principles for a truly indigenous African womanist stance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an overview of the Knowledge Exchange Research Group (KERG) West African Elibrary Collaborative (WAELC) study of West African scholars' systemic restricted access to digitized scholarly databases. WAELC, an ongoing qualitative and quantitative study, explores limited accessibility to current open‐access digital repositories and platforms at some African universities. A practical output of the study is to inform the development of a sustainable institutional repository and support the development of an open‐access multimodal digital platform that will feature scholarly and creative works of global Black people. The WAELC data addresses gaps in previous research on library access and usage at African universities and critically responds to the general African Digital Divide literature. A central focus of this article is to discuss the sociocultural and historical practices and processes that shape current digital access to electronic scholarship in Africa. Foregrounded in a Black feminist autoethnographic approach, the author's research process and researcher positionality were central to developing the WAELC research project. A significant finding of this research is that the systemic inequities framing global knowledge access and production in Global South institutions are reproduced in infrastructures weakened from colonial, neocolonial, and neoliberal social, political, and economic systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we build on the vital insights of feminist thought in economic geography, extending this body of work via a global Black feminist geographic lens. To do so, we center two moments of the Ugandan bridal industry: the international trade of imported dresses and their design and refashioning there. Via the journeys of these dresses, we make visible how connected racial-gendered and classed power relations structure, drive, and manifest global trade networks. We provide geographically contextualized accounts of the gendered-racialization of economies, while always tracing the ties between varied forms of that racialization across place and through history. And we demonstrate the agency and crucial economic worldmaking of African women who labor within and fashion economic geographies. More broadly, we use dress, and the act of dressing up, in two ways. First, via a global Black feminist lens, we show how dress can be a deeply instructive material object that tells us much about the geographies of economies. Second, we use dress as a metaphor for urgent and playful connection, helping us to refashion the subfield of economic geography as feminist, antiracist, and critically transformative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]