Engaging with Feminist Leadership - Shereen Essof - a Personal Journey
Channel: Coady Institute
Date: 2021-08-04

Coady Institute's Sarika Sinha speaks with Shereen Essof. Shereen is a respected Zimbabwean feminist, activist, popular educator, academic, and Executive Director of JASS, a global women-led human rights network of activists, popular educators and scholars in 31 countries. JASS works to ensure women leaders are more confident, better organized, louder, and safer as they take on some of the most critical human rights issues of our time.

Shereen’s academic work is grounded in her engagement with women in trade unions, social movements, and community-based organizations. She strives to understand the roots and the gendered nature of neo-liberal, patriarchal systems, and from that understanding to imagine and organize towards alternatives. She worked at the Zimbabwe Women’s Resource Centre and Network in Harare for six years, and then with the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town. At the same time, she has shared her time and capacities with other social justice organizations, not only to strategize, mobilize, and take action but also to create accessible information through oral histories, documentary, creative writing, and art. Shereen has published widely on feminism, women’s movements, and social movement organizing in both online and hard copy journals in South Africa and internationally.