This talk suggests that an insurgent feminist lens requires understanding that racialized gender is key to mapping borders, histories and movements, and asking the question: how and why do women, queer and gender non-conforming people matter in understanding and responding to this moment of global pandemic and protest.  Chandra Talpade Mohanty will ask what an anti-racist, decolonial, anti-capitalist feminist praxis consist of at this time when colonial legacies and global inequities are no longer invisible and building solidarities and movements across borders is more urgent than ever before?  What do anti-imperialist feminist scholars, activists, and cultural workers need to know, analyze, and learn about so we can forge ethical solidarities across material and virtual borders, and build the landscapes of racial and gender justice that we dream about and struggle for?  What does it mean to craft insurgent knowledges through our writing, our art, our cultural productions, our activism, and our pedagogies? 

Chandra Talpade Mohanty is Distinguished Professor and Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies and Dean’s Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse University. She was a member of the Indigenous and Women of Color Feminist Solidarity delegation to Palestine in 2011. She is author of  Insurgent Visions: Feminism, Justice, Solidarity, (Duke University Press, 2025), Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Duke University Press, 2003), and co-editor of  Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Indiana University Press, 1991),  Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (Routledge, 1997),  Feminism and War: Confronting U.S. Imperialism, (Zed Press, 2008),  The Sage Handbook on Identities (Sage Publications, 2010), and Feminist Freedom Warriors (Haymarket Books, 2018).  Mohanty is co-creator with Linda Carty of the feminist freedom warriors digital video archive http://feministfreedomwarriors.org  and a member of the advisory boards of fourteen journals including Signs, A Journal Of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Africa (South Africa), Asian Women (Korea), Feminist Economics, and The Caribbean Review of Gender Studies. She is a founding member of the Democratizing Knowledge Collective(democratizingknowledge.syr.edu) and coordinating team member of the Future of Minority Studies Research Project(fmsproject.cornell.edu).