CREA’s Global Dialogues
Critical Spaces to Think and Act: CREA’s Global Dialogues
Historical understanding of discourses and movements is a critical aspect of strengthening one’s activism. It is important to look at histories, especially histories that may not be located in our fields of work, that happen in different places and impact each other. As activists and advocates, we need to learn from history because it makes our activism more informed, more analytical, more intersectional. Geetanjali Misra, Executive Director, CREA
CREA’s global dialogues offer a rare space for social movement activists to dialogue with one another around common goals, strategies, and alliance building. Global dialogues delve into issues that require reflection, careful analysis—and sometimes vigorous debate. As deeply political spaces to think and act, these feminist dialogues or convenings are essential mechanisms in movement building. The twelve convenings CREA has organized since 2004 weave together many decades of conversations by feminist activists who have helped push limits and break boundaries.
CREA’s global dialogue themes are informed by the socio-political environment at the global and national levels—especially rising fundamentalisms, authoritarianism, and corporatization—that profoundly impacts gender, sexuality and rights and the social movements that advance them. The global dialogues challenge the ability of women’s movements to become more inclusive of lesbian, trans people, women with disabilities, and sex workers. They have also clarified points of confusion, such as how policy frameworks can adopt consent as a sexual standard, or understanding violence against women as both a health and human rights issue.
CREA’s global dialogues prioritize the participation, voices and perspectives of activists and advocates in the Global South. Because CREA partners with South-based organizations, the dialogues emphasize learning across contexts and strategizing to address common challenges. The inclusion of researchers, lawyers, scholars, donors and cultural critics alongside activists also helps bridge the theory-practice divide and infuse social movements with fresh thinking.
Impact and Value of Global Dialogues
The impact of CREA’s global dialogues stretches far beyond the boundaries of time and space where each conversation is held. New relationships and collaborations are fostered that endure for years. Documentation of learnings and recommendations from global dialogues become valuable resources for other activists and organizations. Most importantly, activists, donors and other movement actors shift their views and approaches in response to what they have learned.
Challenging Discourse
Global dialogues create a space to challenge dominant discourse around sexuality, gender and rights. They provide voice and visibility to concepts, ideas and strategies from people who are usually not perceived as the “experts,” but who are working at the grassroots level and have deep knowledge of how frameworks and strategies get translated on the ground.
One example is the Subaltern Voices Seminar Series (2006-2007), which provided a forum for women leaders from the global South—activists, academics, and advocates—to speak to audiences in the United States on issues of women’s human rights from feminist, Southern-based perspectives.
Catalyzing Ideas
Global dialogues are not only about movement building and shaping collective goals and agendas—they are critical ways of keeping movements from fragmenting, isolating, ossifying, and dying out. They help bring new questions, debates, and challenges—especially from other movements and new constituencies—to the forefront, and ensure that activists revise and revitalize their thinking.
For example, the Global Dialogue on Decriminalization, Choice and Consent reimagined a sexual standard built around consent that would address the concerns of multiple movements. Boldly and politically designed, Global dialogues can build more responsive and accountable agendas that keep movements relevant and vibrant.
Producing and Disseminating New Knowledge
CREA is committed to creating resources that nurture and sustain movements with new content and knowledge based on a discursive and intersectional approach to feminist theory and practice. For this reason, CREA captures the content discussed at global dialogues in numerous knowledge products intended to expand, and build on, the original conversation and reach a broader set of stakeholders. Organizations and donors often request that these reports be translated into other languages, including Spanish, French, Arabic, and Kiswahili.
A set of short videos produced from the Global Dialogue on Disability, Sexuality and Rights provides summaries of key themes covered in multiple accessible formats. As CREA increases its engagement in advocacy and movement building in online spaces, it is also creating digital tools to widely disseminate the learnings from global dialogues.
Sparking Collaborations
By bringing people together to think and act, CREA’s global dialogues spark collaborations across regions, disciplines, and movements. Many of these newly built relationships have led to joint initiatives and deeper alliances around sexuality, gender and rights. For example, following the dialogues on sex work in 2008-2009, Point of View and Sangram collaborated to produce a newsletter for sex workers called “Of Vaishyas, Vamps and Whores.”
Following the Global Dialogue on Disability and Sexuality, CREA collaborated with the Asia-Pacific Resource and Research Centre for Women (ARROW), a regional organization focused on promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights, to produce a special issue of their flagship journal Arrow for Change on the intersection of disability, sexuality and rights.
Influencing donors
Donors are always represented in CREA’s global dialogues as a strategy to influence their thinking about issues, constituencies, and strategies. Funder approaches have indeed shifted after donors attended global dialogues.
For example, donor participation in the 2009 “Ain’t I a Woman” dialogue and the dissemination of the outcome paper paved the way for shifts in the approaches of women’s rights funders towards viewing sex workers as part of the global women’s movement. Soon after the global dialogue, the global women’s fund Mama Cash decided to seed the Red Umbrella Fund, the first global fund exclusively dedicated to supporting the sex workers’ movement.
Bridging Divides Within and Between Movements
These dialogue spaces are an honest, and sometimes painful, analysis of the current state of the global feminist movement. They create a safe space to surface tensions within the women’s rights movement in order to break conceptual or strategic impasses. The conceptual clarity gained through dialogue can help movements reexamine their frameworks, strategies or positions on key issues.
For example, the global dialogues in the early 2000s prompted feminists to rethink their view that sex work is inherently exploitative and synonymous with trafficking. The dialogues between sex workers and violence against women activists produced non-negotiable principles that both movements could agree to follow. In this way, dialogues ensure that the rights claims of one group or movement do not detract from those of another.
Previous Global Dialogues
Global Dialogue on Building Alliances Globally to End Violence Against Women
July, 2004, Bellagio, Italy
The first global dialogue explored emerging issues and challenges in the global efforts to end violence against women. CREA convened activists and grant makers who based their work on the understanding that women’s roles can be multiple and intersecting – as victims, survivors and perpetrators – and have used innovative strategies to deal with prevention and service issues. Participants articulated a complex understanding of the forms, causes, discourse and strategies to address violence against women.1
1 Building Alliances Globally to End Violence Against Women—The Global Dialogue Series Working Paper
Global Dialogue on Strengthening Spaces: Women’s Human Rights in Social Movements
November 2005, Bangkok, Thailand
Co-hosted by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), this global dialogue explored how diverse social movements—including labor, development, dalit, public health, sexuality, human rights, and indigenous people—understand and address women’s human rights, and how women’s rights activists have built alliances with other social movements.1
Models of Resistance
October 2005, Bangkok, Thailand
The Women’s Health and Human Rights Initiative of Columbia University collaborated with CREA, Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML), AWID, and INFORM. The global dialogue highlighted that even during times of utter despair, ordinary people organize to claim justice. These efforts—from families who lost relatives to 9/11, survivors of conflict in Sri Lanka and Rwanda, and Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina—emerge from those who are often not part of organized movements, and deserve greater visibility as strategic models of resistance.1
The Inter-South Dialogue
February 2005, New Delhi, India
The Inter South Dialogue was an effort to link the discourses on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) between organisations working in the global South, whose views were not included in SRHR discourse. CREA partnered with INFORM, MASUM, North East Network, SAMA, and TARSHI to hold a strategic dialogue on sexual and reproductive rights among activists working in Latin America and South Asia. The dialogue focused on the meanings of SRHR across contexts, the role of sexuality in these discussions, and how these terms are being integrated into health service delivery systems.1
Listening to Each Other: A Multigenerational Dialogue on Activism and Women’s Rights
October 2007, New Jersey, USA
In partnership with the Center for Women’s Global Leadership and the Youth Coalition, this global dialogue brought together feminist activists from different generations to discuss and share experiences about intergenerational challenges and barriers affecting feminist movements and organizations, alliance building, and future strategies.1
Sex Work and Trafficking: A Donor/Activist Dialogue on Rights and Funding
December 2008, New York, USA
In partnership with the Global Network of Sex Work Projects and the Open Society Foundations’ Sexual Health and Rights Program, CREA hosted this global dialogue to examine the consequences of language, policies, and programs that conflate the concepts of sex work, migration and trafficking. Recommendations focused on how to leverage existing rights-based models that stop trafficking into the sex sector, and support anti-trafficking efforts that affirm the rights of sex workers and others affected by anti-trafficking legislation.
Ain’t I A Woman?: A Global Dialogue Between the Violence Against Women and Sex Worker’s Movement
March 2009, Bangkok, Thailand
CREA, in partnership with SANGRAM’s Centre for Advocacy on Stigma and Marginalization (CASAM), brought together activists from the women’s movement and the sex workers’ movement to discuss the violence faced by sex workers, why it is ignored by the women’s movement, and how it can be addressed by anti-violence against women campaigns. This was the first time that many people from the violence against women and sex workers rights’ movements were able to gather at a global level to discuss sex work without a heated debate or strong oppositional stances on the issue of sex work as work.1
Global Dialogue on Decriminalisation, Choice and Consent
October 2014, Bellagio, Italy
CREA, along with Amnesty International, the Human Rights Programme at Harvard Law School, and the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale Law School organized a global dialogue on “Decriminalisation, Choice and Consent.” The main focus of the dialogue was to interrogate the conceptual underpinnings of consent, and how consent is articulated and (de) criminalized within diverse contexts, including sexual agency, orientation, marriage, identity and sexual and reproductive health and rights.
Read the publication from the Global Dialogue – Decriminalisation, Choice and Consent here.
Global Dialogue on Disability, Sexuality and Rights
January 2017, Colombo, Sri Lanka
To address key tensions and fractures that divide the women’s rights, LGBTQI, sexual and reproductive rights, and disability rights/justice movements. Two priority themes included movement critiques of medicalization and the divide around access to legal abortion on grounds of fetal impairment. The goal was to identify strategies for movements to foreground an intersectional and inclusive approach to disability and sexuality.
“Fetal Rights” and Women’s Citizenship: Implications of the ‘New’ Gender Ideology
December 2017, Marrakech, Morocco
CREA identified the need for a convening that critiques the meanings and implications of anti-gender and anti-rights politics from a feminist perspective. Globally, the trend across national and cultural contexts has been to endow the fetus with rights and social meanings separate from – and often more valued – than those of women. The global dialogue used the construct of “fetal rights” or “fetal personhood” as a lens through which to examine how anti-gender politics works in practice to deny women’s rights. Specifically the assertion of fetal rights in opposition to, and more deserving than, the rights of women was critically examined through the way language is constructed, cultural representations, and law and policy.
Deconstructing ‘Gender’, Reconstructing Alliances
New York, U.S.A, 2018
CREA, in partnership with the Global Health Justice Partnership of the Yale Law School and the School of Public Health, hosted a dialogue to expand understandings of gender and its relationship to identities, expressions and rights. The project addressed the urgent need for coherent, rights-promoting work regarding gender to proceed across human rights norms and principles in order to minimize protection gaps and to reflect the rich understandings of gender that social movements and scholars have articulated.
Global Dialogue on Disability and Abortion
October 2018, Nairobi, Kenya
CREA hosted a global dialogue aimed at bridging the long-standing divisions between disability rights activists and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) activists that have historically prevented these movements from working in solidarity. This cross-movement conversation allowed both movements to come to terms with historical exclusions, build trust, and arrive at some degree of consensus to develop a political agenda that advances the SRHR of women and girls with disabilities. The dialogue led to the creation of the Nairobi Principles on Abortion, Pre natal testing and Disability.
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