What is it about?

This paper links my academic activism and experiences in rural Jordan to "barefoot nisswiyya" (barefoot feminism), a concept I coined in 2002. Through tools like Bawh and Ishrah, it explores how grassroots women build agency and navigate patriarchal spaces.

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Why is it important?

The paper comprises essentially a twofold structure. The first part expresses nisswiyya through stories, Bawh and Ishrah. The second is practising nisswiyya within the wider national context and the women’s movement in Jordan which challenges the top-down development discourse and enables grassroots feminist practices to flourish in a bottom-up nisswiyya. This type of feminism emphasises the importance of the need for women to have agency over their own lives and communities. Barefoot niswiyya represents a form of women's agency and ownership grounded in everyday practices of “organic” resilience and empowerment among marginalized communities, particularly women facing scarcity and resource challenges. The term is linguistically crafted to underscore its localized aspect, challenging traditional development paradigms by highlighting the agency and resourcefulness of grassroots women outside mainstream epistemes and colonial hierarchies. Rather than merely reacting to colonial narratives, barefoot niswiyya seeks to forge a path towards impact, self-determination, bottom-up empowerment, and personal-political connections, embodying a proactive approach to community empowerment and social change. The methodology used to curate barefoot niswiyya comprises two interconnected tools: Ishrah (engaged connectedness), a process of engaging connectedness fostering dialogue and solidarity among women, and Bawh (intimate disclosure), a narrative tool empowering women to express themselves transparently and challenge linguistic dispossession and erasure of women’s voices. It seeks to empower women by providing them with tools and platforms to articulate their experiences and narratives. The methodology of engaging with rural women through Ishrah and Bawh enables a deep understanding of their challenges, aspirations, and contributions to their communities. This approach fosters a sense of ownership and agency among women, empowering them to take proactive roles in shaping their destinies and initiating economic and social mobility. The framework of barefoot nisswiyya also incorporates an intricate understanding of positionality in shaping both research and practice. By employing research methodologies like Ishrah and Bawh, I navigate ethical considerations and power dynamics, contributing to a more reflexive and inclusive narrative. This approach seeks to avoid binary oppositions between mainstream feminist tropes and grassroots nisswiyya, instead focusing on the lived experiences and agency of marginalized communities while acknowledging the complexities of their social contexts and power relations, promoting inclusivity and solidarity across diverse socio-economic backgrounds and bridging divides within Jordan, such as "the urban and the rural" (Stoler 2008), "center and the rest" (McClintock 1992), and "powerful and oppressed" (Thrush 2008).

Perspectives

This form of nisswiyya did not emerge to demonize or fault, nor to create an "other" out of a sense of vengeance. Instead, it aims to build a narrative that arises from lived realities, rooted in solidarity and the art of possibility on the ground, in the fields, and in the trenches. Barefoot nisswiyya emerged as an intellectual concept from my experiences as an academic activist, along with my fieldwork in rural areas of Jordan. I coined this term in 2002 and have developed it through practice, experience, and engagement since then. These experiences helped me connect with nature in rural settings as a "Fourth Space," as described by Nigel Thrift. This connection has enabled me to challenge certain global-north centric intellectual practices and to construct a (f)eminist framework that stems from the voices and experiences of women on the ground. This Nisswiyya is "the Nisswiyya of possibility in the face of impossibility"—a Nisswiyya that originates from reality, in the trenches, where theory is born from experience, not the other way around. It is a way of thinking that merges limited resources with self-actualization for barefoot nisswiyyat and their communities. Through the research methodology I developed, based on "Bawh" (spontaneous intimate expression) and "Ishrah" (engagement and connectedness), I explore how barefoot nisswiyya has helped me build "Ishrah" with women on the ground and in the field—shepherdesses, farmers, factory workers, and janitors—as they express their voices and document their stories, which embody their agentic nisswiyya. These stories illustrate how barefoot feminists navigate hierarchical spaces to activate the "Fourth Space" of the land and the field. Nigel Thrift classified spaces into four categories: (1) the empirical space; (2) the flexible, fluid space; (3) the virtual, imaginary space; and (4) the Fourth Space, which he calls the PLACE space. This paper discusses these experiences rooted in barefoot Nisswiyya, a form of agency and ouwnershio that seek to narrow the gap between theory and practice, connect the personal with intellectual framing, move away from "global centralized feminism," and expand the scope of nisswiyya to include the experiences of grassroots nisswiyyat from within the local knowledge systems these women lead by their agency in the field.

Professor Wafa Awni Alkhadra
American University of Madaba

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This page is a summary of: Barefoot nisswiyya in practice and theory: the case of grassroots feminists in Jordan, Gender & Development, January 2023, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/13552074.2023.2184530.
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