Feminist Strike
A Special Issue of the Journal Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture and Social Justice, Forthcoming 2023
Women, Photography and Resistance
in Transnational Perspective
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellowship
NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam, 2019-2021
This study focuses on the work of women photographers who participated in resistance movements and whose images were made to expose and resist repressive regimes. Although the significance of these activist movements is widely recognised, the role of women photographers remains marginalised and under-researched. At the centre of this project is an exploration of the lives and work of the women who formed part of the Dutch resistance movement, De Ondergedoken Camera (The Underground Camera), and of the women who were members of the anti-apartheid photography collective, Afrapix.
The project also explores how women and nonbinary photographers and visual activists have made use of the medium in support of feminist, LGBTQI+ and anti-racist struggles across the world.
Research Fellow:
Kylie Thomas holds a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellowship at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. She writes about violence during and after apartheid and about photography and transnational history.
Advisors:
Ismee Tames is Program Leader War & Society at NIOD, Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam and Arq Professor History of Resistance in Times of War and Persecution at Utrecht University.
Her main research interest centers on how people and their societies react to and deal with the situation of war and mass violence: their expectations, experiences and emotions. She follows a transnational and micro history approach, combined with methods from the social sciences and digital humanities.
Peter Romijn is head of the Research Department of the NIOD and Professor of Twentieth-Century History at the University of Amsterdam. He has written on the politics of occupation and regime transition in the Netherlands and Europe in the Second World War, on the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands and was co-responsible (with Hans Blom) for the report commissioned by the Dutch Government on the ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica (1995).
This research is funded by the European Commission within the framework of H2020-EU.1.3.2. through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship awarded to Kylie Thomas for the project Fem-Resist. Grant agreement ID: 838864
An Eye for Freedom - An Exhibition of Photographs by Gille de Vlieg
Anti-apartheid activist Debora Marakalala, Free Mandela Rally, 1986. Photograph by Gille de Vlieg
Special Issue on Photography and Resistance of the Journal MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture
Photograph: Melaw Nakehk’o is Dehcho Dene and Denesulene from Liidlii Kue, Denendeh Northwest Territories. She is a Mother, Artist, Moose hide tanner, Actress and and co-founder of the Indigenous organization Dene Nahjo.
From the series, “Resilience and Resistance”, by Kali Spitzer, 2015.
Image courtesy of Kali Spitzer
Women, Photography and Transnational History
The image shows my grandmother Stella and her mother-in-law walking in Johannesburg, c. 1940, photographer unknown.