Contesting Publics ― Feminism, Activism, Ethnography

Through four case studies Contesting Publics: Feminism, Activism, Ethnography analyses the challenges facing activists to connect gender with issues of race and class.

Lynne Phillips and Sally Cole examine women's projects for social change in Latin America. Using these examples, they argue that feminism can produce both new spaces for participation and new silences, exclusions and re-inscriptions of inequalities. The examples thus speak to a larger theoretical question: what is the meaning of 'public' in the spaces of a broadening and deepening democracy?

Contesting Publics considers current debates among feminists on the merits of a variety of strategies, goals and issues, drawing out vital lessons for students, researchers and activists in anthropology and gender studies.

Lynne Phillips is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Windsor, UK. She is the editor of The Third Wave of Modernization in Latin America: Cultural Perspectives on Neoliberalism (1998).

Sally Cole is Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She is the author of Ruth Landes: A Life in Anthropology (2003).