Description

Farianas’ Post-Armed Struggle Feminist Militancy  

Priscyll Anctil Avoine ( Swedish Defense University)  in Conversation with Maria Martin de Almagro Iniesta ( CRG]

Time:

13:15-14:15- book launch at Rm John Vincke ( 3rd floor) Technicum 1, Campus UFO, Ghent University  

12.30-13.15 - pre-book launch lunch - Refter ( 2nd floor)

Description of the book

             This project is an art-based dissemination strategies concerning my on-going research on war and post-war militancy of women ex-combatants. It is a fiction based on over 10 years of fieldwork with women (ex)combatants and urban militants in Colombia, recollecting their testimonies about their experiences in war and transitions from war-to-peace. It is a collective project with the Colombian illustrator Zulay Carolina Rueda.

            The graphic novel follows the story of two guerrilleras, from their life before the armed struggle, to their participation in arms and then, in their return to civilian life. It explains  disciplining of their body to fit the military order, and it talks about love, combat, fear and the courage to change. It insists on the meaning of ‘dis-embodying’ combat and war, and the transformation of this combat into a feminist one.

            The book is divided into three moments: the war, the civilian life, and the post-war feminist militancy. It focuses on the embodied sensations and emotions that are experienced in this process of transformation, and it ends with examples of projects led by the women in the northeastern region. Most of the novel is fiction, except the productive projects that are presented at the end of the novel – which are currently implemented by the farianas.

About the authors

Priscyll Anctil Avoine is a researcher in Feminist Security Studies and an Associate Senior Lecturer at the Department of War Studies, Swedish Defence University. Her research focuses on embodied and emotional processes in contemporary wars, with a particular emphasis on women’s political militancy in leftist insurgencies and in peace processes. She is the co-author of the graphic novel Militancia feminista post-lucha armada de las farianas (2024) with Zulay Carolina Rueda. Priscyll is also actively involved in the activities of the Fundación Lüvo, a feminist and antiracist collective working in peacebuilding and nonviolence.

Zulay Carolina Rueda is a social worker from the Universidad Industrial de Santander, a specialist in care policies from the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales and a master's degree candidate in Social Work at the University of Missouri. Together with Priscyll Anctil Avoine, Zulay Rueda is co-author and illustrator of the graphic novel Militancia feminista post-lucha armada de las farianas (2024). She is also an assistant teacher in the Ritenour School District in the city of Saint Louis (United States) where she works with migrant and refugee populations. Her academic and work interests have always been guided by the use of art as a tool for social transformation. Since she was a child, she has used graphic art as a tool for protest and communication with the world around her, using media such as watercolor, digital illustration, aerosol, embroidery, muralism, among others.

Maria Martin de Almagro Iniesta: Maria’s research is at the intersection of gender studies, international peacebuilding governance, and the role of knowledge production and meaning-making practices in world politics. Theoretically, much of her work investigates concepts and performances of authority, legitimacy, and power through poststructural and postcolonial accounts and feminist and interpretive methodologies.  Empirically, as an IR scholar and an Africanist, she studies the micro-dynamics of war-to-peace transitions in Sub-Saharan Africa with the aim of producing original findings that derive from an in-depth study of this region, but that can at the same time inform broader debates in the discipline. More concretely, she has written extensively on the advocacy around, and implementation of, the United Nations Security Council’s Women, Peace, and Security agenda at global, national, and local levels in post-conflict contexts.  

She has extensive experience doing field research in conflict-affected countries, including field research experience in Burundi, Liberia, DRC, and South Africa. She is interested in the power of inductive research and grounded theory methodologies for bringing to the fore the world vision of the research subjects.