On August 4 2025, DAWN hosted the online launch of Pandemic Policies and Resistance: Southern Feminist Critiques in Times of COVID-19, bringing together the book’s authors and guests not only to celebrate the publication but also to collectively reflect on the lessons from five years of research and activism.
During the launch, six authors shared reflections on how their work connects policy analysis with movement building, care, and collective resistance.
How to use the book in your activism?
Now, we’re proud to share a brand-new resource: the Southern Feminist Toolkit for Activism. Designed for allies, organisations, and movements, this kit offers ways to use the book as a springboard for research, education, advocacy, and community organising.
Together with the authors, facilitators and more than 50 participants around the world, we reflected on how policy transforms in times of crisis and how we can resist collectively through care, solidarity and feminism.
Some of the key insights that emerged were:
- States prioritised capital over care: In many cases, public policies during COVID-19 centred profits and market “stability” over people’s lives and needs, while offloading care and social reproduction onto women and marginalised groups.
- Care work intensified, but was never recognised.
- Even if we had the data, we did not get the redistribution: Even where gendered data existed, policies often failed to respond to intersecting inequalities, especially for trans communities and small-scale producers.
- Authoritarianism, racism, and anti-gender politics deepened: From the Pacific to Latin America, the pandemic became an excuse to expand repression.
- Colonial and patriarchal fears resurfaced: Crises often trigger backlash. In many contexts, conservative forces pushed for exclusionary and violent models of “order,” reviving colonial frameworks we had begun to challenge.
- One key takeaway: We need spaces for dialogue and exchange: Research should nourish organising, coalition-building, and transnational solidarity.
🎤 Speakers:
🌟Ayesha Constable – Global Fund for Women, Jamaica.
🌟Leigh-Ann Worrell – The University of the West Indies, Barbados.
🌟Nanette Liberona – Universidad de Tarapacá, Chile.
🌟Ritu Dewan – Indian Society of Labour Economics, India.
🌟Roi Burnett – University of Auckland, Kiribati.
🌟Silvia Fernández – Articulación de Mujeres y Feministas Pluridiversas de La Paz y El Alto, Bolivia.
🗣️ Facilitators: Masaya Llavaneras Blanco – DAWN, Venezuela/Canada. Damien P. Gock – DAWN, Fiji.
✨With remarks by Maria Graciela Cuervo – DAWN, República Dominicana.
The full recording of the event is available to watch on DAWN’s YouTube channel.