Creating space to speak together is a critical endeavor for feminist theology. In every part of the world, women are more vulnerable to disease, poverty, violence and discrimination.  There is a need for women from different corners of our globe to come together to listen to each other and work for justice. The goal of this immersion project is to bring together and mentor young feminist theologians from African countries and the United States in order to create a space where they can listen to one another and to engage in constructive dialogue and collaborative research.

The project, which took place in June and July of 2009, invited eight doctoral students and post-graduates from the US and from Kenya to Nairobi for a course at the Maryknoll Institute of African Studies. The goal of this course was to create an atmosphere of cross-cultural dialogue through coursework and fieldwork that then paved the way for the second phase of this project, a one-week immersion listening symposium. During this symposium, obstacles to dialogue were explored and pedagogical commitments were discovered in light of global feminist and postcolonial concerns. The goal of the project was to not only provide participants with a deeper understanding of global feminist theologies, but to allow an intimate connection to the issues facing women globally, as participants engaged local communities through fieldwork and experiential learning. The symposium and the coursework laid the groundwork for the third objective of the project: collaborative writing. Participants from both regions are now pairing up based on their research interests and writing essays together for an academic volume that we hope to publish in both Africa and the US. In these essays, participants will be utilizing fieldwork on issues such as: women and food, women and leadership, post-election violence in Kenya, sexuality, food and narrative, all from a feminist postcolonial theological perspective.

This project is being initiated by the Department of Theology at Loyola University Chicago in partnership with the Maryknoll Institute of African Studies in Nairobi, Kenya. It has been funded through grants from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning and the American Academy of Religion and through funds from Loyola University Chicago’s Graduate School, the Provost’s Office, and the Gannon Center for Women and Leadership. Funds have also been given by University of San Diego CAS Dean’s Office and the International Center.

The idea for the project came about as the result of a graduate student reading group in feminist theologies at Loyola University Chicago. When given a grant to fund the reading group, participants were asked to create a project that we could contribute to the Loyola community and chose to focus on communal feminist pedagogies within the context of Jesuit education.  It was this project that led them to read the work of Circle theologians, which has become the bedrock for this project. In the second year of the grant, participants were asked to create another project for the Loyola community, and this project was the result. This project has global awareness at its center and embodies the Catholic tradition of theology by accompaniment. It brings service-learning to the graduate level as future teachers are asked to participate in a transformative experimental pedagogy of learning by immersion. It embodies the ideals of “service that promotes justice” as it seeks to balance orthopraxy and orthodoxy. And it is deeply faithful, in that it asks participants to seek God, and faith, and life through the eyes of their neighbor.

Learn more about the 2007 Embodied Participatory Learning Project created by the Women in Theology group here.