Radical Wellbeing: Reimagining Collective Care for Feminist Activists

In a field where long hours, over-exertion and frequent burnout becomes easily normalised in the name of working towards a greater cause, prioritising things like wellbeing and self-care can quickly start to feel like self-indulgence. For many feminist activists, self-sacrifice has become the name of the game as we constantly focus on what more we could be doing to contribute to our growing movements.

But when the systems we are fighting directly benefit from this individual sacrifice, it might be time to reconsider what wellbeing practices should look like within truly resilient and sustainable feminist movements.

In the fourth installment of IWDA’s Troublemakers series, Sattara Hattirat, Co-Coordinator and Founder of Backyard Politics Thailand and Kunthea Chan, Regional Co-Director at Just Associates, unpack what collective care as an act of political resistance within feminist movements could look like. They’ll discuss their efforts to broaden and deepen the meaning of ‘wellbeing’ for women and LGBTQIA+ activists to make room for practices that centre spirituality, economic security and reconceptualisations of sexual, romantic and familial relationships.

Speakers

Sattara Hattirat is a lesbian activist and the founder of Backyard Politics Thailand, a women and LBQ-led organisation working on feminist collective wellbeing in social movements. She works with women and LBQ activists across the sectors of youth, indigenous women, civil and political rights, women migrant workers, the urban poor, women and LBQ people in armed conflict, artivism and land rights movements. She co-founded Full Yin, a women and LGBT activist wellbeing space that provides services for activists.

Kunthea Chan is the regional co-director of JASS Southeast Asia. Based in Cambodia, she brings with her many years of experience as a feminist popular educator and the JASS SEA regional lead in methodology, design and strategy. In her work, she uses an intersectional approach to support women's leadership and organising strategies in trade unions and garment workers, LBT groups, indigenous and rural women, and young feminists. In 2018, Kunthea co-authored "Diving Deep, Going Far", a non-fiction book based on the remarkable lives of twenty-five young Cambodian women creating change for the future of their country.

About the series

Troublemakers: Courageous Conversations with Fiery Feminists is brought to you by the International Women’s Development Agency. Over four monthly webinars, you’ll hear two feminist trailblazers from the Asia Pacific in candid, no-holds-barred conversations that will unpack the ideas that get them out of bed in the morning and keep them up at night.

This webinar series will help you see beyond the horizon to explore the next big ideas in international intersectional feminism, challenge your ideas of what feminist movements can look like and introduce you to the feminist thought leaders that are currently changing the game.

Each session will begin with a one-on-one conversation between our two speakers before we open up the space to all attendees for an opportunity to network and unpack the ideas presented by our speakers through a question-and-answer portion.