Co-editors
Natascia Boeri
Bloomfield College of Montclair State University
Marcia Texler Segal
AGR Series Editor
Kristy Kelly
Columbia University
Introduction
Call for Chapter Proposals
Feminist Engagements with the United Nations
Proposed edited volume for Advances in Gender Research (Emerald Publishing)
Co-Edited by Kristy Kelly, Natascia Boeri, and Marcia Texler Segal
The United Nations has long served as a consequential arena for feminist organizing, knowledge production, advocacy, institution building, and social change. Feminist movements have shaped international understandings of gender equality, human rights, development, violence, peace and security, population, climate justice, and other global concerns. Through their participation in world conferences, treaty processes, commissions, expert groups, civil society forums, national delegations, and transnational networks, feminist actors have helped build many of the concepts, policies, and institutional mechanisms that now constitute global gender governance.
These engagements operate across multiple scales. Feminist organizations from the Global South played central roles in reshaping international development and human rights agendas and in building the intellectual and political foundations that informed the Beijing Platform for Action and the expansion of gender mainstreaming. Indigenous women have brought questions of sovereignty, land, colonialism, collective rights, and Indigenous knowledge into international arenas. Researchers and civil society organizations use mechanisms including CEDAW reporting, treaty reviews, UN special procedures, and global policy frameworks to generate evidence, challenge government accounts, and press for change within national contexts. Scholars themselves often participate in these processes as researchers, advocates, experts, delegates, consultants, organizers, and translators of knowledge.
Feminist sociology provides important tools for examining these relationships. Falcón’s (2016) research on antiracist feminist activism inside the United Nations demonstrates how race, gender, geopolitics, and intersectionality shape participation and the production of human rights claims. Feminist analysis also provides critical perspectives on how states interpret and implement UN treaties, including methods of noncompliance (MacCarthy 2017; Womack 2017). Other feminist scholarship reveals how the UN provides opportunities for feminist coalition building and social change (Lee 2020), while drawing attention to shifting relations of insiderness, outsiderness, and “situated accessibility” (Jauk 2014, 2017). At the same time, the UN has become a site of antifeminist organizing that is reshaping intergovernmental debates (Cupać and Ebetürk 2020). Desai’s (2020) work on transnational feminist praxis further directs attention to place, power, relationality, and the production of feminist solidarities across unequal global contexts. Ampofo and Beoku-Betts (2021) similarly call for greater attention and inclusion of feminist knowledge and praxis from the Global South to understand the current moment.
Building from this scholarship, the volume approaches feminist engagement with the United Nations as a multidirectional social process through which feminist actors make, use, challenge, and transform global institutions. Ideas, evidence, people, and political claims move among varying social sites including social movements, universities, NGOs, states, regional organizations, international institutions, and cities. International norms and review processes become resources for national and local advocacy, while situated knowledge travels through international arenas to reshape global agendas. These processes unfold through relationships structured by race, colonial histories, nationality, class, language, professional expertise, organizational resources, and geopolitical power.
The volume also treats the United Nations itself as a gendered organization. Its structures, mandates, leadership, organizational cultures, professional expertise, allocation of resources, and relationships with civil society shape how gender equality work is defined and carried out across the UN system. This perspective opens questions about where responsibility for gender resides, how feminist commitments become embedded in institutional structures and practices, and how organizational change reshape the possibilities for feminist engagement and global gender governance.
Questions and Areas of Interest
We welcome original research addressing questions such as:
How have feminist movements shaped the institutions, concepts, and policy agendas of the United Nations? How have Global South women’s organizations transformed international understandings of gender, development, rights, population, peace, violence, or economic justice? How can historical analysis of feminist engagements surrounding the UN World Conferences on Women, including Nairobi and Beijing, speak to current feminist knowledge, transnational organizing, or contemporary global gender governance?
How do feminist actors use international institutions and agreements within national and local political struggles? How do researchers, activists, and civil society organizations use CEDAW reporting, treaty reviews, shadow reports, UN recommendations, Sustainable Development Goal monitoring, and other accountability processes to engage governments and advance policy change?
How do scholars and feminist ideas move among academic research, advocacy and institutional roles? What happens to concepts such as gender equality, intersectionality, empowerment, violence, care, reproductive justice, or gender mainstreaming as they move across institutions and political contexts? What types of evidence, indicators, and lived experience acquire legitimacy within international institutions?
How do Indigenous women engage UN institutions around sovereignty, collective rights, land, environmental justice, violence, health, and Indigenous knowledge? How do these engagements reshape conventional understandings of gender equality, citizenship, state authority, and international governance?
How do race, class, nationality, language, disability, sexuality, coloniality, professional status, organizational resources, and geopolitical location shape access to global institutions and the authority of feminist claims? How do feminist actors build solidarities across these differences? How do diverse communities and social movement actors, including Indigenous, youth, LGBTQ+, labor, and other groups respond to and navigate UN space once they gain access?
How do feminists engage UN arenas whose mandates extend beyond gender, including climate negotiations, peace and security, migration, Indigenous rights, youth forums, racial justice, disability rights, population and development, labor, technology, and economic governance?
What are the opportunities and challenges for engaging university students with the UN system, its initiatives and its contested politics? How do feminist pedagogies shape how students engage critically with the UN?
How do institutional relationships, informal networks, professional expertise, organizational routines, diplomatic practices, and everyday forms of labor shape feminist participation and influence within the UN system?
How are feminist actors engaging in debates about the institutional future of the United Nations? How do processes of organizational reform, leadership transition, mandate revision, and resource allocation reshape global gender governance? What can contemporary debates surrounding UN reform, the leadership of the organization, and the institutional location and future of gender equality work reveal about feminist influence, representation, accountability, and multilateralism?
These questions are illustrative. We welcome research that expands the conceptual, geographic, institutional, and methodological scope of the volume.
Research Expectations
Chapters should develop a clear analytical argument grounded in systematic empirical evidence and situated within relevant scholarly literature. We welcome qualitative, quantitative, comparative, historical, ethnographic, and mixed-method research.
The volume seeks contributions from across regions, career stages, and institutional settings. Scholar-practitioners, activists, advocates, and researchers working across institutional locations are encouraged to submit proposals.
Proposal Submission
Please submit the following by November 30, 2026:
a provisional chapter title;
an abstract of up to 500 words identifying the research question or central analytical problem, empirical material and methods, conceptual or theoretical approach, principal argument or anticipated findings, and contribution to understanding feminist engagement with the United Nations;
3–5 keywords;
a brief (100 word) author biography (include for all authors if more than one); and
each author’s name, institutional or organizational affiliation, and contact information.
Proposal and any questions should be sent to all volume co-editors.
Selected contributors will receive information concerning chapter length, manuscript preparation, and the schedule for the proposed volume.
Key Deadlines
Proposals due: November 30, 2026
Notification of decisions: mid-January, 2027
Full chapter drafts due: late April to mid-May, 2027
Revised chapters due: Fall 2027
Selected References
Beoku-Betts, Josephine and Akosua Adomako Ampofo. 2021. “Introduction: Positioning Feminist Voices in the Global South.” In Producing Inclusive Feminist Knowledge: Positionalities and Discourses in the Global South, Advances in Gender Research, Vol. 31. Emerald Publishing.
Cupać, Jelena and Irem Ebetürk. 2020. “The personal is global political: The antifeminist backlash in the United Nations.” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 22(4), 702-714.
Desai, Manisha. 2020. “Troubling the Southern Turn in Feminisms.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 27(4):381–393.
Falcón, Sylvanna M. 2016. Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activism inside the United Nations. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Jauk, Daniela. 2014. “Insiderness, Outsiderness, and Situated Accessibility—How Women Activists Navigate UN’s Commission on the Status of Women.” Societies Without Borders 9(1):69–95.
Jauk, Daniela. 2017. “Feminist Scholar-Activism Goes Global: Experiences of ‘Sociologists for Women in Society’ at the UN.” Brock Education Journal 27(1).
Lee, Susan Hagood. 2020. “Opportunities for Feminist Social Change at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.” In Gender and Practice: Knowledge, Policy, Organizations, Advances in Gender Research, Vol. 28, 201–218. Emerald Publishing.
MacCartney, Danielle. 2017. “Monitoring the World Society: LGBT Human Rights in Russia and Sweden.” In Gender Panic, Gender Policy, Advances in Gender Research, Vol. 24. Emerald Publishing.
Womack, Malia Lee. 2017. “The United States’ International Valuing of Anti-Racism Norms over Gender Equality Norms.” In Gender Panic, Gender Policy, Advances in Gender Research, Vol. 24. Emerald Publishing.
