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Kenna Neitch, "A Praxis of Persistence: Central American Feminist Testimony and Sustainable Activism" (SUNY Press, 2026)
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Dr. Kenna Nitsch
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Kenna Nitsch about her book published by Suny Press in 2026, titled A Praxis of Central American Feminist Testimony and Sustainable Activism, which, as the title suggests, explores persistence as being a really key way to understand a bunch of different groups, communities, movements of feminist activism across a range of in Central America. So we're going to be looking at what some movements are doing at some literature that's being produced, lots of different kinds of things to understand the impact that is being had in different spaces and across time too. So clearly a lot to discuss. Kenna, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Kenna Nitsch
Thank you so much for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? What kinds of questions did you want to investigate with the project?
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Dr. Kenna Nitsch
I'd love to. So thank you again so much for having me here. Miranda My name, as you said, is Kenna Nich, and I use she her pronouns. I'm a queer feminist scholar and an assistant professor in the Global and Intercultural Studies Department over at Miami University of Ohio. And for just a quick background on me and my work, I write about a couple of related but pretty different areas. So the first, which is really what's connected to the. The book is Central American feminist activism. And with my background in literature, how do activists use writing and text to further their goals? Now, the second and more recent area that comes up just a little bit in the last chapter is around queer and feminist methods related to social change in higher education. So after spending a lot of time studying feminist activist methods in my research, it's been really important to me to see how can I apply what I've learned to other parts of my job. And as I've seen how these kind of methods can adapt to, then come back to research to talk about that experience with other educators. So that was kind of broadly what I do, but now onto the book and why I decided to write it. So to answer that, we're going to do a little bit of time travel. So go back to 2016. I've been working on this book for a long time, and I really kept coming across this idea of the resistance, accommodation, binary. So it's this kind of rigid idea that you're either resisting or accommodating oppression. And so this binary has been challenged really beautifully by a lot of different feminist scholars, to name just a few. You know, Jennifer Morgan has talked about this. Indigenous feminist Eve Tuck has written about this idea. And, you know, she argues that in any given day, in any given day, if we're thinking about unjust systems, people might resist and challenge and participate and withdraw from these oppressive social structures. So this binary of resistance or accommodation really just doesn't reflect, you know, this nuance and complexity of the actions that we undertake. So I was encountering this framework around that time, and one of those moments was in the seminar where we were looking at a series of Nahua, or Aztec plays that were written in the years pretty quickly after the Spanish conquest. So on the surface, the plays are Christian morality plays, but they're written in the Nahuat language, and it's unlikely that many friars would have had the fluency to write them. So it's theorized that they were at least partially written by indigenous authors. So like I was saying, in a just superficial reading, these feel like these really morality, like religious plays. But then when you spend some more time with them, you start to see all of these moments where they're not just subverting Spanish patriarchal Christian morals and colonial doctrine. They're also putting forward and preserving specific cultural values. Whether it's women being able to retain their own property or money, or even in the stage directions. You know, in one, there's this woman who is being condemned for her vanity, and she's this gaudy woman who loves to wear fancy clothes and big earrings, and that's his big no, no. And the overt messaging of the play. But in the stage directions for how it would have been produced, this is this moment where she's able to be just fully and fantastically adorned in gorgeous costuming and all of this jewelry that was prohibited after the conquest. So it's also a platform to include a kind of cultural production that would have otherwise been restricted. So around that time, I'm seeing these examples where the action certainly is transgressive, but it's not exactly about a form of resistance where the point is to push back or to push against this oppressive institution, or at least not entirely. It's also really about pushing for a community or about values that you really want to see persist. Now, as the title alludes, you know, I didn't ultimately write a book about Nahua Place during colonialism. There are amazing books that do that by people that have the expertise to do so. But that was a really important example for me that I was able to then bring into studying contemporary feminist practices and looking at how they utilize methods that aren't just about how do we fight back in the moment, but how do we create the conditions that are going to allow us to persist through the unevenness of political struggle where it's not this linear onward and upward. If we just play our cards right, it's going to keep getting better and stay that way. And, you know, I will say that has certainly continued to stay relevant here in the US as well as in Central America across the decade that I've been writing and from a personal place. I was in my early 20s when I started writing the first parts of what would become the book. And I think I found myself really in need of ways to understand how to continue organizing through major political setbacks and how to understand the unevenness of feminist work. And so that led me to a lot of the questions that I take up in the book. So across the chapters, I'm really digging into what methods do feminist organizations use that allow them to persist, and how do you make that possible? So how do These organizations adapt to change. Changing conditions, changing needs. Persistence can't just be doing the same thing over and over. And as conditions change, as we are surprised, as we're at times betrayed, how do we adapt and persist? And then how do feminist organizations consider and meaningfully attend to the needs of the people who are involved in their movement? There have been so many needed conversations about activist burnout and the toll that it takes to do this work for a long time. And the more that I got into writing this, and as I got into my job and I was able to teach classes in women's and gender studies and work with students who were already involved in organizing themselves, I began looking at how activists create conditions not just for movements and organizations to persist, but also for feminists themselves to be able to withstand long term organizing. And then again, as I said, with my background in literature and studying text, I'm also really interested in how activist modes of communication connect to persistence. So how can they support that work? And as we think about broader toolkits of activist organizing, how can communication methods really contribute to this work as well? So how do activists communicate? And that led me to a book that combines activist organizing methods and textual methods and the ways that they can each reflect and complement each other.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Lots then going on, bringing you into the project. And of course already a key idea in the title as well, but also in what you've just been explaining to us is persistence. So is there anything further we want to talk about in terms of that idea?
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Dr. Kenna Nitsch
Sure. I'd love to say more about why persistence specifically. So I think there's a lot that's meaningful for me in terms both conceptually of what persistence gets at as we look at feminist organizing. And then there's why specifically this word persistence is such a good fit to get at that concept when there are a lot of other related terms that folks have written about. So conceptually, I found persistence to be important as this foundation to organizing that I don't think we often spend a lot of time analyzing as its own piece. So when we think about feminist goals, we're often thinking about liberation or equity, justice, abolition, these goals that we're working toward creating in the world. But having methods that allow us to keep working toward those other goals is also essential. So for a movement itself to persist is certainly not its only goal or even the end goal of feminist work. But those long term, liberatory political goals really aren't possible unless we have a praxis of persistence in place so that it's possible to Keep going through hostile conditions. So, you know, I spend a lot of time with this word persistence, so that I can think through it as a framework to unpack what we can learn from all of these feminist activists who keep showing up and what that allows them to do, and, you know, the strategies that make it possible for them to do so. And similarly, I believe that we don't only need those strategies for how to keep going. It is really helpful in terms of our analysis to have language that speaks to, to this ongoingness than this struggle really requires. So in trying to think through what that language would look like, I was thinking, of course, about that example from the plays that I just mentioned, where they weren't just resisting, but also preserving. But I was thinking also more broadly about how Central Americans tend to be positioned discursively in this really often disempowering way. And so as I did so, it became really important to me to look for a term that would recognize this kind of work as active rather than reactive. And that's one of the strengths that I think we see if we look at the syntax of persistence. So persisting is to continue and endure and abide. And this does traditionally occur in opposition to something else, but it doesn't syntactically necessitate or privilege that opposition. So instead, persistence is first and foremost about this continuation of locating or creating practices that are self asserting and self affirming. And in a feminist framework, you know, that self in a self asserting sense can absolutely be rooted in community. So using this term, I'm able to focus on this really robust body of strategies that facilitates Central American persistence. And in doing so, I feel like I'm able to demonstrate how persistence can really be a lot more than some pithy slogan. Persistence has become popular as a kind of rallying cry in the US in recent years. But one of my goals is to show that it can be used a lot more intentionally as both activist strategy and as a discursive mode. So through the case studies, persistence is this lens that really illuminates a lot of links and connections between different activist methods that have occurred across feminist organizations in the last 40 years. So if we, you know, look from 1980 up through 2020, and persistence is showing this kind of combination of adaptation and creativity and resilience. And I feel like it's in that way a heuristic that really helps us learn from these strategies of sustainable activism.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Now, you mentioned examining this in terms of case studies, and you've mentioned Central America, but you've also mentioned The US So why did you decide to focus on case studies of organizations in Central American countries?
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Dr. Kenna Nitsch
That's such a great question. So when I was talking about why persistence just now, I mentioned the way that Central America tends to be regarded from the outside. So the U.S. of course, has its own imperial agenda, or why our national discourse tends to highlight both so little and almost exclusively damage centered information about this region. But even more broadly, in Central American studies, there's a lot of documentation that there tends to be such a misunderstanding of this region. Yes, Central America is impacted by global powers, and it has been, but there's so much to see for the ways in which that impact is really mutual. So Central American cultural production has had global impact, and so there is this multidirectional interaction that is often often unseen, that's doing what Anna Lenhof Singh calls friction. So as a part of that, in terms of thinking about why Central America, for a book on how feminists persist, it was really important to me to show how much there is to learn for feminist scholars and activists about how to organize sustainably. So the book focuses on Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. And there's this incredibly instructive through line of persistence in organizing when you look at, for example, from women who took up the cause of national liberation to women who were then building these explicitly feminist initiatives in each of these countries, and then at the same time, women who were figuring out how to continue community initiatives while also challenging structures within their communities that really didn't need to continue. So the feminists there that I've been learning from are mobilizing through conditions that, you know, are certainly often turbulent and precarious, as they are in many places right now, including the U.S. and they require activists to be able to read the environment that they're organizing in and then strategically adapt, which is a skill that I think a lot of different groups, feminist organizations especially, can really learn from. So those changing and frequently challenging conditions around democracy and sexual violence and coloniality and shifting public support around gender have a lot of connections to what feminists elsewhere are experiencing. So while there is, of course, a lot that's unique in these case studies, I really feel that there's a lot that can be applied to other geographic contexts.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's helpful to have laid out, I think, earlier in this conversation to keep in mind then as we get into some of the details of what these organizations are doing. So taking as our first sort of step deeper into this analysis, can we talk about testimonials as sort of a Obviously type of literary production as a site really of persistence, and perhaps especially the way you talk about them in the book as being obviously feminist persistence, but also ways in which we can have multiple voices going on. It's not just kind of about, like, the one single feminist leader persisting.
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Dr. Kenna Nitsch
Yes, absolutely. So, traditionally, as I imagine folks know, testimonials were considered to be a kind of testimony where the individual represents the community. So we see this in a lot of canonical testimonials like Me Llamori, Roberta Menchu, where the testimonialista or the testifier has a communal sense of self. So this is. There is an individual who is driven to testify, to shed light on the injustices that are being perpetrated against their community. But in the book, however, I was able to take a look at a testimonial that really deviates from that format, which is no me agaran viva or they Won't Take Me Alive. So this is a multivocal or multivoiced testimony that's about a Salvadoran woman leader and the FMLN named Eugenia, and she was killed by the state during the Salvadoran civil war. So she is not able to give testimony on her own behalf. And in that case, the transcribers, Clarabel Alegria and DJ Fakol, were able to gather testimonies from 10 different women involved in the FMLN who had known Eugenia during her life. And then they wove those testimonies together into a broader picture. Both, you know, that eulogized her, but that also gave this really broad tapestry of the experience of women in the guerrilla at a point where we had not previously had women involved in the ranks before. Now, when we start to think about gender and the Salvadoran civil war and even more broadly, the Central American national liberation movements, I think the value of that multivocality becomes a lot more apparent. There have been probably hundreds of texts from scholars and activists alike about women's involvement with those movements and. And how we should remember them, you know, how we should understand, you know, gender specifically among the resistance. And for some, it was this very positive revolutionary experience where they first had the opportunity to take action or where they came into the revolutionary ideas. But for others, they encountered really deep and, at times, violent gender inequality in the garia from their own comrades who know they were fighting alongside, who they believed, you know, share their principles and had their back. And some of those women really wanted to completely separate from the revolutionary parties after the war. Now, for others, you know, they were kind of Experiencing this nuanced, messy middle where they could see both perspectives. And so after the war ends, to be able to build feminist coalitions together, all of these people really had to be able to grapple with, with all of those experiences, the damage and the disagreements that came out of the war. And so having multivocal platforms like this, where lots of different women could testify and speak to their own experiences, but you don't have to resolve it into this one perfectly homogenous place of agreement, made it possible to come to some shared understandings about where they could move forward without really having to erase the differences between them and their experiences.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely a relevant lesson to take.
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Dr. Kenna Nitsch
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That movements can grow together, can persist without everyone inside of them necessarily having to entirely agree, which is interesting thing to think about, especially given the challenging conditions that a lot of these organizations are operating in.
- [20:35]
Dr. Kenna Nitsch
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Which is also relevant, as you said, well beyond these countries that you examine. So maybe we can talk about how some of these organizations are doing this. So for example, in the book, you talk about Las Dignas and how they are navigating these changing, turbulent, I think was the word you used earlier. And you talk in the book about specifically neoliberal conditions to nonetheless sustainably organize and adapt.
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Dr. Kenna Nitsch
Yes. So we're talking about Las Dignas, which. Thank you so much for asking about them. I love to talk about this organization and the work that they do. So to very quickly situate ourselves in pai, when we're talking about the neoliberal turn that Les Dinas were navigating in El Salvador, we're focused in on the 1990s and the early 2000s post war context versus right now, where we have a very explicitly authoritarian model where naive Bukele is posturing himself as the, quote, coolest dictator in the world. Not much I can say about that. But after the, after the civil war, the right wing Arena Party is elected into power and they institute this free market neoliberal policies that emphasize your transnational investments and global capitalism. And an approach that is really designed, I think, to curry external U.S. approval. After the war, however, for good reason. People in El Salvador were expecting these, like, big structural improvements in their lives. And this neoliberal approach does nothing to, to address these major socioeconomic inequalities that we're seeing. And in fact, it is exacerbating a lot of them. And at the same time, the Salvador population has just come through well over a decade of this national war that killed 75,000 people, displaced another million, and then of course, caused mental and physical disabilities for untold large percentages of the population. So in this period of time, it's not really very surprising that given these outcomes and the lack of a clear victory from the civil war, coupled with this conservative neoliberal approach from the government, we start to see a Salvadoran population that is really disenchanted and truly traumatized, and they're turning toward what Ellen Moody has called a personal politics of isolation. So economic inequality increases, rates of violent crime increase, and discourse is more and more shaped by people's regard for their personal safety and retreating back into, you know, your own space, rather than collective well being or a sense of community, or even having hope in the positive, the possibility of positive changes. So to confront these changes, feminist organizations, including Las Dinas, start to put a lot of energy into providing that social and institutional support that had been so lacking. They start holding gatherings where women can talk about their experiences, like the ones from the war that I just mentioned. They also are offering these really tangible services like community kitchens and childcare, and they start publishing communications that are really designed for the public so they can be countering this discourse and even popular literature that was at the time buying into this sense of hopelessness and cynicism. And as a part of that, I'll say, I think one thing that's really important is that even though they were rejecting that cynicism and these neoliberal structures, they were also willing to acknowledge how valid it was that people were frustrated with the shortcomings of the armed conflict, even though a lot of them had themselves been a part of the that war. So their response to this negativity and this disenchantment wasn't to respond with a bunch of toxic positivity or, you know, as we, I think you've seen here, when people are saying, you know, these economic conditions are not working to then be like, oh, you know, but look at this metric that's really working for wealthy people. They were instead saying, you know, here is this systemic framework to talk about what isn't working and why. And they're creating, you know, this affective labor where they're making spaces where people can really talk about what it is that they're experiencing. And through, I think, both of these approaches, they really work to build then more collective buy in for people to be able to buy in again to doing more work towards social change, because they recognized why people were feeling this disenchantment and the material conditions that were absent that were really impacting people in El Salvador after The war.
- [25:19]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Kenna Nitsch
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And the kind of ways in which the. Even the idea of community organizing when there isn't even a concept of community really that's working very much, is interesting then to think about linking then with some of the ideas you mentioned that drew you into the project in the first place. Right. As you said, this is not a book about colonial indigenous relations, you know, centuries ago. But there is, I think, some threads of that interest in the book that you have written because you do talk about the persistence and adaptation of indigenous women of indigenous groups and how that's related has been made to relate in some cases to these sorts of feminist goals that there are some instances you talk about in the book where, like, there are indigenous practices that are doing kind of some of the things you were mentioning happening centuries ago to go, well, hang on a second, we're not just going to kind of go quietly into the box you want to put us into, right?
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Dr. Kenna Nitsch
Yes, exactly. So one of the chapters is really about women in Guatemala and indigenous Maya women in the early 2000s and how they were doing some of this work that you're talking about. So in the book, I talk about indigenous identity and culture in relation to cosmological values around gender, gender complementarity. And I think this is a place where we see, you know, a lot of potential for indigeneity and feminism to, you know, have these really like generative and synergistic kind of interactions together, even though gender complementarity certainly can be and has been articulated in ways that can perpetuate gender inequality as well. So in the case study, you know, we're hearing from Maya women in Guatemala who have also just come through a national armed conflict, in this case one that spanned 36 years. And in Guatemala, the armed conflict there really explicitly targeted Maya communities, including a lot of, you know, gendered targeting of Maya women. These are women who additionally, after the War ended, have also really been involved in advocacy for Indigenous sovereignty. These are defenders of their community and the land. And at the same time, they're also encountering this messaging about what the appropriate domestic roles for women are that are supposedly rooted in Indigenous culture and history. And in response, a big part of how they are countering that messaging, that's trying to say what their role is and that they do have to be in this little box. I think, to get at what you were talking about in your phrasing is to articulate their goals around gender equity in ways that make clear how those goals are in line with the persistence of their Indigenous cosmo vision. So the terminology of how they're talking about gender has adapted and is growing as they're organizing in the 21st century. But these same principles of balance and reciprocity that are really in line with the Maya cosmo vision and legend or complementarity, are at the heart of how they're advancing their work. So instead, they're showing how its current practices of patriarchy, they are really indicative of how colonialism and capitalism have impacted their community. And so, really, it's moving toward gender equity that would better reflect the complementarity of their cosmo vision. And I think related to this kind of strategically adaptive Indigenous feminist work, I want to highlight community territorial feminism. So this is a branch of feminist philosophy from Maya feminists, particularly Lorena Kabnal. And it highlights the fight for the body or the quedipal with the fight for land. And so this is a philosophy that actively resists all forms of institutionalized violences, including patriarchy, neoliberal capitalism, racism, environmental violations like mining, for example. And it's simultaneously critical of both colonial and indigenous forms of patriarchy, while incorporating these ancestral cosmological principles such as reciprocity and community and healing. And this is a model that I think really does have a lot of implications for feminism as well as for queerness. So feminism, additionally, cannot be outside of culture, and it really shouldn't be. And as we all navigate these intersectional identities and belonging to communities that can be antagonists to each other just as much as they can be accomplices, I think it's important to look to these examples of how to critically sustain multiple solidarities, even as at times, we also get to. And have to artfully call out our communities as well.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, all sorts of practices there to be able to better understand and, as you said, learn from. And in fact, if we sort of zoom out then and look at these examples sort of all together, across the book, what can we understand in terms of how these organizations are persisting over time?
- [30:57]
Dr. Kenna Nitsch
Well, I think so, from the last case study that we were just talking about with the Maya women, I think one of the really important ideas for how organizations persist is what I think about as strategic adaptability, which is something that happens when we are experiencing change or precarity. So we can think of strategic adaptability as this ability to adapt ourselves and also to adapt inherited methods and mediums that meet the needs and opportunities of whatever conditions you're currently facing. So adaptability is this vital component of persistence, both related to indigeneity and to feminist work, as it's a way to avoid both the expectation that we be changeless and also, you know, within, I think, both academia and in activist spaces, I think there can be sometimes this organizational inertia that we just continue to do things as they've always been done. And globally, you know, we've been experiencing rapid change and often precarious conditions in recent years. And our persistence does rely often, I think, on being able to strategically adapt to those changes. So just as we saw with the Maya in the last question, or even what we were talking about before with Las Dignas, when they were able to speak to that disenchantment that they were seeing, that was in large part because they were willing to make a big shift from the structures that they had inherited from the FMLM before.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Speaking of inherited ideas and practices, I wonder if we can talk about some things, some, like, new things.
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Dr. Kenna Nitsch
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Like, what does this mean, for example, with the Internet? What does this mean with social media? If we think about sort of MeToo, sorts of discourses that obviously were building on things that had happened before, but also to some extent felt like they were kind of using new things and coming out of nowhere and spreading in ways that organizing hadn't always done previously. With these particular case studies that you're looking at, how do you look at those sorts of discourses and the ways in which there is actually maybe more adapting and bringing in of existing practices we've been discussing than perhaps might initially be apparent.
- [33:10]
Dr. Kenna Nitsch
Sure. So we're thinking about, you know, me too. And kind of how that is, you know, related to being adapted, connected to, you know, the existing organizing? I think it's important to, you know, get at, as you're saying, that your feminists in Central America have been organizing against sexual violence and men's violence against women for a long time now. So it's, I think, really important to recognize that there's Not a lot we can say that MeToo truly began. I think, you know, here at least sometimes there was this media impulse to kind of credit me too, as kind of having like, burst these, like, critical movements and reckonings and in a way that can be very US Centric. But I will say that the. The popularization of MeToo did offer this really chirotic moment in Central America for more visibility on conversations around sexual violence, especially in early 2019, which is a slightly different timeline than we were having in other parts of the world. For me too, so in Central America, that moment in 2019 is when several really important developments happen at the same time. So that's when there is an accusation against the former president of Costa Rica. That's when there is this really visible public outcry as the Salvadoran youth led women's organization faces like criminal backlash for having spoken out against a university professor for his abuses. And that's also when we start to see several organizations come together in Central America that are using this platform of MeToo. So there's one called the Michu Mexican Writers or the Michu Escritores Mexicanos, and they did gain a lot of visibility through sharing hundreds of accusations of sexual violence. And both the Me Too Mexican writers and another account called Me Too Nicaragua that I talk about some in the book really reflect this approach that we saw with MeToo of focusing on calling out abusers. And just as we saw in the US I think the media really seized on this approach. And those groups also, I think, faced a lot of recriminations for having used that approach as well. But at the same time, I think what I'd like to use this time to talk about is an account that also tapped into the framing of MeToo. So they were for a while called Honduras MeToo. And I do talk about them in depth in one of the case studies. And they were also active at this time in early 2019. But they have in a way that a lot of other groups haven't been able to really persist in the year since, in part, I think, because their approach looks really different. And I bring them up because I kind of want to flip this to a little bit, think about, yes, Me Too has, I think, been a really influential and important digital moment that continues, I think, to come up as we, of course, continue to have instances of sexual abuse that make media headlines. But I also think it's really important to consider how Me Too or any similar future initiatives that we might build that might gain similar visibility could adapt to methods that might make it better suited to more sustainable goals that we might want to support. So I will say first, though, if I'm talking about MeToo discourse, I am of course you're not talking about Tarana Burke and Danny Ayres like Me Too organization. I am really talking about the digital Me too and all of the discourse that we have seen around it, which even though there has been a lot of important work done through Me Too, we have also seen in study after study that there has been a disproportionate focus with Me too on testimonies that came from, you know, those who are white and wealthy and cishetero and famous and in the west, which is not super surprising. But it does continue to limit sexual violence campaigns as that focus really doesn't replicate who is statistically most likely to experience sexual and gender based violence. So if we come back to this focus on Honduras, me too and this group, that account really wasn't about accusations. It was instead, you know, or continues to be about raising awareness of sexual and gender based violence and how much that violence is inescapably connected to other forms of oppression. So if you're encountering their posts, which you know at one place, these were coming out ten times a day. So if you were at all following them, you had a good chance of seeing them regularly. You're going to be seeing info that's highlighting the connections between sexual violence and violence against the queer community and economic inequalities and unpaid domestic labor and immigration and indigenous movements and child labor and femicide and birth control acts and, and on and on and on. So they're essentially creating this more critical digital environment in which to encounter discourse like MeToo, so that when we do, it's in a more decolonial mindset where I think the matrix of violence is made a lot more visible. So I think there is a lot that campaigns like MeToo can really adapt from this specific example that we take from Central America.
- [38:52]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And that's something, of course, you discuss throughout the book, not just when looking at this campaign in Honduras. So do we want to conclude, perhaps discussing other things you're hoping that readers, perhaps especially those located in the US can take from all of this?
- [39:07]
Dr. Kenna Nitsch
Absolutely. Is of course, an important moment for folks in the US to continue thinking about all the kinds of strategies that we can be learning from and employing in this moment. But I do think that there are hopefully takeaways here for lots of different kinds of readers, depending on your interests, and there are certainly lots for those who do want to learn more about Central America and feminist work there, which I hope that folks do, as I've spoken to lots of reasons why people might want to throughout our time together. And I think in this particular moment, this is especially important to do, even though it is unfortunately evergreen to say that the US Government is negatively intervening in Central America. But I think in a moment where the list of our government's harms and violences feels incredibly long and often more close to home than some people are used to, it is especially important that we not lose sight of this region, either in terms of what's happening there or from how feminists there are navigating conditions in ways that we can learn a lot from, especially as feminists here in the States encounter increasing surveillance and legislation and censorship, that makes it a lot harder to do our work. And on that note, for feminist academics in particular, I think one of the takeaways that really sits with me is this idea of conflicted or contradictory sites of struggle, which really characterizes a lot of the locations that I was analyzing. So, for example, to go back to what we were just Talking about with MeToo, you say you're working with this platform like MeToo that has some really important goals and it has a lot of visibility. So there are benefits. But it's also a site that at times is perpetuating inequalities that you really don't support. And to think again, for those of us who are working as feminist academics in the States. Not to paint with too bad a brush, but I think there can be a lot of resonance in that kind of conflicted site, for those of us in higher ed, where we are working to show up for students and programs and knowledge that's really important. And we're doing so for as long as we can as more and more programs are shut down and downsized in real time. But we're doing so inside of institutions that are generally not very feminist. And speaking for myself, persistence is feeling really urgent and also really challenging. I mean, I'm part of a small and growing smaller by the day sometimes network of queer faculty and staff at my institution who are doing our very best to be there for students. But even in just the five years that I've been in my role, it feels like that work has gotten a lot harder. But I will say to try to not leave it just in the doom and gloom of all of it. I think that one really actionable takeaway that I would like to see that comes from these examples is I think we have a lot of opportunities to build more spaces for us to strategize together, specifically as academics, in the opportunities that we have to conference, recognizing that not everyone is able to do so anymore, given the legislative and institutional restrictions that we're facing. I'll say that I love a research panel and a big keynote as much as anyone else, but I do think that we could really take a note from the encuentro gatherings that happen in Latin America, where there are a lot more times dedicated to discussion and working sessions when these feminists are able to come together. So those gatherings are really some of the places where they're developing the terminology that they use in their advocacy and they compare approaches and they're building actionable agendas in that time. So for us, could we have dedicated time slots in our conferences that are about comparing notes and strategies and then come out of our time together ready to hit the ground running and maybe, you know, form some connections that would help to sustain us if we're headed back to unfriendly environments? And that's just one idea. The whole conclusion of the book is really written around how do we implement these strategies from the case studies? Because it's my hope that readers will see opportunities to not just intellectually learn something new, but to really do something with these practices.
- [43:39]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, it certainly sounds like you're hoping and planning to be doing things with these practices yourself. Is there anything further you want to leave us with in terms of a brief word about what you might be working on now?
- [43:50]
Dr. Kenna Nitsch
Well, thank you so much for asking. I certainly am. I will say that even after spending the last 10 years working on the ideas from A Praxis of Persistence, there are some pieces and questions from the book that are really still at work on me, and they're guiding what I'm doing next. So for one example, I clearly, as I was showing in the last question, I'm really interested in how these feelings, feminist methods of social change, can be adapted and deployed in both activist organizations and by feminist academics. So through that lens, I'm currently working on several articles that take up this framework of sense making, which is something that comes out of organization studies in the 60s. So sense making is essentially how do we respond to events that don't make sense? And clearly there are a lot of events going on right now that really, really don't make sense. So with sense making, we go through this process as individuals or in groups to answer the questions of how do we understand what's happening and what are we going to do in response so the premise of what I'm working on now is that sense making provides this really operational way to think about how we react to and create change. And it can be really valuable both for analyzing and planning feminist initiatives. But also I am finding that infusing traditional sense making approaches with feminist principles and methods would make sense making a lot more effective in our current moment. And as part of that, the other through line for the book is of course, that I will be continuing to highlight Central American feminist activism. And so part of this is going to be illustrating how feminist sense making is already being done in these organizations and how we can, you know, continue learning from those models.
- [45:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, certainly plenty to keep you engaged with then. And of course, any listeners who want to learn more can read the book published by Suny Press in 2026 titled A Praxis of Persistence, Central American Feminist Testimony and Sustainable Activism. Kenna, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [45:58]
Dr. Kenna Nitsch
Thank you, thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooks network.com connect with us on Instagram and Blue sky with the handle Ebooks Network, and subscribe to our weekly substack newsletter@newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox. Some Follow the noise Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line.
- [46:50]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story.
- [46:57]
Dr. Kenna Nitsch
And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss.
- [47:02]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com.