Masaya Llavaneras Blanco and Damien P. Gock eds., "Pandemic Policies and Resistance: Southern Feminist Critiques in Times of Covid-19" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Stentor Danielson
Episode Title: Masaya Llavaneras Blanco and Damien P. Gock eds., "Pandemic Policies and Resistance: Southern Feminist Critiques in Times of Covid-19" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Date: September 20, 2025

This episode features a conversation with Masaya Llavaneras Blanco and Damien P. Gock, editors of the open-access volume "Pandemic Policies and Resistance: Southern Feminist Critiques in Times of COVID-19." The discussion centers on how feminist activists and scholars in the Global South responded to, analyzed, and shaped pandemic policy, and how transnational collaboration and a Southern feminist lens provide crucial, underrepresented insights for understanding the pandemic and its aftermath.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Backgrounds and Genesis of the Book (01:32–05:27)

• Introduction to the DAWN Collective:
  • DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era) is "one of the oldest Southern feminist collectives of its kind," working on economic, gender justice, and sustainable development since 1982. The collective is composed mostly of activists and researchers from the Global South.
  • Masaya serves on DAWN’s executive committee and is an assistant professor at Huron University College (Canada), focusing on global governance and development from a feminist perspective.
  • Damien is a PhD candidate at Western Sydney University specializing in labor mobility and care. He previously worked in DAWN’s secretariat.
• How the Book Emerged:
  • The book began as a collective research project initiated during the acute crisis of COVID-19. The urgency was to understand and document how the pandemic and government policies were impacting marginalized people, especially women, across the Global South.
  • The process prioritized collective action, collaboration, and rapid response to the unfolding crisis.

  "We did what came natural to us, which was investigate what was happening… This huge disruption… we got into this book first, before it was a book, it was a research project out of urgency to understand the moment and to tackle it." — Masaya Llavaneras Blanco (05:27)

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2. Book Structure & Collaborative Methodology (07:00–13:50)

• Case Selection and Chapter Organization:
  • The book comprises 12 country-level case studies, each focusing on distinct policy areas relevant to COVID-19.
  • Authors were recruited not just through academia but via feminist and labor movements, regional networks, and cross-movement collaborations—often driven by pre-existing activist links.
  • DAWN developed a scenarios framework, outlining four types of policy/political responses seen globally during COVID-19:
    1. Continuation of existing policy trajectories
    2. Expansion of corporate influence over policy and biopolitics
    3. Intensification of state control and authoritarianism
    4. Transformative, redistributive feminist policies
  • These scenarios, while not mutually exclusive, provided an analytical lens to understand complex, overlapping challenges in the pandemic.

  "It took a lot of work to… build and weave those relationships in ways that were flexible and strong enough to sustain the process in a context of crisis." — Masaya Llavaneras Blanco (11:07)

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3. Why a Southern Feminist Lens? (13:50–17:58)

• DAWN's approach is rooted in a nonlinear, intersectional analysis—capturing complexities rather than avoiding them.
• The Southern feminist lens spotlights interlinkages across gender, class, labor, migration, and macroeconomic policy, addressing how gendered relations have "material consequences" and are inseparable from policy impacts.
  • Example: India’s case study (by Ritu Dewan) began as macroeconomic analysis but expanded to migration and social protection, revealing intertwined vulnerabilities.

  "Policies don’t operate neatly, coherently, or individually. They were constantly evolving… so implicated in these policies, in these complexities and messes, are the gendered and social complexities of class and power." — Damien P. Gock (14:55)

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4. Corporate Capture and the Erosion of Public Goods (17:58–21:46)

• The pandemic saw massive public funding diverted into private corporate profits—especially in vaccine and medical supply production.
  • This was a vivid example of what DAWN had previously written about as "corporate capture."
• Social protection even in progressive countries (like South Africa and India) was shaped or curtailed by austerity measures, illustrating the reduction of state support—a form of corporate-friendly discipline.

  "All that public funding became part of corporate response… public resources went into these private corporations and then profited from a human pandemic. I think that's the most dramatic example of corporate capture that I've seen." — Masaya Llavaneras Blanco (18:20)

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5. Labor Mobility and Migration During the Pandemic (23:15–27:35)

• The book addresses both global and internal labor mobility.
  • Example: Kiribati seasonal workers stranded in Australia and New Zealand faced job loss, visa insecurity, health risks, and lack of social protection due to lockdowns and border closures.
  • Internal migration crises are covered in chapters on China (migrant domestic workers) and India (internal migrants under austerity).

  "These seasonal workers were stranded in a country that was not their own, with no money, had no employment, had no comprehensive health coverage, and were in breach of their working conditions." — Damien P. Gock (25:30)

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6. Social Movements and Opportunities for Change (27:35–30:40)

• Certain social movements leveraged the crisis to advance rights and organizing:
  • Malaysia: Domestic worker unions, forced online by the pandemic, unexpectedly grew their membership and advocacy impact via digital organizing.
  • Chile: Illustrates migrant and non-migrant organizing to resist exclusion, showing solidarity under pressure.

  "They actually made very important achievements in the context of the pandemic that seemed even impossible before the pandemic happened. That's a case of hope and organizing." — Masaya Llavaneras Blanco (28:14)

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7. Commitment to Open Access and Activist Tools (31:12–37:52)

• Recognizing paywalls as barriers for Global South scholars and activists, DAWN made the entire book open access by dedicating their own resources.
  • "There is research about us that we don't have access to… DAWN would be remiss to repeat that story." — Masaya Llavaneras Blanco (32:10)
• The "Southern Feminist Toolkit for Activism" is a companion digital resource—a smart, clickable PDF designed to help activists, educators, and organizers navigate the book’s lessons and apply them practically across contexts.
  • The toolkit demystifies key themes (e.g., labor rights, macroeconomic analysis, organizing strategies) and helps bridge the gap between scholarship and activism.

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8. Acknowledgments and Reflections (38:10–40:34)

• Deep gratitude to all 22 authors and contributors who worked on the project, many doing fieldwork while personally impacted by the pandemic.
• Special thanks to family and loved ones for their support during a tumultuous period.

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9. What's Next for the Editors and DAWN? (40:46–43:01)

• DAWN is editing a new book on "global China" from a feminist perspective and is expanding work on feminist macroeconomics.
• Masaya is writing on labor mobilities between Haiti and the Dominican Republic and on how social reproduction intersects with authoritarianism.
• Damien is focusing on Pacific well-being and communities of care among the diaspora, especially for PhDs abroad.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Research Urgency:
  "We did what came natural to us, which was investigate what was happening… this huge disruption… we got into this book first, before it was a book, it was a research project out of urgency." — Masaya Llavaneras Blanco (05:27)

• On Methodology:
  "Collaboration was essential from the get go… to kind of build and weave those relationships in ways that were flexible and strong enough to sustain the process in a context of crisis." — Masaya Llavaneras Blanco (11:07)

• On Accessibility:
  "The curse of the paywall. So a lot of us from the south miss out on a lot relevant and current literature because of this." — Damien P. Gock (31:12)

• On Social Movements:
  "They actually managed to grow more [digitally] than they had been able to grow before the pandemic… important achievements that seemed even impossible before." — Masaya Llavaneras Blanco (28:14)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Segment Topic | Time | |------------------------------------------------|-----------| | Introductions & DAWN Collective | 01:32–05:27 | | Book Genesis & Structure | 07:00–13:50 | | Southern Feminist Lens & Interlinkages | 13:50–17:58 | | Corporate Capture & Public Erosion | 17:58–21:46 | | Labor Mobility (Kiribati, China, India) | 23:15–27:35 | | Social Movements and Change Opportunities | 27:35–30:40 | | Open Access and the Southern Feminist Toolkit | 31:12–37:52 | | Gratitudes & Acknowledgment | 38:10–40:34 | | What’s Next — Future Projects | 40:46–43:01 |

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Overall Tone and Language

• The episode is thoughtful, direct, and earnest, reflecting DAWN’s activist-academic sensibilities.
• There are numerous moments of warmth and solidarity, with a strong focus on collective effort, practical wisdom, and global justice.

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For listeners new to these topics, the discussion is accessible, with the editors breaking down complex intersections of gender, policy, and global power—always centering the voices and realities of movements at the margins.

Transcript

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Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Stentor Danielson]

You're listening to New Books in Geography, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm your host for today, Stentor Danielson, associate professor of Environmental Geoscience at Slippery Rock University. Today I'll be talking to Messiah Javaneris Blanco and Damian P. Gock, editors of Pandemic Policies and Southern Feminist Critiques in Times of COVID 19, published in 2025 by Bloomsbury Press. So, Dr. Ziovinares, Blanco and Guk, welcome to the show.

[Messiah Javaneris Blanco]

Thank you very much. We're happy to be here.

[Damian P. Gock]

Thanks for having us.

[Stentor Danielson]

To start off, why don't you tell our listeners a bit about your individual backgrounds and about your involvement with the Dawn Collective that was behind this book and how this book came about.

[Messiah Javaneris Blanco]

For sure, I'll get us going. Um, first of all, this is a. A co edited book of a multitude of authors that we worked on on behalf of don. So it's. It's a super collective process in that way. So I'll start by introducing Don a little bit. DON is stands for Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era. It's one of the oldest Southern feminist collectives of its kind. We are a truly global organization that has existed since 1982. We're a network of feminist scholars, of researchers, of activists from the Economic south with a majority of members based in the economic south, working for economic and gender justice and sustainable and democratic development. So John does a lot of action oriented research and those of us that are part of dawn, me, myself, I'm part of the executive committee of the organization. We are doing, we're engaging with Don in ways that produce research for social change. We are a social justice and economic justice, Economic justice feminist organization. My name is Masaya Yahuanera. I am a doctor in global governance. I'm a professor, assistant professor at Huron University College in Canada. I teach development studies and gender studies and migration studies. I'm originally from Venezuela, but I'm based in the Global north. And my collaboration with Don and my work with Don is one of the ways in which I continue my work in this app.

[Damian P. Gock]

Thanks Josiah and thank you Stamta for having us both again. I'm Damian Gock. I am currently a PhD candidate at Western Sydney University in Australia. So not yet a doctor. As you mentioned earlier, my PhD focuses around labor mobility and care. My link to dawn is that I used to be part of Dawn's secretariat in Suva and I was engaged in various roles in programs and research over the last few years. The book that we are talking about today was something that I had project managed from the secretariat and Maria Graciela, who is one of our general co coordinators and Masaya kindly invited me to JO as a co editor and author of the book given my involvement from the onset. So yeah, that's just a little bit about mil.

[Stentor Danielson]

Okay. And so then why did you know, you two in particular and dawn in general decide to tackle this topic for a book?

[Messiah Javaneris Blanco]

Right. So I think the topic is interesting. The pandemic was happening to us as it was happening to everybody. We were already an organization and a network going by, going about our lives, doing our organization things. And then this huge crisis happened. And as a feminist, politically oriented organization, we were concerned about the drastic changes that we were seeing around us. And we did what came natural to us, which was investigate what was happening, examining it and thinking about what were, what were the political implications of this huge disruption and this huge catastrophe that was happening to all of us in different ways. So we got into this book first. Before it was a book, it was a research project out of urgency to understand the moment and to tackle it. That's how it came about.

[Stentor Danielson]

Damien, did you want to add anything there?

[Damian P. Gock]

No, I think Messiah Very eloquently outlined this urgency for me. I was part of the Secretariat, so it was more of, like, administrative stuff as well as substantive, I think, to an extent, doing research on macroeconomic policies in globally.

[Stentor Danielson]

So, yeah. Okay. And then we can move on to my next question. So the book is organized as 12 country level case study chapters. And so we're not going to have time to talk about each of them individually here, but hopefully we can touch on most of them as, you know, illustrations or examples in your answers to some of the questions I have about the broader themes of the book. But first, I want to ask, how did you go about selecting the 12 countries that are covered in the book and the specific policy focuses within each country, and how did you organize the chapters within the book?

[Damian P. Gock]

Yeah, so this process was a tricky one. First and foremost, the big elephant in the room was that people were dealing with COVID 19. So there was a lot of, you know, at the beginning of the project, there was a lot of uncertainty around who was willing to participate and who had time, you know, who had the mental capacity and the bandwidth to engage in the project. And I could see, as someone from the perspective of the Secretariat, that the project leads, who are Messiah and Maria Graciela, you know, for this project, were fully cognizant of this fact. So I think the goal was to have as much of a Global south coverage during the pandemic and the different pandemic policy contexts. And I think, just to mention, Geeta Sen in her forward very briefly mentioned that, you know, it isn't often that one has a vantage point on policy responses that are happening on a large scale, as we did during COVID So the basis of this book was to see if governments were responding to the pandemic in ways that were protecting the poor and marginalized, especially women. So this was the urgency that Messiah had mentioned earlier. At the onset of this project, Masaya and Maria Graciela developed a framework to look at the policy making and the complex political trajectories during the pandemic through four different hypotheses, which we later called scenarios in the book. And these scenarios included policy and political responses that one, carried on with existing trajectories. So policies followed estab paths. Two, increased the influence of corporations in the political sphere, expanding private sector control over policies and biopolitics. Three, intensified state control through biopolitics, reinforcing these authoritarian trends. Or four, were transformative and progressive, leading to feminist policies that promoted things like democracy and redistributive justice. So these Scenarios in the book are not mutually exclusive from each other, but we use them as a reference point to zero in on key actors and policy trajectories.

[Messiah Javaneris Blanco]

Right. And just adding a little bit to, to what Damian was telling us. Of course, it was quite challenging to start working on something that was happening and of the extent of what was happening. We were. We started thinking about this, you know, around, I would say, May 2020, and then started developing the framework into early 2021, and then the full project started after that. So everybody was living through this. So a challenge was to incorporate a sense of care into how we were working, into how we were conducting research. Who was able to embark on this sort of research? And a lot of what it took was collaboration, collaboration across movements. So we reached out to different movements within the labor union space, within the human rights space, between regional groupings where there were already networks of families, workers or researchers or activists. And through those collaborations, we then started to work directly with authors when we started working in a particular case, for example, example, the chapter on Malaysia comes from our conversations with the International Domestic Workers Federation. Part of our work on in the Caribbean came from conversations with cafra, which is a Trinidadian and Caribbean organization. So collaboration was essential from the get go. And that affected or influenced rather the selection of cases. It influences the of authors and researchers and activists that we brought into the picture. So it took a lot of work to get there, to kind of build and weave those relationships in ways that were flexible and strong enough to sustain the process in a context of crisis. So I think that there was especially important to us and also to mention that again, this collective sense is very much in the essence of this project. Even when we thought about these scenarios that Damian was telling us about, these were scenarios that were developed in conversation with Gita Sen, with Peggy Antropus. So lots of us were in conversation to shape this, and I don't think there would have been a way to do that, particularly in the context in which we started the project.

[Stentor Danielson]

Yeah, I'll say. I think the book really benefits from that intentionality about putting it together that you're describing. That it's not just, oh, well, Those are the 12 people that responded to our CFP and that's why we have those 12 papers.

[Messiah Javaneris Blanco]

Yeah, it's the opposite.

[Stentor Danielson]

Very deliberately constructed in that way.

[Messiah Javaneris Blanco]

It makes me happy that you see that in the book. It really does.

[Stentor Danielson]

Yeah. So why is it important to look at pandemic policies from a Southern feminist lens? And what kind of unique insights does that perspective provide.

[Damian P. Gock]

So, yeah, like, first, we did look at it from a Southern feminist lens, but we used Dawn Interlinkage's approach first as a core analyzing building blocks for the book. And historically, dawn has been at the forefront of this nonlinear, non siloed approach to development. So for the book in particular, this approach was relevant because at the beginning of the pandemic, dawn we had sort of realized that an intelligent approach was expensive enough to accommodate for all these different contexts, local, national, regional levels as well, while providing grounds for a global comparative approach. And an interlinkage's approach is one for us that tackles mess and complexities rather than avoiding it. And in my opinion, and you see this in the book, policies don't operate neatly, coherently, or individually. And we were writing this project, we began this project, and we were writing this book as these policies were coming out. So they were not in a fully developed state. They were constantly evolving throughout this whole process. So implicated in these policies, in these complexities and messes. Sorry. Are the gendered and social complexities of class and power relations that are not so visible from the offset. And we account for this in the book. So, for example, we understood that CARE provisions intertwined deeply with macroeconomic policies through, you know, values of paid and unpaid, mostly gendered, gendered work.

[Messiah Javaneris Blanco]

Yeah, right. And I'm thinking also about the materiality of Southern feminism. Right. So we understand feminism as a lens that enables us to also understand the material conditions of living and how gendered relations have material consequences. Right. So that was essential for us in understanding the lived experience of the pandemic. And also the policy implications of the pandemic and interlinkages was expansive, as Damian described it, because it enabled us to see interconnections between these different policies. Perhaps the chapter that illustrates interlinkages the most is the chapter on India, which focused on austerity and had a lens that was mostly centering macroeconomics, but it was also relating to human mobilities and how internal migrants were affected by austerity. So we were also talking about human mobilities, it also had to do with social protection because of the way these migrant workers, internal migrant workers, were outside of social protection schemes. So even though Ritu, our fantastic author of the Indian case, started as this project from the macroeconomics lens, she is a notable economist. She understood that this was so much more than a conventional macroeconomics case study. Right. This had many interlinked aspects to it. So that's one of the things that we consider particular to Southern feminism that we highlighted in the book.

[Stentor Danielson]

Yeah. So let me ask you about some of those themes and we can see how they show up in across multiple case studies. So one of Dawn's previous books, which listeners can actually hear more about, an episode of this podcast from a couple years ago was about corporate capture of development. So how did corporate capture play a role in shaping pandemic policies?

[Messiah Javaneris Blanco]

Right. So it is interesting. And also I'm also co edited that that book. So I'm quite involved in how these two projects kind of talk to each other. One thing that I think, or one moment, or one aspect of the pandemic where you can see corporate capture the most was in the way public funding went into research historically that produced the vaccines and the materials needed to address the consequences of this pandemic. And yet in the heat of the pandemic, all that public funding became part of corporate response. Public resources went into these private corporations and then profited from a human pandemic. So I think that's the most dramatic example of corporate capture that I've seen in my lifetime, given the consequences that we were observing in our everyday lives and given the very clear global inequalities that shaped it. So I think that was an important part of the context in which we were operating. That was part of Don's Feminists for a People's Vaccine Campaign, which was a sister project to our book. Now, in the book itself, the chapters that we wrote did not address specifically the response of corporations and the kind of hoarding of the public good in the context of the pandemic, but we saw manifestations of it in the reduction of the public, the reduction of public space, the reduction of the state. Perhaps the most interesting example of these was South Africa, which was actually a very interesting case study and one of the global south countries that led interesting responses to the pandemic. And yet lots of its social protection responses was shaped by austerity. So even within what we expected, and we think about as one of the progressive responses to the pandemic in a global context, the way social protection was tackled in the context of the pandemic spoke of austerity, almost self inflicted austerity. That was similar in the case of India, where the pandemic became the alibi for, for the reduction of social protections, the reduction of labor protections. And we saw that as it was happening. So even though the book does not directly speak of a corporation that took space in the public provision, we speak about how the space of the public was drastically eroded in some places and how that has social Consequences.

[Stentor Danielson]

Yeah. Damian, did you have anything you wanted to add on that topic?

[Damian P. Gock]

No, I think Masaya eloquently covered all of that perfectly.

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[Stentor Danielson]

Okay, well then maybe you can lead off the response to my next question, which is about how pandemic policies in the global south affected labor mobility and the repercussions of that.

[Damian P. Gock]

Yeah, so a big example from the book were the seasonal workers from Kiribati, which is a small atoll in the North Pacific. These Kiribati seasonal workers during the pandemic, you know, were left stranded in Australia, New Zealand. And I think this is the biggest example we have in the book to do with like labor mobility specifically. And, you know, it's a complex web of many policy decisions during that time that were taken by, you know, these two host countries, Australia and New Zealand. So we had like the lockdowns. Many host countries, many workers lost it. Sorry. Many workers lost their jobs during the lockdowns because of, you know, to prevent the spread of COVID And, you know, these left these workers, these seasonal workers, these labor mobility workers in very precarious positions, financially being one of the most impactful implication. And some of, in the case of Kiribati, some of these women laborers were pregnant. And it's notorious that a lot of the workers globally, a lot of migrant workers globally don't have comprehensive health care coverage. And compounding this precarity was also the border closures. And New Zealand, for example, was one of the countries which had very, very strict border controls. So it was very hard for people to leave or enter. And so while these migrants had lost their jobs, they were also on visas which had certain conditionalities. And one of these conditions on their visas was that in order for them to remain in the country, they. They had to be employed. But with the lockdowns, this was difficult. So these seasonal workers were stranded in a country that was not their own, with no money, had no employment, had no comprehensive health coverage, and were in breach of their working conditions. So I think in that moment, they had, like, policies were evolving, and they had, like, a huge impact on especially labor mobility workers. And I think the repercussions of these changes, we see that across, not only for labor mobility workers, but we see them as well for migrants and refugees. And the repercussions we see today, I think is reflected in what's happening in the States, for example. Yeah, Masai, did you want to say anything more to that? Because I know you also do, like, a lot of work around mobility, and.

[Messiah Javaneris Blanco]

I think you did a great job. And I think the Kiribat case is an excellent example of how labor mobilities were affected and also all the social implications that that came with that. It'll be interesting for readers interested in that area to also follow up with the case of China. That is a chapter that focuses on internal migrants written by Xicheng Sa wrote specifically about migrant domestic workers within China and like that, also India, which we talked about by Ritu Dewan. That chapter is one that also addressed labor mobilities, but internally. So it's one of the crossing. The topics that cut across, for sure.

[Stentor Danielson]

All right. And then, you know, for either of you, or both of you, what were some examples of how social movements in the Global south were able to take advantage of the pandemic to create social change?

[Messiah Javaneris Blanco]

I think that's an exciting question. It's perhaps one of my favorite bits of the book, and it's specifically about the cases or the chapters on Chile. The case. The chapters On Malaysia, they tell us stories in which social movements maybe in different ways. We could say they took advantage of the moment or they. They rose to the moment. Right. It depends on the context. The case of. Or the chapter on. On Malaysia written by Viva Sridharan and Jenny Fao. Jenny Fu, Sorry was an excellent account of how domestic worker unions in Malaysia were able to organize digitally and through digital organizing, which is. Which was new to them, they were forced to organize digitally because of the pandemic. They actually managed to grow more than they had been able to grow in before the pandemic when meeting more in person. And they were actually able to grow their advocacy and advocate effectively for change in social protection in ways that were impossible before. So they actually made very important achievements in the context of the pandemic that seemed even impossible before the pandemic happened. That's a case of hope and organizing. It's not a perfect rosy picture. It's not like everything is solved in terms of labor rights for migrant domestic workers in Malaysia. But very important changes were made, I think. The case by Nanette Liberona, Carolina Stefani and Salinas in Chile. The talk about migrant organizing in Chile was also a story of the power of organizing, perhaps with less policy success as the Malaysian case had. But it was an interesting tale of migrant and non migrant organizing in the context of exclusion and discrimination that again, I think is very, very relevant to the current moment. Not only the global SaaS. So it's an example of how migrants and non migrants organize together in the context of generalized people. So there's lots to learn from these experiences.

[Stentor Danielson]

Yeah. And Damian, did you have anything else to add on that question?

[Damian P. Gock]

No, I'm good, thanks.

[Stentor Danielson]

Okay, so then my next question is about the book itself, because if you're listening to this and you know, getting excited, think this is a really interesting book to read, you'll be happy to hear that the electronic version is available open access. You can also buy a physical copy, but the electronic one is free on the publisher's website. So what was the process like for getting the publisher to do an open access volume? And why was open access important to you?

[Damian P. Gock]

I'll let Masaya talk about the process and Don's approach to this process, but I want to just jump in and quickly say that as a graduate student and a researcher from the south, open access books like this, this one particularly very important for accessibility reasons and depending on our universities in the South Pacific, funding and all that kind of stuff, books and anthologies are not readily available to us and Sometimes the universities will not purchase them. So we miss out. And I call this the curse of the paywall. So a lot of us from the south miss out on a lot relevant and current literature because of this.

[Messiah Javaneris Blanco]

And I think there another bit about this that kind of worries us as an organization, but also as individuals. I think it's a shared concern for Damian and I is that there is research about us that we don't have access to. Right. This story of the self being the object of research but not getting to read it. And I think Don would be remiss to repeat that story. Right. So the fact that we're doing this as part of an organization also speaks of the motivation behind research. Right. So we're very, very clear in this context that even though we're academics and we're also university people, the research we're doing with dawn, and as part of dawn, has also a very specific political objective. We're interested in producing social change as an organization, and we have a feminist agenda. So we don't do research for the sake of research, although there's room for that. But it's not what we do as an organization. We make research as a public good, which I think is your labor of the universe, of the university, generally. But that's for another podcast. So making the book open access is vital for us. Dawn, as an organization, use its resources to fund the open access version of the book. So that's. That's really how it happened, is that we allocated our own resources to it. It's often the case that we have external funding for some of these, but it is part of how we envision the use of our research. So the book is readily available. I hope we can share the link to it within the podcast notes for anybody who is interested in accessing it and using it. Of course, if you're part of a university with resources, if you're in Global north and you can donate, purchase the book and donate it to a library or have your library purchase it, please go ahead and do it. It's important to have research from the Global south in every space, but it's really available for anybody who wants to teach with it, for example, or organize or learn about organizing with it. And that's really the point of why it's open access.

[Stentor Danielson]

Yeah. And speaking of learning about organizing, along with this book, dawn put out the Southern Feminist Toolkit for Activism. So what's in this toolkit and how do you envision it being used?

[Messiah Javaneris Blanco]

Right. So the toolkit is. Is a digital device. We Created to. And it's really a PDF that is a smart PDF that has, you know, interconnected links that is meant to help anybody who wants to use the book to understand during managing social change, based.

[Stentor Danielson]

On.

[Messiah Javaneris Blanco]

The actual practice of attempts at social change, to use the book in this direction. We're interested in informing academic conversations, but we're also interested in informing social movements and to share practices that might be useful across movements. So what was useful for Malaysian for organizing in Malaysia among migrant domestic workers? May that work among migrant domestic workers in Singapore or may that work among migrant domestic workers in the Dominican Republic or wherever one is located. So what we're trying to do is to kind of break down main aspects that might be of interest to movements and help them navigate the book. So are you interested in organizing around labor rights? You can find references here and there across the book. What are the main takeaways that we can use? If we are analyzing from the lens of Southern feminism and we're approaching macroeconomic policy, here are some examples of how to do it. So we want to demystify the book, we want to make it usable and we want to make it accessible. So it's another way of doing that that's also available online. We've been trying to share it across our social media. It's also good to teach if you're teaching introductory courses because it also helps students navigate the book before they get all intimidated by it.

[Damian P. Gock]

Yeah. Just to add on, we hope these approaches enable not only academics and activists, but everyone, I guess, with these three interconnected analytical approaches to look at these big scary policy areas. You know, policy areas often policies often like looked at very. For someone like me, I'm always very scared. I used to be scared at approaching these. But you know, these interconnected and analytical approaches make it a bit easier and as Masaya mentioned, sort of demystifies everything so it contributes to social movement, social mobilizing and understanding around these big, big topics.

[Stentor Danielson]

All right, well, I think that's a good point to transition into our wrap up questions here that we always like to ask our authors. So first I want to give you an opportunity to give a shout out or a thank you to anyone whose help was important to you as you were working on this book.

[Messiah Javaneris Blanco]

You want to start, Damian?

[Damian P. Gock]

I think I want to say thank you to all the authors and I think Messiah will agree with everything that I'm going to say. For these authors taking their time out during the pandemic, it was such a tumultuous time and for them to give up that time to do the research and the work taking away from their time around caring and their care work and the care work to themselves. So a big thank you to the authors first and foremost.

[Messiah Javaneris Blanco]

Yes, I think well this is a project that is a product develop collaboration. So I actually I entry with Damien. We need to thank Sylvia Oheny Marfo, Karen Rupadin, Crystal Brissan. I'm just naming some of those authors. Sijon Shah, Roy Burnett, Busi Siebeko, Danielle Bopp, Leanne Worrell, Sylvia Amparo, Cecilia Fraga, Corina Rodriguez, Enrique, Aisha, Karla Constable were 20 authors plus the two of us, 22 Nanette Liberona, Carolina Stefoni, Susan Salinas, Liva Sredan and Jennifer. We all worked really hard in a really hard time. I think the book was an opportunity for us to make sense of what was happening as well. So I think it was also useful in that way we could make sense of the world through it. And also this book is a product of conversations with Peggy Anthropus, with Sonia Correa, Maria Graciela Cuervo, Gita Sen. So many of us that were trying to tackle this moment and do it together. I think there is a huge thanks to them from us and I think also from our families that shared us and our loved ones through this very intense time.

[Stentor Danielson]

All right, so then we always like to end by asking what you're working on next. What kind of projects are you taking up now that this book is out both individually and the maybe dawn is working on.

[Messiah Javaneris Blanco]

Right. So I'll start with some of the work we're doing at Dawn. Don is putting out a book right now about global China from a feminist lens that will be coming out in the next few months edited by Xi. And that's one another book project that is coming and there is very little written about global China from a feminist lens. So that's one large project that we have ongoing. We have a large project on feminist macroeconomics. Also how to think about economic systems in this moment in which most systems seem to going in perverse place to say it in a way. So those are two of the projects among among many that Don is involved with. I myself I'm working independently on labor mobilities between Haiti and the Dominican Republic and working on a book project on the way social reproduction shapes human mobilities. So that's the large it's taking a large part of my time and and also interested in thinking about how social reproduction and growing authoritarian practices are happening. This is what I'm trying to pay attention to.

[Damian P. Gock]

Current moment for me, I think besides working on my PhD, I'm contributing a chapter to a book that has to do with Pacific wellness and Pacific well being. And my chapter specifically looks at communities of care and how they are integral to our well being as PhD candidates living abroad. And that further filters down to or is relevant to Pacific diaspora living in Australia, New Zealand, and maybe relevant globally, I guess. Yeah, that's, that's, that's about it for me.

[Stentor Danielson]

All right. Well, that all sounds really interesting and I would certainly love to have either of you back or some of the other folks from dawn to talk about books that, that come out of all of this. So thank you so much for coming on the show today.

[Messiah Javaneris Blanco]

Thank you so much, Sandra, for having us.

[Damian P. Gock]

Thank you for having us. Yep.

[Stentor Danielson]

This has been a conversation with Messiah Yamaneris Blanco and Damian Peacock, editors of Pandemic Policies and Resistance Southern Feminist Critiques in Times of COVID 19, published in 2025 by Bloomsbury Press.

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