"Developing a critical political consciousness is at the core of JASS’ feminist movement building strategies. Popular education, or more specifically, feminist popular education, has long served as a conceptual and methodological foundation for JASS’ activist training, learning, organizing, and action. Perhaps one of the most defining characteristics of JASS’ approach, reinforced by our framework for understand and engaging power feminist popular education provides a road map and tools for going beyond tactics to prioritize approaches and strategies that change hearts and minds, and thereby transform the norms and beliefs that disempower women and perpetuate inequality and violence.

 

This draft working paper is intended to provide a brief introduction to popular education and the ways in which feminists, and JASS in particular, have adapted and refined it in order to explicitly acknowledge how gender ---along with class, race, sexuality and other factors -- shape an intersectional approach to oppression and conversely, empowerment or “liberation.” We invite your reactions, comments, and additions so that this paper ultimately reflects the depth and breadth of JASS’ collective experience and knowledge. A final version will be included in JASS’ forthcoming Feminist Movement-building Toolkit."