In November 2019, Dr Clara Eroukhmanoff (LSBU) and I hosted an event called ‘Feminist Policy Making – Add Feminism and Stir?’ at Loughborough London. It was a one-day workshop designed with feminist pedagogies and methodologies (inspired by Lois Weaver’s work on the Long Table Etiquette) in mind to be non-hierarchical, collaborative and conversational. The Long Table Etiquette involves the use of paper, spread across the surface in front of participants so that they can note down their thoughts, and is designed to feel comfortable and social (like a good dinner party). We didn’t map our workshop onto this format exactly, but took inspiration from it, with all participants sitting around a table covered in pens/markers and A4 sheets of paper, allowing them to reflect in writing on the conversations throughout the day. We collected the sheets at the end of the workshop, and it was nice to have some participant thoughts in a physical, tangible form.

The event took place under the remit of and with sponsorship from the Gendering International Relations Working Group (GIRWG) of the British International Studies Association (BISA), in a partnership between the Gender and Security Theme of the Centre for Security Studies at Loughborough University and the Race, Gender and Sexualities Research Group at London South Bank University (LSBU). It also received sponsorship from Routledge.

The drive behind organising the workshop stemmed from the fact that for decades feminist scholars with different areas of focus have been engaged in the so-called policy world – making, critiquing, advising on policy at various stages and in various spaces. Yet recently there has been a particularly notable surge of interest in feminist foreign policy (FFP) as a category. Key questions around this subject focus on what the category of FFP does, whether or not it manifests beyond a rhetorical commitment and what the politics of such policy making might look like. In the simplest terms FFP encompasses feminist perspectives on foreign policy issues from the everyday to the geostrategic and back again (not, of course, that these are ever mutually exclusive). In fact, the parameters of what FFP looks (or should look) like is up for debate.

Additionally, in the context of a ‘global anti-genderism’ (meaning a kind of backlash towards feminism and reaction against women’s and LGBTQ+ rights) coming from the far-right and concerns about the gendered and racialized impact of political shifts like Brexit and the leadership of Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán and others who profess/symbolise actively anti-feminist standpoints, the relationship between feminist theory, political discourse and policy frameworks takes on a new urgency (see Ackerly, Friedman, Gopinath, Zalewski 2019).

This workshop drew together scholars and practitioners working on different facets of feminist policy, broadly defined, including feminist critiques and feminist curiosities about policy-making work and spaces. Areas of focus were designed to track between the personal, political and international. We wanted to include possible consideration of policies within and around the EU and Brexit, NATO, academia, so-called decolonisation, points of intersectionality, modes of violence, healthcare, welfare, economics, LGBTQ+ rights and other domains and concerns with a central connection to feminist intervention.

On the day, the workshop included representatives from Amnesty International, the Quaker Council for European Affairs, the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy and Womankind Worldwide among others as well as a range of feminist scholars from different UK universities.

The themes of the event included: feminist policy-making within institutions, feminist activism and civil society practice and feminist foreign policy.

We asked participants to consider the following questions and incorporate intersectional considerations within their thinking.

• Does institutionalising feminist ideas deradicalize them?
• Can institutions, governments and states be feminist?
• What are the implications of recent political shifts like Brexit and wider ‘global anti-genderism’ (Ackerly et al. 2019) for feminist and anti-racist work?
• Are there contradictions/disjunctures between/within feminist theories and feminist policies and activism?
• What is the role(s) of feminist scholars in feminist policy-making?
• To what extent is a feminist foreign policy possible?
• Are white and liberal feminisms dominant over intersectional approaches in policy spaces? If so, what implications does this have?

The discussions, punctuated by opportunities to enjoy the sandwiches, were productive and engaging, and there was a sense of collaboration and synergy as well as challenge throughout the day. Particularly important was that the workshop provided an exciting (coffee-fuelled) space for academics and practitioners to share and debate their visions and critiques and to consider both the limitations and transformative potential of feminist thinking across their different areas of expertise. The conversation ranged from the definitional parameters of feminism itself to the institutionalising effects of incorporating feminist ideas into the policy-making process.

Clara and I continue to pursue avenues to develop this network of fantastic feminists and further the challenges, provocations and ideas articulated on the day. As part of this we are currently building on the conversations from the workshop by planning an edited book project.

From Clara and I - a big thank you to all the attendees, to BISA GIRWG, Routledge, LSBU, Caroline Kennedy-Pipe and Helen Drake as well as Leila Abbas and the catering team at Loughborough London for supporting this productive, thought-provoking, and invigorating day. It laid the foundations for exciting collaborations to come.