Estudios de Género en el Sur’s Intergenerational Research Collective: Exploring Decolonial Feminism in the Global South through Social Media Communication

Studies of Gender in the South is an autonomous research collective founded in 2019 by a group of undergraduate students and a university professor in Bogotá, Colombia. It emerged from a geographical insistence to study gender from a Global South perspective. Rooted in Latin American decolonial feminism’s intersectional praxis, we investigate how gender intersects with sexuality, race, class, and ecology in diverse parts of the world. We read academic scholarship and organize encounters with people who work for gender justice, such as Indigenous scholars and LGBTQ+ activists in Brazil, Colombia, and the United States. This creates bridges between scholarly insights and local vernaculars, including South–North, activism–academia, and student–faculty. We share knowledge using social media, including posts to define concepts like gender, intersectionality, and “the South” using clear language and artistic visuals that appeal to university counterparts and nonacademics alike. We present audiovisual analysis of current events to counter disinformation about transgender and vogue communities, abortion decriminalization in Latin America, and uprisings against political violence, toward connections among these topics and groups. This article shares lessons from our experience. We discuss how public geographers can develop broader communication skill sets by using new media platforms; suggestions to reconfigure scholarly relevance in geographical institutions; the power of intergenerational alliances to combine diverse researchers’ strengths—including knowledge of literature, social media expertise, and intersectional experiences with gender geographies; and the critical role of building trust within the research collective itself to productively engage with external interlocutors and conduct decolonial feminist education online.