This panel brings together interdisciplinary scholarship that foregrounds lived, embodied, and community-generated knowledges to challenge dominant paradigms in religion, gender, and social justice. Across diverse sites—church abuse survivor communities in Australia, Hindu women’s menstrual practices in South Asia, Sikh diasporic devotional music, and feminist reimaginings of family in Korean literature—the papers examine how gendered experiences are shaped by religious, cultural, and colonial power structures. Collectively, the panel highlights collaborative, ethnographic, and decolonial methodologies that democratize knowledge production and recognize embodied memory, practice, and narrative as critical epistemic resources. Attention to women’s agency, survivorship, and creative world-making reveals alternative frameworks of justice, sovereignty, and relationality that resist institutional silencing and textual authority. By centering feminist, Indigenous, and diasporic perspectives, the panel offers comparative insights into how religious and cultural traditions can be reinterpreted to address harm, affirm agency, and imagine more just and inclusive futures.
Papers
This paper reports on a community-based research project in a large diocese in NSW Australia where researchers have been collaborating with survivor support groups to understand the impacts of harm that child sexual abuse in Catholic and Anglican churches caused.
One focus of this work is examining the way in which harm against children is gendered. Another focus is the collaborative methodology that the project utilised. This paper will bring these two elements together and explore the methodological approach and its efficacy in determining and meeting the ongoing challenge of addressing childhood institutional trauma and its impacts on women survivors.
The key principles of the collaborative research model are based on the importance of the provision of support services, the call to justice from Church leaders and the building of knowledge. The project collectively functioned to democratize knowledge production and recognise lived expertise as an important form of hermeneutical justice.
Renowned writer of the 1990s Korea, Gong Jiyoung is also famously known for her feminist novels. Go Alone Like a Rhino’s Horn published in 1993 is acknowledged as a novel that popularized feminism, making it a social phenomenon beyond a movement of progressive activists and intellectuals. Then in 1997, Gong wrote Good Woman to provide a fuller vision of a feminist future, in which a couple of women form a family like community in opposition to the heteronormative patriarchal family. The progressiveness of this vision was not fully acknowledged at the time, but recently Gong’s feminist novels have been reevaluated in a positive light, reading them as informative in queering Korean families. This paper takes this discussion further to explore the underlining Confucian understanding of selfhood in Gong’s vision, and how her literary imagination can contribute to the ongoing discussions on reinterpreting Confucianism to be more just and inclusive.
Can women be recognized as biblical interpreters or theologians in the history of Christian thought? This paper examines the biblical interpretation of Mary Fletcher (née Bosanquet, 1739–1815), an early Methodist leader whose devotional writings and manuscripts reflect sustained engagement with Scripture within the pastoral life of eighteenth-century Methodism. Although Fletcher is often remembered for her piety and leadership—and occasionally for defending women’s preaching in her correspondence with John Wesley—her work as a reader and interpreter of Scripture has received comparatively little scholarly attention. Drawing on manuscript materials preserved in the Fletcher–Tooth Collection at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, this paper considers several examples of Fletcher’s engagement with biblical texts in devotional and pastoral contexts. Her reflections and Watchwords illustrate ways Scripture was interpreted in relation to the spiritual formation of Methodist communities and suggest how recovering such materials may inform ongoing conversations about the place of lay and women’s voices in the history and future study of biblical interpretation.
This presentation argues that international intervention programs often overlook locally produced knowledge about menstruation and diminish the importance of women’s practices, agency, value systems, relationships, and of specific religious forms and participation. I examine dominant global approaches to menstrual health in the Global South through ethnographic research with approximately 75 Hindu women in India and a comparative sample of about 40 Hindu women in Bajura, Nepal (2024–2025). By adopting a critical approach towards literature, methods and theories from within a religious studies lens, and foregrounding ethnographic evidence, the study highlights parallel forms of agencies within religious menstrual practices.