We are pleased to reprint The Institute for Women’s Leadership at Rutgers’ remembrance of scholar and activist, Alison Bernstein, who died three years after the Barnard Center for Research on Women’s transnational feminisms initiative 2013 trip to South Africa. For this inaugural trip, Yvette Christiansë, Jane Bennett, and Catherine Sameh collaborated with Alison to bring Rutgers and Barnard undergraduate students to Cape Town for an immersive course on The Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary African Contexts.
Bernstein spent most of her professional life thinking through the possibilities for transnational feminist alliances. For those of us who participated in this course, we witnessed Bernstein’s brilliance and generosity; her capacity to engage students, faculty, and community activists; and her commitment to learning together across many borders and within complex national, regional, and transnational events and conditions. In this journal issue, where we are marking the politics and theoretical contributions of transnational feminisms in locations of learning, we think with the memory of Alison Bernstein to honor her life’s work.
