McDonald, Niamh and Antosik-Parsons, Kate and Till, Karen E. and Kearns, Gerard and Callan, Jack (2019) Campaigning for Choice: Canvassing as Feminist Pedagogy in Dublin Bay North. In: After the 8th. Zed Books. (In Press)

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Abstract

The dramatic and resounding vote for abortion rights in Ireland was won by committed women sharing their personal stories. While some of these stories were circulated in the mass media, many more were shared with family and friends in the privacy of kitchen or living room. Still more were retailed on doorsteps to complete strangers face-to-face when activists canvassed. This aspect of the Repeal campaign was prepared for and supported by groups who organised locally in their constituencies. This chapter comes from our membership and activism in Dublin Bay North Together For Yes (DBN Repeal) group, a grassroots, women-led group set up to remove the Eighth Amendment (8th) from the Irish constitution. In this chapter, we draw upon a survey of June 2018 conducted by and of 125 activists from DBN Repeal to describe how this vote was won and the particular place of the canvass in the campaign.2 After providing an overview of our constituency, group, and campaign, we argue that our approach to canvassing may properly be understood as a form of feminist activist pedagogy.

Item Type:	Book Section
Keywords:	feminist activist pedagogy; Irish feminist activism; grassroots feminist campaigns; Repeal the 8th campaign; abortion rights; canvassing; 8th amendment; Dublin;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography
Item ID:	10472
Depositing User:	Dr. Karen Till
Date Deposited:	11 Feb 2019 11:00
Publisher:	Zed Books
Refereed:	Yes
URI:
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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