Lyn Ossome

Marilyn ('Lyn') Ossome is an academic, specialising in feminist political theory and feminist political economics. She is a Senior Research Associate of at the University of Johannesburg and a member of the advisory board for the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa. She is an editorial board member of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy. , and co-edited the volume Labour Questions in the Global South in 2021

Biography

Lyn Ossome was born and raised in Kenya. She holds a PhD in Political Studies from University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. From 2016 to 2021 she was Senior Research Fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, at Makerere University in Uganda. Her work on feminism includes articles on Arab refugee women, Kenyan media and anti-rape discourse, and agrarian movements in Africa.

Her 2018 book Gender, Ethnicity and Violence in Kenya’s Transitions to Democracy: States of Violence examined 'the democratization process and sexual/gendered violence observed against women during electioneering periods in Kenya'. In 2021, she co-edited the volume Labour Questions in the Global South.

In 2016, Ossome was a visiting scholar at the National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. She was also Visiting Presidential Professor in Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University from 2016-17.

Ossome serves on the board of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE. She is currently serving as CODESRIA Executive Committee member and President. She is an editorial board member of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, and serves on the advisory board of Feminist Africa.

Critical work Ossome's academic work is grounded in feminist political economy and decolonial feminist theory, where she questions the structural and systemic production of inequality through the intersections of gender, labor and rural agricultural development in colonial and post-colonial period. Her work highlights women's unpaid labor and social reproduction that has sustained households and national economies; yet women their contribution has remained undervalued within capitalistic and liberal development framework. She observes that women in controlled labor and markets are unvalued compared to men that has led to systemic pauperization in the modern African independent societies. Lastly, calls for national sovereignty and liberation as a fundamental condition for safeguarding the possibility of survival of most parts of the world. She calls for liberation of the labored gender regimes for genuine liberation form capitalistic systems to take place in Third world countries.

Selected publications Ossome, Lyn and Naidu, Srisha C (2021). 'Does Land Still Matter? Gender and Land Reforms in Zimbabwe'. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy. 10(2): 344–370 https://doi.org/10.1177/22779760211029176 Ossome, Lyn (2021). 'Land in transition: from social reproduction of labour power to social reproduction of power' Journal of Contemporary African Studies. 39(4): 550-564. https://doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2021.1895431 Ossome, Lyn (2021). 'The care economy and the state in Africa’s Covid-19 responses'. Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d'études du développement, 42(1-2), 68-78.https://doi.org/10.1080/02255189.2020.1831448 Ossome Lyn (2021). 'Pedagogies of Feminist Resistance: Agrarian Movements in Africa'. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy. 10(1):41-58. https://doi.org/10.1177/22779760211000939 Ossome, Lyn and Naidu, Srisha C (2021). 'The Agrarian Question of Gendered Labour' in Labour Questions in the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4635-2_4 Ossome, Lyn 'African Feminism' in Rabaka, R. (Ed.). (2020). Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429020193 Ossome, Lyn (2022). Introduction: The social reproductive question of land contestations in Africa. African Affairs, 121(484), e9-e24. https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adab032