About the Archive

The Kumari Jayawardena Feminist Archive is intended to be a long-term project to document the histories, memories, debates, and struggles of the women’s rights movement/s in Sri Lanka. It is conceptualised from a desire to support contemporary feminist activism and new imaginaries for gender and social justice, build solidarity and community across organisations and issues, and preserve histories that are being lost due to inadequate and non documentation. It is envisaged that the KJF archive will function as a central and accessible digital resource centre for students, activists, scholars, policymakers, artists and other stakeholders who wish to learn about and/or draw upon the rich history of feminist thought, knowledge production and praxis in Sri Lanka. It is named after Kumari Jayawardena –– one of Sri Lanka’s most celebrated scholars and foremothers of the feminist movement in South Asia. As Kate Eichhorn reminds us, the feminist archive is ‘where academic and activist work frequently converge’. In a way, Kumari combined these aspects of feminism in one person, as a pioneering scholar par excellence, an indefatigable activist, and an inspiring teacher, educator and mentor.