Victories that materially change women’s lives happen because feminists work to build power in coalition with others, nurturing ideas that were planted in the soil by past generations’ efforts. Take the Justice for Cleaners (J4C) campaign for example, launched in 2006 by outsourced cleaning staff at SOAS University who organised with trade unions, staff, and students to secure better wages and working conditions. The campaign drew on organising tactics developed by Cleaners Action Group in the 1970s and the London Living Wage campaign in the early 2000s, which focused on unionising cleaning subcontractors in the City of London.
This kind of campaigning work is slow and often quiet; its signs of progress don’t arrive in loud or heroic moments, rather, they take years to accumulate through care and consistency. In 2018, SOAS J4C forced the university to end the outsourcing of its cleaning, security, and facilities staff. It took 11 years of keeping people’s attention fixed on the campaign for the workers to be brought in-house and given proper pay, benefits, and rights. Since then, J4C campaigns have popped up at universities around the UK, inspired by the success at SOAS.
Victories like these are committed to our collective memory through citation, the act of referencing and crediting those whose work has shaped and inspired our own. Feminism is as much about knowledge-building as it is about power-building. As Black and working-class feminists who rally against state violence, genocide, and the economic systems that keep us all stuck, we’ve never been able to rely on the “official” archives to make our movements visible. We can only build our own archive through citation, as Saidiya Hartman says, “the stories we tell or the songs we sing or the wealth of immaterial resources are all that we can count on.”
Citation is how we write ourselves into a history that powerful entities would like us to be written out of. It is an act of recognition that says, “we see you and we won’t let anyone forget who you are and the work you did.” It’s also how we build an archive and a roadmap so that this work becomes accessible to those who come after us: a trail of crumbs left for each other to follow so that no time is wasted repeating past mistakes. Without citation, cumulative struggle becomes invisible and we play into the hands of those who would much rather forget our movements, strip us of generational knowledge, and let future generations start from scratch.
In 2024, when Level Up launched media guidelines for reporting on abortion in Britain, we did so by following a trail of crumbs left by Abortion Dream Team in Poland. As activists working under Poland’s near-total abortion ban, they’ve long supported women to access abortions and worked to normalise the procedure. Working within Poland’s context, they knew that media outlets play a major role in shaping what the public thinks about abortion. All of Level Up’s campaigns are grounded in reproductive justice and the knowledge that culture change comes before law change, so Abortion Dream Team’s approach to shifting how the media reports on abortion made perfect sense.
Our abortion-focused media guidelines wouldn’t have taken shape without Abortion Dream Team’s efforts and ideas in creating their own. It’s why we shared and cited their work: as Sara Ahmed writes, “Citation is feminist memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow.”
Level Up is a small campaigning organisation that doesn’t receive state funding; we know that archiving is how groups like ours have survived and shared knowledge. Yet our awareness of citation as feminist praxis means we’ve keenly noticed when our work gets replicated without citation. This is a common practice for charities and non-profits, who are fuelled less by solidarity than a need to prove and sustain their own existence. It happens by design: government funding strangles their power to make socially progressive demands and instead fixes their attention on survival. This system creates organisations that put more focus into fundraising strategies and sustaining their existence than the bigger-picture dreaming and visioning that women at the grassroots and margins are doing. Fuelled by urgency and individualism, they prioritise accountability to the state and forget that they’re also accountable to their sisters in the struggle: the smaller, often grassroots groups whose work they brazenly steal and dilute without credit.
We know that lots of much bigger, better-funded organisations follow our work closely. As a part-time team of six, we punch well above our weight; our campaign messaging, framing, and positions are influential enough to be repeated by others. So if you’re inspired by our work, cite us, don’t bite us.
Further reading and references
- Agnes Bosanquet, “Thoughtful Citation.” The Slow Academic
- Thora Siemsen, “On Working with Archives.” The Creative Independent
- Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
- United Voices of the World: a community and trade union of low-paid, migrant, marginalised and under-represented workers
- Professor Jane Holgate, Unionising the low paid in London: the Justice for Cleaners campaign
- Abortion Dream Team