Joy Watson

Joy Watson is a feminist researcher, writer and policy practitioner whose work focuses on gender-based violence, feminist movement-building, public policy and the political and institutional conditions that shape women’s lives. Her work sits at the intersection of research, policy and practice, with a particular interest in how feminist knowledge and organising can influence institutions, systems and public debate. She collaborates closely with GRG on gendered harms and technology-facilitated GBV.

Joy has worked for more than two decades across government, civil society and international organisations, including twenty years in the Parliament of South Africa, where she led the research cluster on women’s and children’s rights for seventeen years. Her work there included advising parliamentary committees on legislative reform, developing Parliament’s gender mainstreaming manual and gender-responsive budgeting tools, and supporting CEDAW reporting and oversight. Since then, her work has spanned violence against women, gender-responsive governance, technology-facilitated gender-based violence, feminist funding and movement-building, and the design of services for survivors of violence. She has advised UN agencies, governments and regional institutions in South Africa and across globally.

Joy is a member of the Coordinating Committee of the Coalition of Feminists for Social Change (COFEM), a global network of activists, practitioners and researchers working to centre feminist approaches in efforts to end violence against women and girls. Through COFEM and other collaborations, her work has explored questions of feminist power, accountability and movement infrastructure, and the ways in which development and institutional practice can support or undermine feminist organising.

Joy has a longstanding interest in the relationship between knowledge, storytelling and social change. Alongside her research and policy work, she writes for public audiences. She is Book Editor at Large for Daily Maverick and the author of Because I Love You: Three Women, Three Stories (Jonathan Ball Publishers), with a further book forthcoming.

Her current work examines how institutions respond to gender-based violence, the changing landscape of feminist organising and funding, and emerging forms of violence and backlash, including technology-facilitated gender-based violence. Across these areas, she is particularly interested in the distance between formal policy commitments and women’s lived experiences and in what it takes to close that distance.