Feminist resistance through emotion: Humanist approaches to vulnerability and healing

This article reflects on a coaching session held in Vienna in March 2025 for recipients of the Emma Goldman Award, which recognises groundbreaking research on feminism and inequality across Europe. What began as a simple reflective exercise unexpectedly became a powerful space of collective vulnerability and healing where emotions acted as catalysts for knowledge, solidarity and resistance. Participants shared experiences of racism, colonialism, gendered oppression and survival, transforming the session into a site of resistance that challenged neoliberal models of professional development, which often prioritise productivity over care. Drawing on a humanist feminist approach that foregrounds emotions, care and relationality as vital to knowledge production, I situate these reflections within feminist decolonial and anti-racist thought, writing from my positionality as a Palestinian scholar shaped by settler colonialism, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the destruction of my family home and the profound grief of losing my father. By centring emotions as sites of knowledge and resistance in shared struggle, I show how feminist communities transform pain into strength, sustain movements for justice and create alternative spaces of collective healing and solidarity.