I am currently working on a book project titled “Women’s Resistance: Confronting and Constructing Change in Zimbabwe.” The book is a socio-historical analysis of women’s roles as change agents in Zimbabwe from the colonial period through independence.
For details on all of my research projects, please see below.
Work in Progress:
In 2019, I began a new book project to examine the role of women in confronting and constructing change in Zimbabwe by examining the substantive contributions women’s resistance makes to the economic and cultural life of their communities. The research focuses on women’s movements during periods of social upheaval and major change in the pre-colonial and colonial periods (including social dislocation, migration from rural to urban areas, the rise of trade unionism, nationalism, and independence struggles) and the post-colonial period of independence, constitutional construction, economic collapse, the 2017 coup, and the 2018 election. Using primary sources from the Zimbabwe National Archives, Senate House Archives at University College London, and the British Library (oral histories, government documents, and newspaper articles) as well as personal interviews with female ex-combatants and political leaders, the book will address myriad ways in which women across Zimbabwean society – rural and urban, professional and domestic, elite and poor – have accommodated or confronted obstacles to societal well-being since the late 1800s in order not only to survive but to make substantive contributions to the economic and cultural life of their communities.
Lorna Lueker Zukas 