In celebration of the life, alignments, and commitments, of the political scientist and historian Visakha Kumari Jayawardena, the Social Scientists’ Association of Sri Lanka (SSA) of which she is a founder member and former Secretary, is creating a digital archive of her scholarship, which endeavour we began last year through funds raised from individual donors.

 This collection of her work, some of it hard-to-find or inaccessible and unfamiliar to a new political generation, will be online after mid-June 2026. The SSA conceives of the Kumari Jayawardena collection as the beginning of a living feminist archive i.e. a collection of material, that will be read, spark debate, inspire, and galvanise activism, as Kumari Jayawardena has done for over half-a-century.

To publicise the Archive and promote engagement with the Kumari Jayawardena collection, the SSA will host an all-day workshop in Colombo in late September 2026, supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (RLS) South Asia office.

The SSA sees this as a powerful way of honouring Kumari Jayawardena (b. June 16, 1931) as an animator of institutions and networks (SSA, Voice of Women (Kantha Handa), Women’s Education Centre, South Asian feminists, Cat’s Eye collective) and collaborator with the Centre for Society and Religion (CSR) and Civil Rights Movement (CRM) among others; educator (the Institute of Workers Education at the University of Colombo (UoC), courses on women and development at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, and politics and later gender and women’s studies at the UoC); and of course, activist-scholar through her writing in different modes from articles, pamphlets, booklets and books and for different audiences from workers to feminists to academics.

Short papers of under 4000 words in an accessible style and for a non-academic audience are anticipated, engaging with the continuing relevance of her multi-disciplinary scholarship; and generating fresh perspectives and insights to enrich socialist feminist organising and thought today, with a view to their online (www.polity.lk) and print publication (Polity Vol. 14, No. 2, July-December 2026).

Expressions of Interest due 22 May 2026– engaging with Kumari Jayawardena’s standpoints (“Marxist, feminist, and secular”) and methodologies (“the interaction and interplay of economic and political factors with consciousness and ideology”); and writing and praxis (“if you are in any movement, there is no big dichotomy between action and research”): ranging across but not limited to her work on –

• women’s history in anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements;
• workers’ struggles and the origins of the labour movement;
• origins and evolution of the left movement;
• Marxism and the national question;
• Sinhala Buddhist nationalism;
• rise and formation of the colonial capitalist class;
• ethnicity, class, caste and capital;
• women plantation workers;
• peasant rebellion;
• Euro-Asians in national and women’s liberation struggles;
• women/gender and third world development;
• social history and political action through cartoons, newspaper engravings, and photographs;
• workers’ education;
• women against militarism and war and for peace;
• ‘Cat’s Eye’ collective and column, etc.

are invited from activists, artists, and scholars, based in Sri Lanka, of not more than 300 words (in English, Sinhala or Tamil) with a one-paragraph bio at <ssa.femarchive@gmail.com>.

The Timeline is as below.

• EOI on or before Friday 22 May 2026.
• Notification on Monday 01 June 2026.
• First draft on or before Monday 31 August 2026.
• Workshop presentation Wednesday 30 September 2026 (TBC).
• Final draft on or before Monday 19 October 2026.
• Publication in Polity web magazine 03 November – 08 December 2026.

Inquiries: ssa.femarchive@gmail.com