What might it look like to practice liberation not as a distant ideal but as something lived, nurtured, and sustained every day within community?
This question sits at the heart of the work of 2025 Sawaba Fellow Sunshine Komusana, whose project documents the Feminist “Church,” a growing collective of Ugandan feminists experimenting with new ways of gathering, relating, and building together.
At a time when many of our systems are shaped by colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, and development logics, this work invites a pause. It creates space to rethink how we come together and what becomes possible when we step outside inherited structures that were never designed for our freedom.
The Feminist “Church” is not a fixed institution. It is a living, evolving practice. It is a space where community is built intentionally, where care is central, and where connection is treated as both political and necessary. Through shared reflection, collective rituals, and everyday acts of being together, participants explore what it means to commune in the name of liberation.
This work asks important questions. What does it mean to gather outside systems that have historically defined belonging and exclusion? What shifts when we center care, trust, and imagination in how we organize? How do we sustain practices of liberation beyond moments of crisis or resistance?
In documenting this collective, Sunshine Komusana offers more than observation. The project becomes an invitation. It encourages us to see liberation not as something deferred to the future, but as something we actively create in the present. It reminds us that the spaces we inhabit and the relationships we nurture are already sites of possibility.
The Feminist “Church” shows that liberation can be practiced in small, intentional ways. In how we listen to one another. In how we hold space. In how we imagine and build together beyond the limits we have inherited.
If you’re curious about what liberation can look like in action, we invite you to explore the full project here: Feminist Church – A Radical Experiment of Gathering and Practices of Liberation