Crafting Social Entrepreneuring: Intra-Sectional Possibilities in Responding to GBV

The intersectional nature of gender-based violence (GBV) makes it unlikely that survivors can escape the socio-economic precarity that perpetuates this social ill. Current conceptualizations of the entrepreneurial process do not sufficiently account for the material constraints GBV survivors face in developing countries and/or in contexts of poverty, and as such, may not fully grasp their capacities to engage in social entrepreneuring. We develop a theoretical model, drawing on new materialist thinking, to enable a better grasp of the intra-organizational conditions and agency that may allow GBV survivors to engage in social entrepreneuring. More specifically, our interpretation of the materiality involved in craft-based social entrepreneuring in Watville allows us to conceptualize entrepreneurial becoming as an intra-sectional response to GBV. The study´s unique contribution is that we offer a new-materialist processual conceptualization of the emergence of social entrepreneuring amongst GBV survivors with intergenerational histories of trauma, inequality and poverty that perpetuate the social and economic precarity in South Africa post Covid-19. This enables a more precise grasp of the agency and intra-sectionality at work in the empirical realities of women engaging in craft-based social entrepreneurship, with implications for processual and new materialist research beyond this case.