In 2017, American President Donald Trump signed the anti-abortion Executive Order reinstating the ‘Global Gag Rule’. This order bans new funding to NGOs that provide abortion or abortion-related services. It violates the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, particularly UN Security Council Resolutions that recognise the importance of providing reproductive healthcare services to survivors of wartime rape and sexual violence. This policy can be aligned with a particular construction of the female body that equates femininity with motherhood. This gendered construction of human security will be discussed in relation to Butler’s (1990) concept of gender intelligibility and Wilcox’s (2015) work on biopolitical violence. According to Wilcox, biopolitcal violence treats bodies as either populations that must be protected or populations that must be eradicated. Historically, women (and children) – particularly those in “underdeveloped” countries – have been identified as particularly vulnerable and in need of protection during war/armed conflict and in post-conflict settings. Essentialist depictions of women place them within three overlapping categories: “vulnerable,” “mother” and “civilian” (Carpenter, 2005). Within these discourses, women are often defined in relation to their biology, as objects of maternity. Women who bear children – thereby performing accepted standards of gender intelligibility – are thus eligible for protection. It will be the argument of this paper that President Trump’s Executive Order draws implicitly on these homogenous depictions of women as nurturing and caring. This policy not only invokes Butler’s notion of gender intelligibility, it also contradicts a key element of the WPS agenda: women’s access to the full range of sexual and reproductive health services, including pregnancies resulting from rape (UNSCR, 2122). Drawing upon the ongoing crisis in Syria, this paper unpacks the implications of this Executive Order for women and girls’ access to safe abortion following rape.

Stacy Banwell is a Principal Lecturer in Criminology. Her research addresses the gendered impact of war and armed conflict. Stacy is currently writing a monograph on Gender and the violence(s) of war, she has also presented a series of papers on gender, human security and the violence(s) of war.

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The contemporary thirst for law as a route to equality does not address deeper more structural questions of inequality. As Smart tells us, “feminist scholarship has become trapped into debates about the ‘usefulness’ of law. These are necessary debates but have the overwhelming disadvantage of ceding to law the very power that law may then deploy against women’s claims.” Although Smart does not fully develop the idea that the focus on law-as-solution leads to a kind of “methodological blindness,” she contends the issue is one of “challenging a form of power without accepting its own terms of reference.” Academics have subsequently called upon her work in order to advocate a move from legal-focused routes to justice to “something else.” In this regard, Halley advises us to “take a break” from feminism, in a rejection of the paradigms that have dominated social justice politics in recent years.

This article explores this prospect, in examining the place of law in addressing core issues within the feminist discourse. With reference to issues of sexual violence and marriage equality, I argue law, as a mechanic of justice, does not address wider issues of inequality. In doing so, I deviate from the suggestion that we must engage in a “participatory resistance” with law. Instead, I argue we must explicitly remove ourselves from the reliance on law in order to challenge it.

Sharon Cowan, “Sex/Gender Equality: Taking a Break from the Legal to Transform the Social,” in David Cowan and Daniel Wincott (ed), Exploring the ‘Legal’ in Socio-Legal Studies, (Palgrave Macmillan2016).

Janet Halley, Split Decisions (Princeton University Press2006).

Carol Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law (Routledge1989).

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In order to come to a logical conclusion, I break this article into three sections. Part 1 considers ‘what’ we are taking a break from. Part 2 explores ‘why’ we must take a break. Part 3 details ‘how’ we ought to take this break.

Conceptual shifts in early modern philosophical conceptions of the deaf suggest a salient case study in the social construction of deafness. Ancient models which formed the starting point of early modern philosophical inquiry into deafness assumed that the inability to speak was intrinsically connected with an inability to hear, a conjunction expressed by the conventional usage “deaf and dumb.” Rejecting the ancient exempla, Leibniz speculated that a society comprised entirely of congenitally deaf people could in fact reach a significant level of scientific accomplishment, postulating further that the use of gestural signs in lieu of conventional spoken language could provide wide-ranging benefits, allowing a vividness and precision inconceivable within the range of speech alone. Methodologically, Kuhn’s model of scientific theory-change suggests an analogous framework, allowing for the treatment of such conceptual development within the Kuhnian apparatus of paradigm shifts. This paper argues that Leibniz’s theory of deafness represented a decisive paradigm shift from Greek models that posited an essential relationship between deafness and dumbness, a view responsible for historically othering portrayals of the deaf as congenitally less intelligent, incapable of speech, and physically impaired. In order to establish that sign language was an effective form of language, and as a corollary that deaf people were equally capable in all relevant cognitive capacities, Leibniz employed a novel theoretical account of language to replace the earlier reigning paradigm and the presumed otherness of the deaf entailed by it.

Born in Daegu, South Korea, Shauna Kwag is an independent scholar of the history of science and deaf studies. She is currently at work on a study of early modern methodologies around language, speech, and deafness.

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This paper examines the gendered effects of the ‘separation barrier’ in occupied Palestine in the context of Israeli settler colonialism. From 4am every morning, thousands of Palestinian men spend up to two hours waiting to pass through Israeli checkpoints to work in Israel in pursuit of higher wages. Drawing on a series of interviews with women whose husbands undertake the daily commute through Checkpoint 300 near Bethlehem, we analyse the impact of the gendered restrictions and consequences of the border technology on their everyday family lives. We examine three aspects in particular; first, the temporal effects that keep men away from the home and the family; second, the negative psychological impact of the checkpoint on couple and family relations; and third, the effect on the sexual division of labour in the home in the absence of the husband. We conclude that the disciplinary effects of the checkpoint extend beyond the physicality of the checkpoint, governing relations, affects and power relations in the intimate space of the home.

Mark Griffiths is Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow at Northumbria University, UK. He is a geographer with a focus on the embodied aspects of the occupation of Palestine and the ethics of geographical research. His work has been published in Antipode, Political Geography, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Gender, Place & Culture and Area.

Jemima Repo, Newcastle University, jemima.repo@newcastle.ac.uk

Jemima Repo is Lecturer in the Politics of Gender at Newcastle University, UK. She specialises in feminist political theory and biopolitics. Her work has been published in journals such as Economy & Society, Politics & Gender, European Journal of Women’s Studies, and Feminist Theory. Her book, The Biopolitics of Gender, was published by Oxford University Press in 2015.

please consider this paper for the conference

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This paper examines insurgent citizenship practices employed by activists in the Burmese women’s movement from the 1990s and onwards. The Burmese women’s movement was formed in the borderlands surrounding Myanmar in the shadow of civil war and military rule, within the framework of broader oppositional political and armed struggles against the regime. Consisting of political exiles, refugees and ethnic insurgents, this movement has successfully used the transnational, transitory space of the borderlands to constitute themselves as political subjects with legitimate claims to rights, citizenship and leadership. Drawing on interviews, this analysis interrogates women’s activism through the lens of insurgent citizenship practices. Thus, how have Burmese women’s activists claimed rights and lived citizenship in exile? Three main strategies are examined: firstly, women have positioned themselves as political actors and authorities through involvement in governance and humanitarian aid delivery in refugee camps. Secondly, they have claimed rights and constructed themselves as political subjects through engagement with international norms, networks and arenas. Thirdly, they have claimed citizenship and political influence in oppositional nation-making projects through engaging with and negotiating ethno-nationalist armed struggles. The analysis highlights the multifaceted nature of women’s insurgent citizenship practices, showing how they navigate multiple subject positions, direct their rights claims towards multiple governing authorities, and enact multiple political communities.

Elisabeth Olivius is a Senior Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at Umeå University, Sweden. Her research focuses on how gendered relations of power are produced and reshaped in processes of conflict, displacement and peacebuilding. In ongoing projects she explores the role of diasporic women’s organizations in peacebuilding in Myanmar, examining how their activism contributes to reshape conceptions of gender, ethnicity, and nation. She has previously published on the politics of gender equality in humanitarian aid; men and masculinity in humanitarian gender policy; and political participation and space in refugee camps.

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The situation about women’s rights it’s a sensitive issue when it’s talking about human rights. More difficult its find a way to protect these rights. Aware of this problem, the aims is to analyze the women’s rights in the Brazilian context, mainly, the reproductive rights. So, to achieve this purpose, this paper through the combination of Law, Philosophy, and Literature tries to rethinking why women can’t have a voice when the decisions about their rights are taken. Methodologically, it was used as an interdisciplinary bibliographical revision between Law, Philosophy, and Literature. From Literature it brings the contributions from the life-narratives as an instrument to promote human rights. Besides the life-narratives theory, it’s also used the novel The Handmaid’s tale from Margaret Atwood, which became a symbol to reflect about reproductive rights. From Philosophy, it’s adopted the concepts of Homo sacer and state of exception developed by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben. The contributions of these different researches fields made possible to conclude that women are Homo sacer because governments ignore their voices and opinions when they talk about abortion. The control of the human body, mainly, women bodies it’s more important than preserving some fundamental rights and because of this, it’s so difficult to preserve and promote the human rights. Based on these conclusions, it is understood that when the state is incapable or does not want to guarantee the adequate protection of human rights, it is up to society through its various means to find ways to protect them.

Luana Mathias Souto is Ph.D. Law student at Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais. Lawyer. CAPES scholarship.

José Adércio Leite Sampaio is Post Doctor Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha. Doctor in Constitutional Law at UFMG. Professor at Escola Superior Dom Helder Câmara and Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais. General Attorney at Minas Gerais.
Email: joseadercio@terra.com.br

This paper is part of my doctoral research on gender and state of exception developed at Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais with the support of CAPES Brazil.

This paper examines the effect of living in violent and precarious environments on intra-household decision making dynamics. While current literature on household bargaining abound about the effects of intra-household factors such as education and income on a woman’s decision-making power, studies exploring the impact of extra-household parameters remain sparse. Drawing from the non-unitary household bargaining model, external environmental factors like the conditions of an individual’s living environment are in fact crucial shift parameters of a woman’s bargaining power. Subsequently, this paper uses municipal homicide rate data from the National Institute for Statistics and Geography (INEGI) as a proxy for unsafe living conditions in Mexico, and exploits the fortuitous overlap in timing of the three-wave Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS), which provides detailed information on a woman’s intra-household decision-making power. The sudden and plausibly exogenous rise in homicides between 2007-2011 due to the Mexican Drug War provides a source of variation in the data as it coincides with the third wave of the MxFLS. To estimate the relationship between homicides and a woman’s relative decision-making power, I employ two distinct empirical strategies, an individual fixed effects model and difference-in-differences which both follow an intent-to-treat approach. Overall, results from the former method reveal a decline in a woman’s relative bargaining power over public and collective consumption goods which include children’s. Interestingly, estimates from the latter model suggest an increase in a wife’s relative decision-making power over her husband’s private goods and a simultaneous decline in her relative bargaining power over her own private goods in the face of a violent milieu. Altogether these findings point to several possible mechanisms such as fear, mistrust, protection and lower labor force participation, which potentially govern the relationship between dangerous living environments and a woman’s relative intra-household bargaining power.

Audrey is a second year Ph.D. in Economics student at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her research interests pertain to family, household and development economics with a main focus on gender-related topics.

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This paper could also be classified under general gender research.

An estimated 860,000 girls and women and an unknown number of boys and men were raped by American, French, British, and Soviet allied troops at the immediate war’s end of 1945 in Germany. These events are currently the largest known mass sexual violence atrocities in modern history. With a focus on U.S. allied troop post-1945 sexual violence as its case study, this paper explores a counter narrative, removed from the singular Cold War rhetorical prism toward the narrative of territoriality. How do borders and territory function as silence? How has the U.S. government tightly controlled, hence bordered, the silences around these mass rapes? How was the young, post-WWII German democracy – including post-German re-unification in 1990 – through its newly found territoriality complicit in the silencing? How has gender framed, constructed, produced and re-produced these bordered, political silences? And how have they endured? Based on original, new research in Germany and the U.S., this paper explores the gender-identity-state interaction generally and silence production within borders of national narratives, memories and historiographies specifically. Gender as an ordering principle is tremendously prolific within state identity discourses, the rhetorical borders of nationhood, national authenticity, the politics of belonging (autochthony) and the many forms of national otherings. Gender shapes and affects discourses of border construction linked to nation-building, state memory regimes including memory entrepreneurship, reconstruction and national post-war economies.

Dr. Sabine Hirschauer is an assistant professor with the Department of Government at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA. Her research interests include security studies, human security, migration, identity, and gender. She is the author of the book The Securitization of Rape: Women, War and Sexual Violence published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014. She was a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Bloemfontein, South Africa, with a research focus on gender-based violence. In 2017 and 2018, Dr. Hirschauer led two experiential-learning study-abroad courses to Munich, Germany where students worked with local refugee non-governmental organizations to explore local migration and integration challenges and opportunities. Most currently, Dr. Hirschauer writes about gender and international security, state identity and memory regimes, migration and policy failure in Europe and about the impact and effectiveness of international immersion programs and field experiences. She is originally from Munich, Germany.

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Thank you!

I am interested in the ways people cross borders to build families using gametes, embryos or children provided by third parties, and how these ways change over time. The movement of people for reproductive reasons has been analysed through different paradigms, including migration, movement, nomadism, exile, cross-border reproductive care, flows, and diaspora (Groes et al 2018; Nahman 2016; Whittaker et al 2013). The mobilities turn (Sheller 2017; Faist 2013; Urry 2008, 2007) demands that social scientists examine the nexus of mobilities and social inequalities.
Reproductive politics and mobilities in Spain have undergone a radical change in recent decades. Until 1978 some Spanish women traveled to France to acquire condoms or the pill. When disadvantaged women did not manage to prevent pregnancy, they often ended up providing children—sometimes unknowingly—for the domestic adoption industry. In contrast, today, Spain has become the European country providing the most eggs to the fertility industry and the fertility treatments and the third in the world. Spain has simultaneously become one of the main destinations of transnationally adopted children (Marre et al 2018).
I analyse the interlinked forms of reproductive mobility, spurred by both legal structures and sociocultural norms, that have affected the management of women’s fertility from the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975) to the present. The directions of the reproductive mobilities have reversed in many cases, but the gender and class stratification underlying them has remain unchanged. My point is not to argue against (re)productive mobilities. Rather, I suggest that researchers, practitioners and users should be aware of the inequalities that inhere—especially for women—in reproductive mobilities, and their causes and consequences.

Social Anthropology PhD and Associate Professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. Her areas of specialisation are human reproduction, gender, parenting and childhood and youth in Spain. She is the author and co-author of several articles, chapters and books and the director of AFIN Research Group and Outreach Centre.

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References
Faist, Th. 2013. The mobility turn: a new paradigm for the social sciences?. Ethnic and Racial Studies 36(11):1637-1646.
Groes, Ch. and Fernández, N. T. 2018. Introduction: Intimate Mobilities and Mobile Intimacies in Groes, Ch. and Fernández, N. T. eds. Intimate Mobilities. Sexual Economies, Marriage and Migration in a Disparate World. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1-27.
Marre, D., San Román, B., Guerra, D. 2018. On reproductive work in Spain. Transnational adoption, egg donation, surrogacy. Medical Anthropology, 37(2):158-173.
Nahman, M. 2016. Reproductive tourism: through the anthropological “reproscope”. Annual Review of Anthropology 45:417-432.
Sheller, M. 2017. From spatial turn to mobilities turn. Current Sociology Monograph 65(4):623-639.
Urry, J. 2008. Moving on the Mobility Turn. In Tracing Mobilities in Canzler W., Kaufmann, V. & Kesselring, S. eds. Towards a Cosmopolitan Perspective. Burlington: Ashgate, 13-25.
Urry, J. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity.
Whittaker, A. and A. Speier 2013. “Cycling overseas”: care, commodification, and stratification in cross-border reproductive travel. Medical Anthropology: 29(4):363-383.

What haunts me through the thankful remark of the migrant woman I interview for my PhD project is the question of what compels her to thank. What makes a newcomer, a migrant, an arrival, an obligation to thank? What compels her to seek a mutual consensus on the gratefulness among the “we,” and consequently, what makes her believe that the gratitude of the “I” is also the gratitude of the “we,” the gratitude of the former colonial as the “we”? How such a feeling is disciplined and regulated? How can feeling of gratitude become a feeling of an indebtedness, an indebtedness of a debt that is both repayable and unrepayable at the same time? How can the gift of “having a new life,” a life that my interviewee is so grateful, become not only the gift of life but also the gift of death? How can this gift of life as/and gift of death become a value for exchange? If love works through the logic of exchange, of a reciprocal exchange, then could it be that the gift of love becomes the debt of love, a debt that is already a refutation of the love that it proclaims? Could it be that the gift of love is also the gift of time, of a transitional time, of a time given to a temporal being in transition, in awaiting and in hoping for transformation? As Derrida puts it in „Given Time,“ when a gift is received as a gift, it is no longer a gift, it is a debt. In this paper, I do not seek an empathetic redemption through gratitude, but rather, I trace the complicity between the receiver of the gift of gratitude/the migrant woman and the giver of that gift within the Swedish liberal empire—a complicity that is convoluted, irredeemable, and doubtlessly, unredemptive. I believe this complicity is intrinsic to the mechanism of biopowers in which the ethnic subjects are obliged to thank.

Lan Kieu is a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at Umeå University. Her research interests include postcolonial feminism, feminist theory, and issues of race, ethnicity, and power in a globalized world.

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I have no comments or suggestions at this moment.

As feminist socio-legal research, the aim of the work is not merely to write about those affected, but to talk with them first and to include their experiences. With this approach, the law of books could be compared with the law of action.
Following this strategy, Israeli asylum law was examined as to whether it has gender-specific perspectives to guarantee legal and actual access to justice. In particular, it concerns access to justice to the asylum procedure and within.
In order to examine access to justice, unstructured interviews were conducted with six Eritrean women in Israel. The intersectional multi-level analysis according to Winker and Degele (2010) identified five types of suppression and discrimination – gender, wage labour, mental health, generativity and race – as crucial for barred access to justice.
The comparison of international treaties and standards and national laws and procedures also revealed blatant backlogs in the gender-specific interpretation at a national level.
This research has shown that there is a tremendous need to catch up, so that the Israeli asylum procedure, on the one hand, complies with international recommendations and, on the other hand, guarantees access to justice for female refugees.

Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Political Science (University of Mannheim, Germany).
Master’s degree in Gender Studies and Gender and International Law (University of Graz, Austria)
Field research in Armenia (Gender and Memory. An Analysis of the Armenian Genocide) and Israel.
While studying I interned at several Women Rights and feminist NGOs (in Europe and abroad) and at the German Institute of Human Rights.

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I’m not sure what to write in the field „affiliation“.
Furthermore, the field „description and abstracts“ and „co-authors“ are blank, because I am just submitting a paper. Is that not possible? Do

Religious diversity, tolerance, and pluralism are the norm in much of West Africa, though religious tensions have at times accompanied conflicts based on resources or ethnicity. As in the rest of the world, women in West Africa develop ties with other communities through their faith and religious practices; just as community building is fundamental to peacebuilding, so is religion a part of peacebuilding in West Africa.

Programs developed internationally by the United Nations and transnational NGOs to support women’s peacebuilding are designed to be secular or non-religious in an effort to be sensitive to political and social contexts. However, in prioritizing the social identity of gender and intentionally excluding values and practices based on faith and religion, international actors fail to recognize the connections women make among themselves that can be key to a more sustainable peace.

Based on research in Côte dʼIvoire, Guinea, and Mali, this paper asks: How do peacebuilders in local women’s organizations develop knowledge about their communities’ needs, incorporate religion, and build solidarity within and across religions? Semi-structured interviews and participant observation conducted with women peacebuilders reveal that religion is imbricated in their work in two ways: as instrumental and as personal. First, the women use faith and interfaith connections as a technique to advocate for peace by appealing to religious tenets that build communities. Moreover, women’s personal faith is often the source and driver of their work that allows them to advocate for sustainable peace; their religious beliefs motivate them.

Ultimately, international actors that embed assumptions about religion and women in their peacebuilding processes and programs overlook how religion is intertwined in public and private social life in West Africa. While local women’s peacebuilding organizations are often secular to be more attractive partners to the international community, the women working in the organizations promote religion and faith as tools to build solidarity and promote mutual understanding. International policies on women’s peace and security that do not take faith and religion into account, therefore, establish a world view that is largely incompatible with the knowledges developed by local women peacebuilders.

Dr. Carrie Reiling is an assistant professor in Political Science and International Studies at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. Her research and teaching interests include global governance, human security, development, NGOs, African politics, and feminist theory, particularly where they intersect in policy, namely the UN Security Council Resolutions on Women, Peace, and Security. Her research examines how this policy is implemented in West Africa and how local women’s NGOs work with the international community and national governments to achieve peace and security. She has conducted fieldwork in Côte dʼIvoire, Guinea, Mali, Senegal, and Sierra Leone.

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This article examines the institutional gender inequality in Economics. The incorporation of gender equality in health policy can strengthen responses to health problems and reveal disparities created by gender in health. It addresses the silence toward gender inequality within Economics by discussing Economics’ co-evolution with healthcare and women’s status especially in Europe where major health systems and women’s movements commenced. Questions of interdependence, asymmetrically reflective responsibility, and overall gender inequality are neglected by economic theories but are key to re-introducing gender inequality in Economics. It highlights the importance of promoting the incorporation of gender equality norms and standards into Economics responses both vertically and horizontally and for accountability. Linking directly Economics with gender equality at the global level is essential to create fully-competent health systems competent to face and adjust to new standards, demands, and needs created by globalisation, including different types of immigration and gender.

I will send one shortly

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My paper concerns the depiction of dead females in Western (popular) culture and focuses specifically on various texts inspired by or based on the 1965 torture and murder (or femicide) of Sylvia Likens in Indianapolis, Indiana. I take as my starting point the trope of “the beautiful dead girl,” often seen in stories belonging to genres such as true crime, detective/mystery/crime fiction, and horror, and suggest that elements such as slut-shaming, victim-blaming, the eroticization and/or aestheticization of dead/dying/tortured/suffering women inform the depiction of female bodies and both build on and reinforce Eurocentric ideals of beauty (whiteness and youth = beauty) and heteronormative views on concepts such as virginity and chastity. I analyze existing texts on/about Sylvia Likens, which together form what I refer to as “the Sylvia Likens Archive” (inspired by Halberstam’s “Brandon Archive”), and I suggest that most of these narratives follow a specific “structure of unmaking,” a term borrowed from Elaine Scarry’s 1985 study on torture, “The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.” I argue that in the creation of the Sylvia Likens femicide narratives, the victim is made (created) and unmade (killed) by artists and murderers alike. I propose that it is possible (and necessary) to produce narratives (of various forms) about victims of femicide in a caring and responsible manner that does not replicate acts of violence. By utilizing a caring ethitcs of (re)mourning, grounded in queer feminist ethics, I will produce my own Sylvia Likens narratives, through the writing of fiction and embroidery. For instance, I will be making a shroud for Sylvia Likens, thus invoking the idea, described by Susan M. Stabile in “Memory’s Daughter’s: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth Century America” (2004), that the shroud, or winding sheet, “is an emblem of women’s collective mourning and memory.” The act of using the embroidery needle to create a text for/about Sylvia Likens is meant to contrast one of the first narratives written about (and on) her: the words „I AM A PROSTITUTE AND PROUD OF IT!,“ which were branded onto Sylvia’s body by her tormentors.

Anne Bettina Pedersen is a PhD fellow at Aalborg University. The title of her project is “(Un)Making Sylvia Likens.” She has an MA in American Studies from University of Southern Denmark (SDU). From 2013 to 2017, she worked as an assistant lecturer at SDU. She has taught courses on Creative Writing, American Horror, American Literature before 1922, American Cultural Studies, Contemporary British Studies, and more. Her main areas of interest/research are: dead women in popular culture, (toxic) motherhood, trauma, horror, and feminism. She has published papers on the cult TV-series Twin Peaks and femicide narratives.

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In the experimental poem “Map of the Americas” (2005), Two-Spirit poet and scholar Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee descent) articulates a decolonial queer critique of US settlement with its attendant gendered violence and attempted extermination, while symbolically inscribing the queer body back onto the land: “My chest the plains / and hills of this land My spine / the continental divide / my heart drums the / rhythm of returning / buffalo herds…” (Driskill 2005: 10). This poem reflects the ethos of an emergent field of inquiry: the indigenization of “American” notions of geography and land. This field encompasses settler colonial critique, literary deconstruction, cultural geography, and queer indigenous theory. This paper argues with these recent indigenous theoretical innovations in anti-colonial criticism (such as Barker 2017; and Driskill 2010) and argues that the literary (poetic, fictional, and autobiographical) narratives of re-territorialization offer important challenges to the eliminatory logics of settler colonial narratives of landscape and environment (see e.g. Morgensen 2011; and Wolfe 2011). Furthermore, the paper analyses how Two-Spirit and queer Cherokee/Tsalagi poets and authors, such as Kim Shuck, Sarah Tsigeyu Sharp, Michael Koby, and Indira Allegra, poetically and imaginatively resist settler colonial erasure, “dream away borders,” and insist on (re)mapping (Goeman) and indigenizing disparate traumatic topographies. Thus, reclaiming psychic or imagined territories as an act of healing becomes articulated to material indigenization of territories by imagining indigenous survivance and futurity.

Works Cited
Barker, Joanne. Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. Duke UP, 2017.
Driskill, Q. L. “Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies.” GLQ, 2010, doi:10.1215/10642684-2009-013.
Driskill, Qwo-li. Walking with Ghosts. Salt Publishing, 2005.
Goeman, Mishuana. “(Re)Mapping Indigenous Presence on the Land in Native Women’s Literature.” American Quarterly, 60.2, 2008, pp. 295–302.
Morgensen, Scott Lauria. “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now.” Settler Colonial Studies, 1.1, 2011, pp. 52–76.
Wolfe, Patrick. “After the Frontier: Separation and Absorption in US Indian Policy.” Settler Colonial Studies, 1.1, 2011, pp. 13–51.

Marianne Kongerslev (PhD, University of Southern Denmark, 2016) is Assistant Professor of Anglophone literature and cultural studies at Aalborg University, Denmark. She has previously carried out research on Native American literature, US popular culture, gender studies, and critical race studies, and she has previously taught US cultural studies at Copenhagen Business School, University of Southern Denmark, and Aarhus University. From 2014-15, she was visiting student researcher at UC Berkeley. She recently started researching spite and precarity in US literatures and culture, in a project funded by the Carlsberg Foundation.

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My paper would fit in both stream 3 and 7, so I am open to be included in either, should my proposal be accepted.

Research on eco-territorial conflicts has examined both the disastrous effects of extractive projects on local livelihoods and ecosystems and the practices of resistance of social movements. The gendered dimensions of both processes, however, has received comparably less attention. In such conflicts, however, different understandings of territory, development and nature are negotiated in a context characterized by highly asymmetrical – and gendered – power relations.

In the Andean region of Peru, the protagonism of rural and indigenous women in eco-territorial conflicts is notable and, against previous paternalist tendencies, a certain level of convergence with the feminist movement, based on social movement encounters, can be observed.
Based on long-term research with Peruvian activists, I ask: How do rural and indigenous women organize to defend their territory? What politics of translation develop and what alternatives are articulated when they organize within male-dominated social movements and with/in the feminist movement?

I trace the politics of politics of translation that have resulted in the discourse on ‘body-territory’ that connects extractivism to patriarchy and the exploitation of territory to the exploitation of women’s bodies. I analyze the limits of recognition, the moments of strategic misunderstanding, as well as the possibilities for solidarity and emancipation based on partial connections between different worlds that play out in these encounters.
Combining the concepts of ‘cosmopolitics’ (de la Cadena) and of ‘boundary objects’ (Leigh Star), I argue that the merging of political ontology and of feminist science and technology studies offers fruitful avenues for understanding the potential but also the challenges that develop when different social worlds meet in eco-territorial conflicts. The dynamics of such contact zones, however, can only be understood when researchers adopt a cosmopolitical perspective that destabilizes their political, cultural, and ontological certainties as well.

Johanna Leinius works as post-doctoral researcher in the research program “Ecologies of Social Cohesion” at the University of Kassel, Germany. In her current research, she analyzes how societal alternatives towards socio-ecological transformations are constructed in encounters between heterogeneous actors within postcolonial contexts. Arguing for collective research practices, she has worked with the Programa Democracia y Transformación Global (PDTG) in Lima, Peru.
Previously, she was a research associate at the Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies (FRCPS), Cluster of Excellence ‘The Formation of Normative Orders’, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany. She is speaker of the Working Group ‘Gender and Politics’ of the German Association for Political Science (DVPW) and of the Working Group ‘Poststructuralist Perspectives on Social Movements’ of the Institute for Social Movement Studies (ipb).
Her research interests include postcolonial, decolonial, and feminist theory, the politics of ontology and of knowledge production, Latin American politics and societies, and social movement struggles.

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My paper might also fit within stream 4, depending on the final perspective the stream organizers choose to pursue.

In this paper, we analyze Iceland’s policy and practice regarding SOGI minorities amongst resettlement refugees and asylum seekers. Iceland has an international reputation for being a gender equal society, both with regard to women’s rights and the rights of LGBTQ people. Both claims, however, can easily be problematized. Gender equality is often used by national leaders to beat their own drums in international for a, while the same leaders turn a deaf ear to demands for improvements at home. In this context, it is interesting to consider what the status of sexual orientation and gender identity minorities are in a society that identifies as a leader in both of these fields. Over the last decade, Iceland focused its resettlement refugee efforts on single women heads of household, thus reflecting the outward facing identity of being the best place in the world for women. In 2017, it accepted a small group of queer refugees, all the while deporting members of that same minority who had come to Iceland as asylum seekers. The paper asks whether Iceland has identified a “desirable refugee” that it is willing to accept? The paper draws on policy documents, interviews with stakeholders and refugees and asylum seekers, to shed a light on the way in which the system responds to the specific needs of this group.

Omarsdottir is an Associate Professor of International Affairs at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Iceland. She studies Iceland’s foreign and security policy from a feminist perspective.
Steinþórsdóttir is an MA student in International Affairs at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Iceland.

Alexandra Dögg Steinþórsdóttir, Faculty of Political Science, University of Iceland

Pragmatic anti-oppression academics and legal theorists have long argued for equality under the law. The law should not discriminate on the basis of physical markers—it should be neutral as to what sorts of bodies come before it. However, such neutrality is not always on the side of justice; it can aid and reinforce systems of oppression. This is particularly true of the international legal principle of non-refoulement (PNR), which prohibits states from returning asylum-seekers back to states or territories where there is a risk that their lives and/or freedoms will be threatened on account of their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. States are (legally) obliged to rescue asylum-seekers who will be persecuted if they are returned to their home states or territories. However, as enforced, the PNR systematically denies that right to certain groups, particularly those who experience gender-based and/or gang-based violence. Exclusionary rulings depict some experiences as the result of indiscriminate and widespread violence, and so render some forms of identity-based violence as too common and unexceptional to meet the standards of persecution embedded in the refugee definition. Thus, the PNR often fails—because of its purported neutrality—to protect women and those with certain bodies.

This situation forces us to interrogate both how bodies and borders interact in international law and how we should think about neutrality and equality. Neutrality has long been the hallmark of the serious academic and legal theorist; but should we continue to hold this line, especially in regards to refugee studies? To what extent, if any, should international law take physical status into account when legislating about refugees, territories, and borders? We first investigate the concept of neutrality as a border surrounding contemporary liberal academic and legal discourse, and then discuss the implications of such neutrality for the intersection of gender research, refugee studies, and international law. We conclude that the legal entanglement of equality and neutrality has become entrenched in the international laws surrounding refugees in a way that is seriously harmful and oppressive to those with unwelcome bodies who flee across international borders.

Jennifer Kling is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Her research focuses on moral and political philosophy, particularly issues in war and peace, self- and other-defense, international relations, and feminism. She is the author of articles in Journal of Global Ethics and The Routledge Book of Pacifism and Nonviolence, and is the editor of Pacifism, Politics, and Feminism: Intersections and Innovations (Brill, forthcoming).

Emily Skop is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and is the Founding Director of the UCCS Global Intercultural Research Center. Her research focuses on international migration, urbanization (in particular spatial segregation and inequality), and race, ethnicity and place. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on these topics, and received the 2018 Distinguished Scholar Award in Ethnic Geography from the American Association of Geographers (AAG).

Jennifer Kling, PhD
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
jkling@uccs.edu

Emily Skop, PhD
Professor and Chair
Geography and Environmental Studies
Founding Director of the UCCS Global Intercultural Research Center (GlInt)
University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
eskop@uccs.edu

This is a co-authored paper.

Denmark has garnered worldwide acclaim for its values of liberalism, freedom of expression and equality, but, I argue, the role of fictional representations in film, television and literature has proliferated this view. The sale of Danmark’s Radio’s (DR) now prestigious television drama to first-world nations like the US, the UK, Australia and Germany has cemented Denmark’s appeal as a gender-progressive and remarkably self-reflexive Nordic country, and one which seems to speak on behalf of the whole Nordic region. Framing my argument through border theory and John Urry’s tourist gaze, this paper challenges the perception of the Nordic region as a homogeneous mass, defined by its social welfare system. I maintain that the role of politically-critical crime fiction in the negotiation of national identity (including gender politics) and generating an international discourse is under-represented in academia considering the huge industrial impact of a successful media industry. I concisely trace Nordic crime fiction through its iterations as the left-wing criticism of Sjöwall and Wahlöö, to Peter Hoeg’s harrowing Frøken Smillas Fornemmelse for Sne, to Arnuldar Indriðrason’s grim resignation, culminating in the transnational TV phenomenon of Bron/Broen, while considering the way that cultural nuances within and between the Nordic nations are grappled with in fiction. Of particular interest is the emergence of female investigators who forgo or sacrifice the familial realm, thereby displacing their duty of care into the public service. The visibility of these women speaks to a demand for gender equity in the Nordic countries, but the actual female characters are often conflicted between the social expectations of motherhood and their personal drive for justice. This paper draws from Andrew Nestingen’s claim that “If we want to understand contemporary Scandinavia’s struggles over transformation we have to study its popular fictions” to ask: what role does fiction play in consolidating ideas of nationhood, cultural fluidity and the seemingly universal appeal of crime and degradation?

Djuna Hallsworth is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies. She explores the cultural and political context surrounding the representation of women in Danish film and television, framing screen cultures within welfare state governance. Djuna has attended two conferences in Denmark since she began her thesis in March 2017, and has established relationships with Danish industry professionals and academics to aid her research. She has applied to be a visiting PhD scholar at Aarhus University in 2019. Djuna’s main research themes include motherhood, sexuality, mental illness, transgression and guilt, and uses her background in film studies, textual analysis and English to integrate these themes into her work.

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I have previously emailed my submission in because of the discrepancy in the word count as stated on the submission guidelines compared to the text fields on this page, but as I have not received confirmation of receipt I would like to send it again here. Thank you.

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Dr, Docent Hanna Ylöstalo works as a University Researcher at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Her ongoing project, titled Missing “Plan F” – A battle between knowledge, economy and equality in the changing welfare state (2017-2020) is concerned with the changing conditions of gender equality policy in Finland. She is particularly interested in neoliberalization of the Nordic welfare state, the gendered economy-society relations and the role of knowledge in policy-making. Ylöstalo obtained her PhD (Gender Studies) at the University of Tampere. Ylöstalo’s research is concerned with gender equality policy, gender equality and diversity in work organizations, gender and economy, and post-Fordist labour. In addition to her academic work, Ylöstalo has developed processes and practices of gender budgeting for the Finnish state administration. She takes actively part in societal discussions about gender equality and the economy.

Anna Elomäki, Faculty of Social Sciences (SOC), University of Tampere, Finland
anna.elomaki@uta.fi

Paula Koskinen Sandberg, Faculty of Social Sciences (SOC), University of Tampere, Finland
paula.sandberg@uta.fi

Miikaeli Kylä-Laaso, Faculty of Social Sciences (SOC), University of Tampere, Finland
kyla-laaso.miikaeli.h@student.uta.fi

Hanna Ylöstalo, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland
hanna.ylostalo@helsinki.fi

I have also submitted the panel proposal via e-mail.

This paper will explore the meanings of rape and sexual violence in shaping gender relations, drawing on stories of victims of intimate partner violence. Rape and sexual abuse in and as part of violence in intimate relations is highly gendered. Although it is increasingly recognized that not only heterosexual women can be raped and are subjected to intimate partner violence, and further that some persons and some groups are more exposed to sexual violence and abuse, we will argue, supported by our own and other research, that sexual violence in intimate relations remains a paradigmatic case of men’s violations of women in heterosexual relationships. How to analyse gendered power dynamics of rape and sexual abuse as part of IPV without silencing other groups’ experiences? In this paper, we are exploring the intersections of sexual violence in intimate relations as a gendered phenomenon and the production of institutionalized and cultural patterns of gender inequality. We will analyse stories of victims of violence, drawing on and combining theories of rape, victimization and embodiment, as well as theories of heteronormativity, love and gendered dynamics in heterosexual relationships.

Margunn Bjørnholt
Research professor, Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies,
PhD gender studies, Mag.Art. Sociology.
Recent publication: Bjørnholt, Margunn and Hjemdal, Ole Kristian (2018). Measuring violence, mainstreaming gender; does adding harm make a difference? Journal of Gender-Based Violence

Hannah Helseth, Senior researcher, Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies, PhD Sociology, editor Nytt norsk tidsskrift. Recent publication: coauthored With Anja Sletteland (2018) Det jeg skulle sagt. Håndbok mot seksuell trakassering. [What I should have said. Handbook against sexual harassment]Manifest forlag.

Hannah Helseth, PhD
Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies
hannahhelseth@gmail.com

Populism and nationalism are rising in many countries in Europe, putting national identity once more on the agenda. The influx of refugees from Africa and the Middle East and terrorist attacks in Europe have fuelled harsh discussions about integration, national identity and Islam. In this context, Islam is often considered to be a threat to European identities. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between religion/secularism and national identity through the experiences of female converts to Islam. These women occupy a controversial position in society: they are often born and raised in Europe and have chosen for a religion that is generally associated with ‘foreignness’. In this context, they are not only confronted with questions of national identity (are they still ‘Dutch’, ‘English’, ‘French’), but also of emancipation (is this a conscious and free choice and how does it influence women’s emancipation?). Through a literature review and discussion of preliminary interview results, it will be investigated how female converts negotiate their multiple belongings, especially with regard to the relationship between religion and national identity. Gender is essential in this conjuncture, as many national, religious and secular markers are gendered and, most of the time, specifically focused on women and their bodily practices. The central questions that guide the paper are: ‘How do specific interpretations of religion, secularism and women’s emancipation inform definitions of Dutch national identity and what can the experiences of ‘insider/outsiders’ teach us about the borders of ‘Dutchness’?’.

Eva Midden is Assistant Professor in Gender Studies, at the Media and Culture Studies Department, at Utrecht University. She was recently involved in the European Research Project ‘MIGNET’ for which she conducted research on migration, gender and religious practices in new media. Midden’s current research is connected to the project ‘postsecular nationalism’ and focuses on gender, religion and national identity in the context of conversion to Islam. Her general research interests include feminist theory, postcolonial theory, intersectionality, (post)secular(ism), whiteness and media analysis. Her recent publications include: Transformations of Religion and the Public Sphere (ed with Braidotti R., Blaagaard B. de Graauw T.). Postsecular Publics. Edited Volume. Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series. Palgrave MacMillan: Hampshire. and: ‘Rethinking Dutchness: Learning from the Intersections between Religion, Gender and National Identity after Conversion to Islam’. Social Compass December issue 2018. Pre-published online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0037768618800427

no co author

This paper examines how the US-based white nationalist movement defines itself as a defender of patriarchal masculinity, articulating a version of what I am calling white sexual politics. This helps to explain the ways opposition to feminism, queer politics, immigrants, and Islam are melded together in far-right movements. Informed by black feminist theories, the concept of white sexual politics reveals how whiteness has historically been articulated through a set of language and practices around gender, sexuality, and the family.

Based in over a decade of research on the online white nationalist movement, this analysis shows how contemporary right wing, authoritarian movements rally around the modern, classed and raced, and patriarchal family as an anchor of stability in a time of increasing economic and social change. In so doing these movements build their racist agendas on a patriarchal foundation.

Sophie Bjork-James is an Assistant Professor of the Practice in Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. She has over ten years experience researching both the US based Religious Right and the white nationalist movements. She is working on a book manuscript on race and evangelical politics in the US. Her work has appeared on the NBC Nightly News, NPR’s All Things Considered and BBC Radio 4’s Today.

This is single-authored

Trafficking in persons has been on the agenda of States and international organisations in order to create global strategies – Treaties, Conventions, and General Recommendations – to help diminish the impact and significance of this phenomenon worldwide. States have signed and ratified these agreements within their policies, with the purpose of prosecuting traffickers, preventing human trafficking and creating better protection mechanisms for victims. A clear example is the United Kingdom. However, in the case of the victims, they are still invisible, often without receiving necessary guarantees that protect them from vulnerable situations.

This proposal aims to explore the type of control strategies that the United Kingdom, specifically England, has carried out and the impact these strategies have had on trafficking victims in the country. Starting from what Souter (2011) proposes as the culture of denial, many victims of trafficking face challenges when going to the authorities to determine their situation and have their own space within the society.

Following these perspectives it is relevant to ask:

What control strategies do the states carry out regarding trafficking? What is the position of feminist theories on this issue? How are victims who have been trafficked to the United Kingdom affected? Why a culture of denial?

Political Scientist from the Universidad del Rosario, Colombia. With an MA in Migration Studies, Development and Social Intervention, from the Universidad de Granada, Spain. And an Erasmus Mundus MA in Women’s and Gender Studies, from the University of Hull, the UK. Main areas of study and interest are: social justice, gender equality, migration, human trafficking, identity and asylum.

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In this paper I introduce and explore the term “prepper pedagogy”, which I describe as an orientation to nation-building intended to educate the public to a variety of military, carceral and police logics. Prepper pedagogy refers to various survivalist practices and ways of knowing that condition pre-emptive responses to perceived threats of persistent social disorder. Prepper or “survivalist” movements, I suggest, coalesce histories of nation building, colonialism and civil militarization on the home front of international conflicts. While preppers are often perceived to be outsider social movements characterized by liberal notions of self-reliance and alt-right politics, my research considers how prepper pedagogies both perpetuate and resist the normative epistemological and ontological foundations of the settler colonial state. If, following von Clausewitz’s (1918) famous formulation, war is a continuation of state policy by other means, then prepper pedagogy is its home front.

To develop this argument, I analyze a specific technology, commissioned by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) during the Cold War, designed to purportedly provide an objective and scientific method for identifying civil servants who were perceived, because of their sexual orientation, to constitute a security risk (Kinsman 2004). This mobile technology, known as the “Fruit Machine”, was deployed against hundreds of suspected civil servants, some of whom were later demoted and or/removed from their positions (Kinsman 2004). As a result of advocacy by the LGBT group Egale Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently offered a formal apology and financial compensation to those who had been affected by the program (CBC 2017). The “fruit machine” and its related sex-normative curriculum, I suggest, is an example of prepper pedagogy in which nation building takes shape as pre-emptive domestic practice of surveillance and securitization. What binds these moments together, I argue, is the operative logic of pre-emption that works to produce and maintain those who are other to the colonial and imperial project of nation building, something constructed as much within the nation as directed towards those so-called enemies without.

Sara is Associate Professor in the Department of Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research and teaching are interdisciplinary and consider the dynamics of violence, war and social conflict in the global context. One of her interests is the relationship between war, visual culture and nation building, a focus she explores in a current curatorial project entitled „Surveillance and Nation Building in Canada: 1945-2011“. Along with Dr. Dina Georgis at the University of Toronto, she directs the SSHRC funded Research Creation Project „Surveillant Subjectivities: Digital Youth Cultures, Art and Affect“. In addition to her academic-based work, Sara curates aesthetic projects that archive visual encounters with legacies of war and social trauma. Her critical art writing has appeared in PUBLIC, FUSE Magazine and in exhibition essays for the Art Gallery of Bishops University, YYZ, the Ottawa Art Gallery and as a blog for Gallery TPW.

no co-authors

This research aims to examine how refugee women under international protection living in satellite cities of Turkey have access to social and financial aid schemes. According to the geographic limitation on the 1951 Geneva Convention, Turkey only accepts refugees from Europe, and asylum seekers from other countries such as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and African countries –conditional refugees under temporary protection of UNHCR- are allowed to reside in cities, called satellite cities, until their resettlement to a third country. As these cities are relatively less developed cities of Turkey, they present very limited options in terms of socio-economic integration and refugees’ access to labor market.
As a result, particular groups generally defined as ‘vulnerable groups’ with no sustainable income become dependent on the financial aid and donations that they receive from the State, UNHCR and migrant NGO’s. All these different schemes of financial aid, while an important source of income for refugees, still apply a canonic understanding on refugeeness and categories of vulnerability. I argue that this system of economic dependency and vulnerability assessment put refugees in a situation where they have to present themselves as ‘the ideal deserving subjects’. As Malkkii (1995) suggests, the depiction of ‘refugeeness’ as vulnerable and helpless in humanitarian discourses reinforces the representation of refugees as being in need of rescue and protection. The refugee has been essentialized, if not fetishized, as the ultimate victim whose vulnerability makes him/her deserving of help and protection, and the perfect object of humanitarian politics and discourses. In addition, the concepts of ultimate victim and ideal deserving subject are not only highly subjective or even arbitrary, but also based on gendered and racialized assumptions.
In order to examine how does the relationship of gendered vulnerabilities and deservingness is established and put into practice in the example of social aid schemes in Turkey, I’ve conduced a qualitative research with participant observation and interviews with refugees women themselves, and institutional representatives in Eskişehir, Ankara and Istanbul.

Meriç Çağlar is a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at Central European University. She completed her MAs at Rovira i Virgili (Mediterranean Relations) and Pompeu Fabra (Migration Management) Universities in Spain, and worked as a researcher and a coordinator at Migration Research Centre at Koç University, Istanbul. Currently she is working on her PhD project entitled ‘Assessing the Hierarchy of Deservingness Through Victimhood: Refugee Women Under International Protection in Turkey’. Her research interests lie in the area of; intersectionality in migration studies, critical race theory, post-colonial feminisms, categorization of migrants, refugee integration in Turkey, and migrant deservingness.

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Patriarchy within cultural space is used as a backdrop upon which female visibility and assertiveness is relegated to the background. The rule, dominance or authority of the male is enforced in social formations and interactions such that, a female is branded as arrogant and uncultured if she vents her feelings or presents her views on issues in a patriarchal setup where the word of the male or father is law. This paper explores this oppressive practice as captured in Salami’s The Queen Sisters and Rotimi’s Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again. It presents the practice as one which devalues women and sets boundaries that promote female exclusion and relegates females to the margins on the backdrop of culture. The paper submits that it is not yet Uhuru for women despite visibility enjoyed by female folk in male dominated societies. More efforts at entrenching and creating avenues that break patriarchy and give voice and visibility to women are needed. Writing against this and demanding for equity in social circles will go a long way in sustaining the manner and how women are regarded in patriarchal societies.

Jonathan Desen Mbachaga PhD. received his training in the field of Theatre Arts, earning a Master Degree from the Benue state University and PhD from the University of Abuja with a specialty in Applied Theatre. Mbachaga is the author of Widows’ Might – Play. (Makurdi: St. Kalemba Publishers, 2008), Security Risk – Play (Makurdi: Gilgal Ventures, 2008). Mbachaga is co-editor of Literary Perspectives on Corruption in Africa (BookWorks Publishers, 2010). He also Co-edited Theatre and Sociocriticism: The Dramaturgy of James Alachi with Professor Sunday Ododo (Society of Nigeria Theatre Artistes SONTA. 2014) as well as Leadership,Corruption, and Governance in Nigeria and Beyond. (Whiteline Publishers, 2014). He has written two works of Poetry, Executhieves and Other Poems and Love Notes (a collection of love Poems). His chapters have appeared in several books. His articles have appeared in several refereed and reputable journals such as Consciouness, Literature and the Arts, University of Lincoln United Kingdom. International Journal of Current Research in the Humanities. Nigerian Theatre Journal, The Crab, Journal of Theatre and Media Studies University of Port Harcourt. Mukabala: Journal of Performing Arts and Culture. Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, Nigeria. He currently lectures in the Department of Theatre and Media Arts, Federal University Oye –Ekiti – Nigeria.

no co – author

kindly consider my abstract for oral presentation in your upcoming conference. to enable me process permissions and sponsorship with my employer, i desire that communication regarding the status my abstract be done early before november 10th 2019 to give me space to apply and process sponsorship.

The main goal of this paper is to answer the question on what are the arguments of NATO
personnel to support or oppose the implementation of UNSCR 1325 in ISAF and Resolute
Support Mission in Afghanistan. Secondarily, it focuses on how military and
civilian NATO personnel perceive the process of the UNSCR 1325 implementation and
how the process of the implementation of UNSCR 1325 in ISAF and Resolute Support
mission in Afghanistan works. It deals with perceptions of NATO personnel who have
been deployed in NATO missions in Afghanistan. It takes a form of policy
analysis, from the policy paradox perspective of Deborah Stone and aims to provide a
contribution to the theoretical and practical debate on issues relating to women, peace and
security in conflict-affected settings. The research has been conducted for the purposes of my master thesis and was successfully defended in January 2018 at the Masaryk University.

My name is Lucie Bohdalová, I am a PhD candidate in political science at the Masaryk University, the Faculty of Social Studies. I am professional in gender studies, strategic communication, with a record in research focused on diversity policies implementation, goal oriented political scientist offering experience in quantitative and qualitative research, with a keen interest in security and strategic studies. My interest in diversity policies, political representation and decision-making processes has taken me from my internship at the Ombudsman of the Czech Republic to my experience of being an intern in the office of the NATO’s Special Representative for Women, Peace and Security. Currently, I am based at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a visiting research fellow, where I conduct research on engagement of female soldiers in Israeli army.

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Abstract
A Mitzvah in Historic Preservation: The Need for Conservation of Stone Epitaphs Dedicated to Jewish Women in Ancient Rome

Before time and earthquakes threaten more Italian museums, such as the Roman National Museum of the Baths of Diocletian and the National Naples Archaeological Museum storage facilities, we need to save the Roman Jewish stone epitaphs, those dedicated to women, still remaining to be re-investigated.

It is incumbent upon us to accurately revise the outdated and biased Corpus of Jewish Inscriptions, spanning the sixteenth through the early twenty-first centuries. These records continue to be used as original primary sources for archaeological works.

The conservation of those Roman Jewish stone epitaphs which memorialize women, and are now in museum storage, is a subject of great magnitude. This paper is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to their conservation. Rather, this paper intends to demonstrate how select distinct nuances, gathered through my continuous research, yield a different way of reading, understanding, and interpreting sacred tombstones inscribed in honor of women. For, this is a particularly praiseworthy undertaking, not to be overlooked. The historic preservationist has the duty of drawing international attention to the awareness of scholars, in particular to female Torah scholars, who can provide insights into women’s Jewish history which others will less easily be able to provide. Otherwise, in the event of another earthquake, these precious stone epitaphs, dedicated to Jewish women in ancient Rome, risk total destruction.

My Name is Brenda Lee Bohen and as a tour guide form more than sixteen years I have been sharing my passion for Rome’s history and its surrounding cities with hundreds of families of all faiths and backgrounds.
I divide my time between Chicago and Rome and am originally from the US. I hold a BA in the History of Art and Architecture specializing in Ancient Greek and Rome and the Italian Renaissance from De Paul University and an MA in Historic Preservation from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University’s Cardinal Bea Institute for Jewish Studies in Rome. I am currently researching Jewish History and Civilization toward an MA at The Spertus Institute of Jewish Learning & Leadership in Chicago.

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Female leaders in the ancient synagogues with functional titles, such as Priestess, Mother of the Synagogue, and Elder, are found among the Stone Epitaphs in memory of Jewish women in Ancient Rome. In order to bring forth a new perspective, it is now imperative for women rabbis to further re-investigate these precious inscriptions.

Migration is one of the most striking challenges for societies around the world and an issue of the greatest political relevance. Despite this fact, the current philosophical debate on migration remains largely limited to a normative-empirical exchange on the present refugee situation. In my current research project, I propose an alternative that reaches beyond this focus and aims at a phenomenological examination of the experience of those crossing borders: I wish to pursue and unpack the philosophical intuition that there is a core lived experience accompanying every migration, which is intersubjectively comprehensible and communicable. This experience transgresses subjective reasons to migrate, one’s cultural and social background or one’s particular life-story, even if all these factors can influence its intensity. Against this background, my paper focuses on the question, if gender can be seen as a decisive factor, which renders retrieving such a common experience of migration impossible? As gender is definitely one of the core constituents shaping the current forced migration, and partly also voluntary migration, it has a critical influence on my central question: How does a migration experience change the existential situation of a person regarding her self-perception and her relation to the community in which she lives? Referring to the essential fields of experience: the Visible, the Audible and the Corporeal, I will examine the role, which gender plays in experiencing migration, but also the storytelling transforming this experience. In this respect, my investigation contributes substantially to the current academic migration debate: I engage with the question, who do we speak of, when we address migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers, instead of objectifying and reducing them to numbers to be ‘normatively managed’. Within this framework, determining the significance of gender influence is a key aspect of pursuing a thorough insight into the versatility and commonality of the migration experience.

Theoretical references: Arendt, Spivak, Said, Borren, Gündoğdu.

I am an Assistant Professor in practical and political philosophy at Paderborn University and an associate fellow at the Center for History of Women Philosophers and Scientists. I studied philosophy and education at the University of Lodz, Poland and University of Jyväskylä, Finland. I then completed my PhD studies in Germany, initially at the University of Bonn and subsequently at the Paderborn University. My dissertation examines exercises in political thinking in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt. In my post-doctoral research, I pursue a project, which corresponds with my own biography: a phenomenological study of the migration experience.
In my research and teaching I focus on political philosophy (political action and judgment, migration, political participation) and feminist philosophy (feminist phenomenology, theories of the body, feminist politics).

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To oppose hegemonic systems of oppression in terms of (transcultural) sisterhood has always been a great field of interest on feminist agendas. But many feminist scholars, especially Black feminists like Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) or bell hooks (1984), made it clear that building feminist solidarity on an unreflected generalized claim of womyn* being the victims of patriarchy without consideration of race, class, sexuality and nationality – to name only a few of relevant intersecting categories –, won´t help the feminist movement to overcome the reproduction of the same hegemonic patterns they assert to fight against. Underlining, Chandra T. Mohanty´s (2002) transcultural feminist solidarity model proposes the relevance of finding common grounds of patriarchal, and therefore capitalist, domination and struggle, but also differences – on a local as well as on a global perspective. Whilst Michel Foucault (1994) stated that systems of power systematically produce self-disciplining individuals to keep the status-quo intact, it seems to be a necessity to form feminist solidarity as well as to question violently imposed categories as a tool of oppression. Nevertheless, these categories are shaping the performativity of identities, the very reality people are living upon, and therefore can´t be dismissed as “just” hegemonic. As these categories form a central structurally enforced order of society, the analysis of the categories themselves is essential. But to be able to examine the multilayered forms of oppression, it´s even more important to look at the multilayered intersections these categories are showing and, further, to fragmentize these categories to overcome simplifying intersectional approaches that refer to distinct and fixed subject positionings. Accordingly, Jasbir K. Puar (2007) suggests with her assemblage concept to complement and complicate intersectionality to meet identity constructions in their fragmentarity corresponding to aspects of spatiality and temporality, and hereby “give identities back their threatening mobility” (Puar, 2007). By applying this approach of fragmentized intersectionality, the significance of one´s identity as one of uncountable layers could become more visible and has the potential for opening ways to find a solid ground to enable transcultural feminist solidarity.

Sonja Köhler is a PhD-student at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, in the field of Critical Social and Gender Studies. She is a member of the doctoral program “Gender and gender relations in transformation”, and further, a scholarship holder of the researcher excellence grant of the University of Innsbruck. In her dissertation project she deals with the topic of Jewish-religious feminism in Israel. Therefore, she´s currently working on her dissertation at the Ben-Gurion-University of the Negev in Be´er Sheva, Israel. As coming from the academical background of Psychology and Social Pedagogy, her research interests are focusing on social and intrapersonal dynamics and, more specifically, feminism, feminist critique of power and feminist activism. Believing in the necessity of putting theory into praxis to destabilize patriarchy, and thus, to make life more just, Sonja Köhler is trying to conduct valuable research for activists, and further, is a feminist activist herself.

There are no co-authors.

Contact information:

Sonja Köhler

Current address:
HaMishlatim 4, 6676108 Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

Austrian address:
Hauptstraße 51, 8401 Kalsdorf, Austria

Israeli telephone number: +972 53 599 3697
Austrian telephone number: +43 650 2741878

E-Mail: sonja.koehler@gmx.at

Sami author Annica Wennström’s novel Lappskatteland (2007) tells the entwined stories of the Sami girl Njenna in mid-nineteenth century Sábme and her descendant, an unnamed young woman in present-day Northern Sweden. After having been raped by a Swedish settler, Njenna leaves her family behind. Over the years, Njenna, her children and grandchildren subsequently attempt to overcome the stigma of Sami belonging by assimilating into Swedish culture. While this offers them protection, the denial of Sami identity also creates sorrow and shame, passed down over generations. In an attempt to overcome such feelings, her great-granddaughter begins a search for her hidden Sami family history. As such, Lappskatteland is a narrative about Swedish colonial trajectories and its consequences on an intimate and emotional level but also a story about intra-generational trauma and healing. This paper is a personal reading of the novel through a decolonial and Indigenous feminist lens. In dialogue with the novel it explores colonial divisions of the Sami in Sweden, “inherited sorrow” (Pirak Sikku 2014), and Sami identity and belonging.

Ina Knobblock is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Gender Studies, Lund University, currently active at Vaartoe – Centre for Sami research, Umeå University. Through conversations with Sami feminists, with the aim of learning and sharing feminist analyses and experiences, she explores Sami- and Indigenous feminist contributions to feminist theory with a particular interest in issues of decolonisation, self-determination, gender and Indigeneity.

No co-authors

Please see „description and abstracts for panels“. There you have the description of the panel and the abstracts of the three papers:
Paper 1 (Gaia Giuliani): Lampedusa: the border spectacle and the postcolonial chronotope of the migrant boat;
Paper 2 (Sílvia Roque): Internal others, masculinities and femininities: security discourses on terror threats in France;
Paper 3 (Júlia Garraio) Cologne and the (un)making of transnational approaches to sexual harassment and violence.

Gaia Giuliani is researcher at the Centro de Estudos Sociais – University of Coimbra, associate professor in Political philosophy (ASN 2017, Italy), PI of the FCT project “(De)Othering. Deconstructing Risk and Otherness in Portuguese and European medi-ascapes” (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-029997), and founding member of the Interdiscipli-nary Research Group on Race and Racisms (Italy). Her research interests focus on visual constructions of race and whiteness from an intersectional viewpoint. Her methodology crosses political philosophy, critical race and whiteness studies, postcolonial, cultural and gender studies. Among her books: the co-authored monographic book Bianco e ne-ro. Storia dell’identità razziale degli italiani with dr. Cristina Lombardi-Diop (Le Mon-nier 2013) [First prize 2014 in the 20th-21st century category by the American Associa-tion for Italian Studies], Zombie, alieni e mutanti. Le paure dall’11 settembre ai giorni nostri (Le Monnier 2016),Race, Nation, and Gender in Modern Italy. Intersectional Rep-resentations in Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Sílvia Roque, PhD Internationa Relations, Researcher at the Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, silvia.roque@gmail.com
Júlia Garraio, PhD German Literature, Researcher at the Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, juliaga@gmail.com

The panel is part of an ongoing project at the Center for Social Studies: (DE)OTHERING – Deconstructing Risk and Otherness: hegemonic scripts and counter-narratives on migrants/refugees and ‘internal Others’ in Portuguese and European mediascapes.
The researchers Gaia Giuliani, Sílvia Roque and Júlia Garraio are part of the team of this project. Though the webpage of the project you have access to their webpage.

This paper investigates Epistemic Injustice (Miranda Fricker 2007) as an institutional phenomenon in Feminist Knowledge production. Drawing on an Institutional Ethnography (Dorothy Smith 2005) of the Finnish gender and feminist research community, the paper explicates the material and relational conditions of contemporary feminist knowledge production and shows how these shape who gains access to defining the objects of Gender Studies. It furthermore, and connected, involves unpacking whose identity position is ascribed value and legitimacy. Through this the paper aims to explicate epistemic hierarchies within feminist knowledge production.
Epistemic Injustice, as coined by Miranda Fricker (2007) has a testemonial and a hermeneutical dimension to it. Testemonial injustice refers to situations in which the experience of a particular person, intendedly or unintentedly, is not acknowledged or included due to their designated gender, class, race, sexuality or other identity position. Hermeneutical injustice refers to people lacking the ability to acknowledge or make sense of certain experiences as being unfair or harmful, because certain concepts are not available to them to denaturalize and problematize practices. In the context of academic and activist knowledge production epistemic injustice would refer to certain people’s experiences not being acknowledged or heard, and the theories, methodologies and concepts that would contribute to opening them up, and perhaps bring about change, are not considered legitimate, valuable or respectable. Testemonial as well as hermeneutical injustice may be systemic or incidental, but they do result in the hierarchization of people and epistemic commitments, impacts community building and solidarity, and ultimately participate in the (re)production of social inequity.

REBECCA LUND is an Academy of Finland post-doctoral fellow in Gender Studies at Tampere University in Finland. Her research focuses on the social organisation of academic work and knowledge production more broadly. Her current work is centred on epistemic injustice in feminist knowledge production and more particularly uses institutional ethnography to explicate relations of class, race and gender in the ascription if epistemic status. She is editor-in-chief of NORA: Nordic Journal for Gender and Feminist Research; Coordinator for the Thematic Working Group on Institutional Ethnography at the International Sociological Association.

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Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht was the leading cultural figure and poet in Sweden for a number of years in the mid-18th century, at a time when women were not deemed fit to become authors or public figures at all. She was a strong and brave woman, who wrote sharp female emancipatory as well as anti-religious poems. Before anyone else in Sweden, she publicly engaged in enlightenment debate and dared to say what no one else dared.
Nordenflycht was an persistent and relentless challenger and transgressor of patriarchal borders from her early youth. She never accepted to be confined within the narrow boundaries of education for women. When put to needle work she hid philosophical books under her embroidery hoop. Nordenflycht was a feminist as well as an enlightenment pioneer. Using the same kind of unscrupulous, offensive strategies, her poetry – from her youth to her death – questioned, challenged and mocked societal and religious border regimes, scrutinized and attacked both earthly and heavenly patriarchy. She was also a forerunner in using subjective strategies hitherto unknown in Swedish poetry.
This paper investigates those literary strategies, in terms of the concept parrhesia, as understood by Michel Foucault – meaning truth-telling and complete frankness as well as deliberate subjectivity. Parrhesia is being there, investing yourself fully, including your own body. The parrhesiastes is characterized by great courage, daring to speak what she (in this case) knows is the truth in opposition to the orthodoxy and consensus of her time. The parrhesiastes is close to the prophet. What could we learn from Nordenflycht’s parrhesia regarding how to invest our bodies and our words to resist and attack the patriarchal border regimes of today?

Helene Blomqvist, associate professor in Comparative Literature, is a member of KuFo (the culture studies research group), one of Karlstad University’s prioritized research groups. She is engaged in the Nordic Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, in the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture (IRSLC). Research interests: 18th-century literary history, narratives of 20th Century Sweden, narratology, semiotics, rhetoric, theory of genres and modes. All of her research borders on the history of ideas as well as church history and history of dogmatics. Blomqvist acquired her Ph.D in 1999, with a thesis on the thematic of secularization in the writings of Sven Delblanc. She has published studies on, among others, Pär Lagerkvist, P O Enquist and Agneta Pleijel, on theories of genres and modes, on literary teaching methodology and on Swedish literary history. The years 2012–2014 were spent on a project financed by the Swedish research council (Vetenskapsrådet) on the aesthetics of blasphemy. The project resulted in a monograph focusing the writings of Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht. She recently published an article on the influence of Martin Luther on Carl Michael Bellman’s Fredman’s Epistles, and also on how the problem of suffering and evil was articulated in poems of the 18th century – by Alexander Pope, Albrecht von Haller, Voltaire and Nordenflycht.

No co-author.

All over the world, nationalist populists have redrawn borders, imposing new forms of exclusionary policies. However, these borders are not new, but based in historical structures and traditions. Right-wing populists re-emphasize distinctions and hierarchies that liberal democrats try to ignore. Critical thinkers, especially postcolonial scholars, have long pointed out that even liberal universalism has certain borders and necessarily excludes people. Populism emphasizes these borders in a way that was unknown, at least to the mainstream, of Western society. Even though it is an essentially contested concept, few will deny that populism operates by drawing clear distinctions between friends and foes, between us and them.
Donald Drumpf won the presidential election by employing explicitly xenophobic and sexist stereotypes. His victory made it impossible to ignore the importance of race and gender as political practices. Drumpf blatantly showed the precarity of women in the political realm. No longer could women of any color sit idly by and assume that politicians will have their interest in mind, too. It is in that moment in which hegemonic struggles come to the fore, that counter-hegemonic (e.g feminist) movements arise.
In the wake of Drumpf, women have been politicized and forced to engage in feminist activism to make their voices heard. The women’s marches all over the US and around the globe show the scope of this collective action. Feminist activism in the US has successfully launched a counter movement to the Drumpf government by stepping into the enduring populist sentiment in US society.
Based on the assumption, that populism is not a threat to democracy but an integral part, we will analyze how US feminist activism is successfully employing populist techniques, e.g. by fundamentally questioning the political status quo and the integrity of the democratic institutions, by scrutinizing the system of political representation and by appealing to the people. We will also show pitfalls and difficulties the current female-led counter-movement is facing and we will discuss how intersectionality and populism can work together in theory as well as in practice.

Stephan Ritscher studies political philosophy with a focus on the concept of the Political and started his PhD at CISRUL in October 2018. His PhD dissertation seeks to investigate the interdependencies between democracy and populism and how populists challenge the status quo by advocating a counter-hegemonic understanding of the people. Stephan holds a BA in Cultural Studies as well as an MA and MSc in Global Studies. He studied in Germany, France and Denmark.

Fredericke Weiner is currently a Postgraduate Fellow at the Leibniz ScienceCampus „Eastern Europe Global Area“ in Leipzig. She works on the development of a PhD proposal on recent feminist activism in Eastern Europe in a global context. Fredericke holds an MA in Global Studies and a BA in Literature, Art and Media Studies. She studied at the University of Konstanz, the Jagiellonian University in Krakau, the University of Leipzig and the University of Wroclaw.

frederickeweiner@posteo.de

We did not want to put a an author/co-author hierarchy on the paper. That’s why we put both in the author’s box. We are sorry if that causes any inconveniences.

Feminist theorisations of gendered violence have consistently challenged the borders between ‘public’ and ‘private’ violence with a sustained focus on violence that occurs within family structures. Rather than accepting this violence as private or ‘just a domestic’ dispute, feminist scholarship and activism has revealed the structural and public nature of intimate gendered violence, citing patriarchal, economic and social inequalities as the foundations. In many countries now, domestic and family violence are seen as matters of national concern and responsibility.

However, in this paper, we examine the ways in which women in immigrant and refugee communities may face internally constructed ‘borders’ when they experience domestic and family violence. We outline social and political structures that mobilise both the contested borders of public/private violence and punitive border regimes in ways that impact women’s safety and rights. Using Australia as a case study, we explore the ways in which discourses about ‘other’ cultures and the withdrawal of supports for refugee and asylum seeker communities intersect to limit women’s access to family violence support and safety pathways. We argue that these conditions operate to create internal cultural and social borders where assumptions about some communities (such as attitudes to gender equality or cultural practices such as dowry payments) are used in conjunction with visa and immigration regimes to exclude women from access to services and supports. Conditions on partner visas and a recent national inquiry about ‘dowry abuse’ are critically interrogated revealing how they seek to re-privatise the gendered violence that women experience.

Professor JaneMaree Maher is Professor in the Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University. She is Deputy Director of the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre. With Professor McCulloch and Associate Professor Segrave, the Centre’s research focuses on family and gendered violences and how state and social institutions such as the criminal justice system and migration and border regimes reinforce patterns of gendered inequality and disadvantage. The team works extensively with the Victorian State Government on recommendations from the landmark Royal Commission into Family Violence (2016).

Professor Jude McCulloch, jude.mcculloch@monash.edu
Associate Professor Marie Segrave marie.segrave@monash.edu

Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre, Social Sciences
Monash University

In the early 2000s, India’s fertility industry attracted thousands of foreign infertile parents seeking to build their families through commercial gestational surrogacy and egg donation. While many intended parents sought egg providers of different backgrounds from within India, others chose to utilize eggs with similar skin tone as themselves, often opting to pay women from countries such as South Africa to travel to India for the purposes of egg donation. This article examines the process of transnational egg donation from the perspective of the women who travel abroad in order to make their eggs available to global consumers pursuing parenthood through gestational surrogacy. How do these “traveling egg donors” make sense of their “donations” in India? Drawing on ethnographic research with doctors, egg providers, and intended parents, I show how the social positions of egg providers influence how they view their role in egg donation. In particular, South African women viewed their own eggs as gifts, rather than commodities to be exchanged, while Indian egg donors viewed their “donations” in explicitly commercial terms. When situated within a broader framework of transnational inequalities, these narratives of egg donation, I contend, reflect and reinforce the ways in which certain kinds of bodies are privileged in transnational reproduction, in order to illuminate the ways in which egg donors of different nationalities and skin color are differently valued, compensated, and treated.

Daisy Deomampo is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Fordham University. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist whose research interests encompass science and technology studies, critical race studies, reproductive health and politics, and bioethics and social justice. Her book, Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India (NYU Press, 2016), based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in India with Indian surrogate mothers, Western intended parents, and egg donors from around the world, illuminates the intersections of race, power, kinship, and inequality in the context of transnational gestational surrogacy. Her research and writing have been supported by multiple sources including the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. Dr. Deomampo’s current research explores the social meanings of race, identity, and DNA in the context of egg and sperm donation among Asian Americans in the United States.

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The flourishing feminist literature on surrogacy has explored the role of race in structuring stark disparities of power and transnational mobility between surrogates and intending parents. In this paper, I add to this literature from a different angle: by exploring what research from the biological sciences can offer to the longstanding feminist project of valuing the labour of gestation, and troubling the race-stratified forms it often takes. Emerging research on environmental epigenetics might reshape cultural and legal understandings of race in gestational surrogacy arrangements, offering new concepts of epigenetic relatedness. As Sonja van Wichelen (2016: 174) critiques, understandings of kinship in gestational surrogacy are structured by a biolegitimacy discourse of ‘one’s own biological child’, which centres the genetic parent/s while devaluing the contribution of the surrogate.

Drawing on interviews with gay Australian fathers who conceived children via surrogacy, I argue that dominant surrogacy discourses locate race in genetics, and construct the surrogate as a non-transmissive holding environment to bring the already raced, or race-blind, foetus to term. In an effort to rethink this binary, I bring a feminist cultural studies approach together with the insights of environmental epigenetics in order to figure a transmissive womb. In an environmental epigenetics framework, gestation is a crucial window for environmental exposures that shape foetal gene expression. Here, a surrogate’s geo-political location, class and race shape her environmental exposures and thus the biology of the foetus she carries. In a biopolitical sense, the surrogate’s womb is thus a racialising force. This bears significance for two key areas of thinking: how to best regulate the transnational flow of emerging biotechnologies such as surrogacy through reconsidering the relationship between reproductive labourers and consumers, and how to best theorise race as a kinship and legal object in a postgenomic age.

Jaya Keaney is a final year PhD candidate in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her PhD explores ontologies of race in the narratives of queer parents who conceived using reproductive technologies. The project employs ethnographic methods and draws together conceptual approaches from feminist science studies, critical race theory and queer kinship. Jaya was recently a visiting scholar with the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc) in the Department of Sociology at Cambridge University, UK (Easter term, 2018). Her broader research interests include biotechnologies, postcolonial science and queer of colour critique.

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Within studies of masculinity and crime, so-called “psychosocial criminology” has become a common framework in studies of men’s violence as it pays attention to some of the limitations of other masculinity theories. Drawing on post-structuralist and psychoanalytical perspectives, Tony Jefferson and others have emphasized early relations within the family as crucial in subject formation, in particular discussing how masculine identifications enable a “defended” and conflicted subject investing, not seldom unconsciously and in contradictory ways, in normative discourses. While aiming to bridge the gap between individual and social factors, this psychosocial approach has been critiqued for emphasizing intra-psychological processes at the expense of structural ones, as well as minimizing men’s abuse.

This paper aims to build on the contribution of Jefferson and others in the area of men’s violence, but to expand the focus and engage in dialogue with Jessica Benjamin’s feminist psychoanalytic theory of intersubjectivity, recognition and the Third. The theoretical discussion is highlighted through a case study of a young man and his mother, in the analysis of two semi-structured interviews, which are part of a larger on-going study of young men, their sexual or physical abuse and relations to family and friends. The case serves as an example of theorizing gendered (dis-)identifications, embodied experiences and violence, from the perspective of discontinuing violence. The aim is to move beyond a static binary of sexual difference and identification, and to rethink and situate Oedipal kinship relations, masculinities and violence. I hope to show how feminist intersubjective theory can provide a relational ontology for moving beyond patriarchal and violent relations and rethinking (gender) identification and recognition in a more utopian direction. Thus, I hope to contribute with a theoretical discussion in the empirical field of men’s violence and kinship relations.

Hanna Bornäs, M.A., is a clinical psychologist and doctoral student in Child and Youth Studies at Stockholm University. Her research focuses on youth, embodiment, depression and violence from phenomenological, psychosocial and feminist perspectives. She has published in NORA and Sociology on young adults’ gendered experiences of depression and anti-depressant use, building on theories of feminist phenomenology, neoliberal subjectivitites and medicalization. Her recent work focus on gender formation, kinship relations and violence among Swedish youth, building on feminist psychoanalytic theories on recognition and intersubjectivity.

No co-author

A year after the populist turn in Hungary in 2010, a heteronormative definition of family became part of the Hungarian constitution. This paper researches the speeches of Viktor Orbán from 2011, specifically the linguistic construction and the valuation of the symbol „family“. I used the method of critical discourse analysis to identify the inner logic of populism by exploring the construction of production vs. reproduction in the Hungarian populist discourse. As the gender aspects of the Hungarian populist logic has only been vaguely researched – and rarely from a feminist perspective – the current paper has a special importance.
Important components of the construction of „family“ are the concepts „work“ and „action“, which stand in a hierarchical position to each other: action means forms of work, which express and create Christian morality. Viktor Orbán expresses objection towards state socialism, due to its restriction of free religious practices, but he praises its (working) morals and connects them to Christianity. The components work and action are recognizable in each symbol of the speech: „ship“, „road“, „building“, „family“. In a family, work is identified with feminine connoted care-work, whereas action with the male connoted economical work.
As conclusion, it can be said that the discursive construction of the symbol family in the analyzed speeches legitimizes populist demarcation lines within and beyond the country borders. It excludes from the ‘people’ those who either do not have their own family or do not earn enough money to feed their family. It also constructs a morally legitimized hierarchy within the family, existing along the gender roles. Family serves as a legitimization of the concepts of state and nation, both of which are constructed by analogy to the symbol family. Thus, the gender related differentiation between production and reproduction is the basis of the nationalistic populist logic in Hungary.
These findings suggest a direct connection between anti-feminism and nationalism and capture the populist understanding of democracy in Hungary. This knowledge can lead to a new consciousness about feminism and populist politics that might manifest in political activities to preserve liberal democracy.

Katinka Czigány studies on the faculty of Gender Studies in the University of Vienna. Her current paper deals with the politics of her home country, Hungary. Her research interest are first of all Hungarian politics, feminist activities and possible ways of emancipation and resistance.

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The paper explores how social media (such as Instagram and Facebook) increasingly become employed as tools of surveillance in migration processes.

Most LGBTQ+ asylum seekers, who are denied asylum in Denmark (as well as in the other Nordic countries), are denied asylum because of a lack of credibility. In other words, the authorities do not believe their stories of gender-related persecution, homophobia or transphobia in their homelands; very often, immigration authorities do not believe that the asylum seekers are ‘genuine’ LGBTQ people.

During the previous few years, social media have become integrated into most people’s social lives. For many LGBTQ people this has involved an increased self-expression (Thumin, 2012) of their gender and/or sexual identity on various online media. At the same time, and a consequence of this development, immigration authorities, such as the Danish Immigrant Services (Udlændingestyrelsen), have begun to increasingly examine asylum seekers’ self-expressions and online claims of gender and sexual identities through analyses of their postings and activities on social media.

The paper wants to explore this merging of migration and digitalisation – surveillance and self-expression – with a particular focus to how the categories gender and sexuality function in asylum processes involving LGBTQ refugees.

Digital connectivity and mobile technology increasing play roles in migration processes, as refugees, via mobile phones, navigate their ways through Europe (Leurs & Smets, 2018). Simultaneously, digital media (especially mobile phones) play a growing role as a tool of surveillance, as migration authorities begin to deny refugees asylum based on their digital tracks. This points to a tension, where digital technology simultaneous function as a resource for surviving, a means of self-expression, and an instrument of surveillance.

The paper discusses how social media – which have been celebrated as tools of imagination and as spaces where individuals can play with identity and sexuality – in this specific context, becomes an instrument of truth and facts – of right and wrong. This indicates serious inequalities in who have the privileges of playing with and expressing gender identities and sexualities in contemporary (online) times.

Referencer:
Leurs, Koen & Smets, Kevin (2918). Forced Migrants and Digital Connectivity. Special Issue of Social Media and Society.
Raun, T. (2016). Out online: Trans self-representation and community building on YouTube. London: Ashgate.
Thumin, N. (2012) Self-representation and digital culture. New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan.

Rikke Andreassen is Professor (mso) in Communication studies at Roskilde University, Denmark.
She is a researcher and teacher in the fields of media (‘new’ and ‘old’ media), gender, sexuality and race. She has recently published the books ‘Mediated Kinship. Gender, Race and Sexuality in Donor Families’ (2018), ‘Human Exhibitions: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Ethnic Displays’ (2015) and the co-editor of ‘Affectivity and Race: Studies from Nordic Contexts’ (2015) and ‘Mediated Intimacies: Connectivities, Relationalities and Proximities’ (2018).

No co-authors

Since 2002, family reunification to Denmark has involved an assessment of the family combined attachment to the Danish nation. Thus, spouses seeking family reunification must prove their “combined attachment Denmark” to be “greater than to any other country” (The Alien Act §9, 2002). Suggesting the “attachment requirement” as a new form of affective border control, this article investigates what affective relationship between the nation and the family the concept of “national attachment” entails. It does so by investigating the definitions and conceptualization of family, nation and attachment as they are reflected in the official application forms for migrants and Danish nationals applying for family reunification. The empirical material consist of the application packets and forms to be filled by the applicant applying for family reunification with the spouse residing in Denmark, as well as the spouse/cohabiting partner residing in Denmark. Investigating the documentation required for proving national attachment, the article asks: What can these forms tell us about attachment as a new way of instrumentalising the biopolitical potential of affect? How are affective investments (in a spouse, in the nation-state, in the notional community) thought to be documented in the forms, and thus evaluated by officials? And what kinds of affective relationships and families become in/-recognizable in the eyes of the Danish Immigration System based on such evaluations?

Sofie Jeholm has an MA in Danish Studies and Gender Studies from the University of Copenhagen. She is currently a PhD student at PhD student at the Centre for Gender Studies, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen. Her PhD project The Function of Attachment in Cases of Family Reunification is a part of the collective research project Loving Attachment: Regulating Danish Love Migration (LOVA). Her project takes it point of departure in family reunification cases and investigates how the applicants’ attachment has been evaluated by the Danish immigration system from 2000 to 2015.

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The world is facing an enormous crisis where neoliberalism and neo-nationalism generate post-democratic conditions and have effects on knowledge production also and especially on the symbolic gender order. It has been questioned whether the current concept of nation state plus market economy can guarantee real democracy because of its economic, epistemic and gouvernemental exclusions (Claude Lefort, Achille Mbembe). Furthermore, the establishment of a solidary society needs to reach beyond the legal discourse. “Rights must not be confused with equality and legal recognition with emancipation.” (Wendy Brown, 1995, 97).
The presentation offers suggestions with Queerfeminist, post/decolonial strategies against economic, epistemic and other forms of violence (Sara Ahmed). Against a neoliberal appropriation of the term queer I understand with radical queer theory: “[Queer] as a point of departure for a broad critique that is calibrated to account for the social antagonism of nationality, race, gender, and class as well as sexuality.” (Ann McClintock et al., 1997, 3). The aim is to deconstruct, denaturalise, deessentialise and disidentify these categories nation, gender, race, class, ability and religion etc. This paper argues with Queer of Color and other critiques e.g. José Esteban Muñoz and Roderick Ferguson for new perspectives on the resistant performances, survival and activism of marginalised, minority subjects and queer futurity.
Furthermore, I install “Religion” as equivalent interdependent and intersectional category of knowledge in the discussion of “situated knowledge” (Donna Haraway). An investigation reveals that gender and religion as intersectional, interdependent categories of knowledge production are neither sufficiently analysed nor deessentialised. Queerfeminist, post/decolonial, and postsecular critique underline that subject formation, agency and human flourishing can also be obtained with religious practices (Saba Mahmood, Ulrike Auga). This paper also shows how individual and collective agency can be thought together.
A radically democratic understanding (Chantal Mouffe) requires a radical social imaginary that can be identified beyond the legal discourse. The paper applies Cornelius Castoriadis’ concept of the of “radical social instituting imaginary” to describe a collectivity beyond identity. He does not suggest what a society should look like, but focuses on the constant re-imagination with the radical imagination.

Ulrike E. Auga is Visiting Professor at the Intersectional Centre for Inclusion and Social Justice (INCISE) at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. Born in East-Berlin, she participated in the peaceful revolution in 1989 and became involved with social movements and issues of solidarity, gender and religion. She further developed her postcolonial critique when she worked for several years in South Africa, Mali, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories. She is a Gender, Cultural and Religious Studies scholar at the Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin (ZtG) and the acting President of the International Association for the Study of Religion and Gender (IARG). Her research interests include: Gender, Sexuality, Cultural Memory, Nationalisms, Fundamentalisms in Transition Contexts (South Africa, West Africa, East/West Germany); Gender, Performativity and Agency in the Visual Archive; Postcolonial, Postsecular, Gender / Queer theory development; Epistemology of Gender and Religion, new Materialism and posthuman Ontology.

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The paper examines the photographic work of Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942), the Swiss journalist, writer, historian and antifascist resistance activist, in the context of her photojournalistic expedition to the Soviet Union, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland and Sweden in 1937/38. Schwarzenbach worked from 1933 to 1942 as an image reporter for the Zuericher Illustrierte and was considered as an internationally established correspondent. The photographic image report developed actively as genre in the 1930s. Until the present the genre is highly subjected to the danger of ideological appropriation and propagandistic instrumentalisation.
The analyses focuses on discursive, aesthetical and technical mechanisms of Schwarzenbach’s travel photography particularly from Finland and Sweden with regard to its contribution to the visual symbolic deconstruction of Race, Nation, Gender, Class and Religion. The paper scrutinizes Schwarzenbach’s photographic strategy of evading contemporary dominant visual aesthetics of the 1930s and underlines the emergence of new image strategies within the established genre of the photographic travel report.
The study opens a critical postcolonial perspective on photographic reports and shows in how far Schwarzenbach’s photographs escape nationalist claims on supposedly documentary journalistic images.
The image discourses from 1937/38 are analysed alongside the contemporary work of Annie Leibovitz (*1949), US-American (journalistic) photographer working in the genre of portrait who became the first female artist to exhibit at Washington’s National Portrait Gallery in 1991.
As an example of journalistic commercial photography is the Fall-Winter 2015 advertising campaign for the international fashion down feather clothing company Moncler staged in Iceland is discussed. Leibovitz’ critical visual approach to the realm of allusions to Russian folklore and Nordic sagas allow for a non-violent re-interpretation of the Nordic motives. Medially circulated journalistic photography – particularly travel image report and commercial photography – are actively participating in the discursive formation of visual knowledge. Their imaginary potential for overcoming a continuing visual reproduction of epistemic violence is assumed to be one of the central powers for a societal change.

Elisaveta Dvorakk is a PhD candidate in Art History and Visual Culture Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin. Her work focuses on Journalistic Travel Photography and Political Aesthetics of the Documentary in Switzerland and the Soviet Union (1937–38). She holds a Masters Degree in Art History in Global Context with Focus on Europe and America from Free University Berlin. E.D. studied Art History, Theory and History of Photography, Gender Studies and Theology in Berlin, Zurich and Vienna. She also received a Diploma in Icon Painting from St. Petersburg/ Bordeaux. Her research interests include Critical Theory of Photography; Gender, Postcolonial and Post-Secular Theory; Activisms; (Post-)Digital Archiving. She is a scholarship holder of the German National Academic Foundation.

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The impacts of colonialism on Indigenous peoples have been deeply felt globally. For Indigenous peoples of North America, including Canada’s First Nations, Métis and Inuit, the on-going experiences of colonization carries wide-reaching social, political, cultural, and economic implications, impacting Indigenous expressions of identity, sovereignty, and equity issues. Building on queer theories, decolonization and visual methodologies, we examine how heteronormativity in music has contributed to the erasure of Indigenous queer identities, which has reinforced and perpetuated stereotypical expressions of gender and sexuality (e.g., rigid gender binaries imposed on Indigenous peoples and cultures). Further, we examine Indianist sheet music and related materials produced during the late 19th to early 20th centuries by focusing on images (i.e., design, illustrations) featured on the covers of Indianist music, lyrics, and the music itself, including instrumentation, rhythmic and melodic motives, and harmonic structures that have come to represent racial, gender and sexuality stereotypes of Indigenous peoples in the white Canadian and US imaginaries.

Comparing and contrasting these representations with heteronormative expressions of gender and sexuality, we analyze the politics of racial identity, colonialism, and systemic oppression as expressed through Indianist music. Our examination of several pieces of Indianist music produced between the late 1880s to 1940s engages discursive approaches to music, text, and illustrations that subvert and deconstruct notions of heteronormativity and the colonial gaze in music.

Spy Dénommé-Welch is an artist, writer, and composer of Anishnaabe descent. He is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University. His academic teaching and research focuses on Indigenous topics in education and arts-based practice.

Elizabeth Gould serves as Associate Professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music where she teaches philosophically-based courses in music, music education, and sexual diversity studies. Her research in gender and sexuality in the context of feminisms and queer theory has been published widely.

Kevin Hobbs is a writer, educator and Master’s candidate at Brock University in Social Justice and Equity. He utilizes narrative and artistic methodologies in his work.

Dr. Elizabeth Gould, Associate Professor, Faculty of Music, University of Toronto (egould@utoronto.ca)

Kevin Hobbs (MA candidate), Social Justice and Equity Studies, Brock University (kh17du@brocku.ca)

Young women (16-24) is a group more exposed to intimate partner violence than older women are. Yet, relatively little is known about young men’s use of intimate partner violence. Instead, the violences of young men tend to be addressed in terms of street crime, youth violence and the like, often to the neglect of partner violence. In this paper, we present preliminary findings from an ongoing study with young men’s r physical and sexual violence to women partners in Sweden. We have conducted qualitative interviews with young men (ages 16 to 25) who have committed acts of physical or sexual violence towards an intimate partner. Drawing on ‘the affective turn’ in contemporary feminist theory, we are interested in the work of affect at the scene of violence as well as its aftermath. What is the role of affect in violent encounters? And what is its role in social network responses to violence? How can a focus on affect help us rethink issues about young men, masculinity and intimate partner violence? To this end, we focus specifically on the transmission of affect and on how atmospheres are produced and experienced. Drawing on the work of Teresa Brennan, we are interested in how affect circulates between bodies, rather than being something simply deposited within a subject. With the notion of atmospheres, we want to broaden Brennan’s notion of transmission by highlighting the role of materiality and non-human actors in producing certain atmospheres. We argue that a focus on affect contributes to novel ways of theorizing young men, masculinity, and intimate partner violence.

Lucas Gottzén is professor in Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University. Drawing mainly on poststructuralist theories and employing ethnographic field methodologies, he has explored gendered and generational aspects of parenting and family life; affect, embodied action and identity making of children, youth and violent men.

Kalle Berggren is a post-doctoral researcher in Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University. His research has addressed intersectional power relations in Swedish hip hop, as well as the use of feminist theory within masculinity research. Berggren’s current research explores young men and intimate partner violence.

Kalle Berggren, PhD, Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University; kalle.berggren@buv.su.se

The study of affective regulation of migration and belonging is a flourishing scholarly field in the Nordic countries, mainly emerging amongst researchers within the fields of feminist, queer and gender studies, critical race and whiteness studies, cultural studies, and political science (see e.g. Myong & Bissenbakker 2016, D’Aoust 2013, Myrdahl 2010, Smedegaard Nielsen & Myong forthcoming 2019, Smedegaard Nielsen 2018, Andreassen & Vitus 2015). Although some of these studies investigate how media discourses partake in the affective regulation of migration and belonging (e.g. Nikunen 2015, Hvenegård-Lassen & Staunæs 2015, Smedegaard Nielsen & Myong forthcoming 2019, Smedegaard Nielsen 2015, 2018), there seems to be less attention towards the effects of more specific popular regimes of representation, as for instance ‘celebritization’, being the specific point of interest of this paper. I address celebritization in a situational context of it as being at work as a mechanism of affective regulation of migration and belonging. I study a case of the deportation of a Thai mother and her child from Denmark, after the death of her white Danish husband. Subsequently, they are subjected to a celebritized media representation, highly generated by the mobilization of a white Danish public, paving the way for legislative intervention by the Parliament, making them able to return to Denmark. The paper aims at exploring if and how celebritization can be viewed as an affective catalyst for the transformation of their belonging. For this purpose I invoke ‘compassionate celebritization’ as a way of conceptualizing celebritized representation as a form of affective intervention (see also Smedegaard Nielsen & Myong forthcoming 2019), capable of generating transformations of belonging through the public accumulation of compassion. In this sense, compassionate celebritization works to secure the renowness of the suffering migrant bodies, and the public orientation towards them as victims in need of intervention into their situation of being deported.

Asta Smedegaard Nielsen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University. Her postdoctoral project is part of the collective research project ‘Loving Attachment: Regulating Danish Love Migration (LOVA)’ funded by the Independent Danish Research Council. She holds a PhD in Media Studies, and has published work within the intersecting fields of media, migration, race and whiteness, and affectivity studies.

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In this paper, we are going to look at the transformations of the Russian family models which have been entailed and affected by the strengthening of the neoliberalism and neo-traditionalism. We claim that neoliberal and neotraditional turn has influenced all types of families in Russia including those which have always been placed at margins by the State and the wider society. Based on our empirical data, we argue that the neoliberal turn has led to the re-discription and re-definition of the family both by the conventional or normative forms of family-related unions and by the marginalised and nonconventional ones.
In this paper, we analyse families that are on the border of the societally accepted model: families of mothers implementing attachment parenting and lesbian families. Lesbian families were never legal and/or accepted by Russian society. Nevertheless, they successfully survived through Soviet times, liberal period and recent neoliberal turn, including more conservative neotraditional ideology that came to force in 2013. But the analysis reveals that their family structure, everyday strategies have transformed profoundly during the political, legislative and ideological changes: they re-articulated their kinship with fathers and donors of their children, transformed „families of choice“ by including grandparents and other relatives into care relations and changed their practices to more save for children.
In the meantime, the case of the attachment-parenting mothers shows how the implementation of the radical forms of intensive othering challenges the conventional form of heterosexual mothering and the kinship relatedness — namely extended mothering. It also exhibits the essentialization of maternal care for children and nuclearisation of a family. The attachments mothers (re)define family: it is no longer a multigenerational kin unit for them but a heterosexual couple with children, which historically was never conventional on the level of everyday practices.
In our work, we are aiming to show how the family and parenting structures of groups that are on the borders of society transforming at the joining point of different political courses, ideologies and temporalities.

Anna Avdeeva is Doctoral Candidate in Gender Studies, University of Helsinki, and member of research project „Contrasting and Re-Imagining the Margins of Kinship“ (CoreKin) funded by Academy of Finland. Her current research is devoted to attachment parenting in Russia. She has been doing research on parenting and gender for already 7 years.

Alisa Zhabenko is Doctoral Candidate in Gender Studies, University of helsinki and member of research project „Contrastinf and Re-imagine the Margins of Kinship“ (CoreKin) funded by Academy of Finland. Her current research is on lesbian mothering practices in Russia from Last-Soviet period to contemporary times.

Anna Avdeeva
anna.avdeeva@helsinki.fi
Doctoral candidate, Gender Studies, Helsinki University

Iceland is known for a thriving literary scene that spans from the first sagas to modern fantasy and mystery genres. The government directly supports writers through The Artists’ Salaries, which go as well to designers, visual artists, theater groups and others working in creative fields. In 2018, one female artist of foreign origin and one male writer of foreign origin received a salary for three months from the fund (Rannís, 2018). The situation in 2017 was the same, but both immigrant recipients were female (Rannís, 2018). Funding, as represented by the Artists’ Salaries, is one of the main gatekeepers for the arts in Iceland. The publishing industry is another gatekeeper. The Union of Icelandic Publishers has 41 members, all companies that are headed by Icelandic directors, with only 12 headed by women (Félag Íslenkra Bókaútgefenda, 2018). Ós Pressan was born into this landscape in 2015 as a continuation of a multilingual writing workshop offered by UNESCO Reykjavík City of Literature and the Reykjavík City Library. A literary collective and publishing nonprofit, Ós Pressan was started by eight women of foreign origin and one Icelandic woman to address the lack of diversity in Icelandic publishing and to offer space for marginalized authors. Since its inception, Ós has printed an annual literary magazine that includes works from authors on, about or connected to Iceland. The nonprofit organization has organized readings with visiting and local authors, writing events, workshops and a book club targeted at women of foreign origin in Iceland. Members of Ós Pressan have attended Icelandic and international conferences and spoken publicly on how literature intersects with marginalization, including gender and national origin. This paper presents Ós Pressan as a case study in creating spaces for otherwise marginalized voices in the traditional and highly closed literary scene in Iceland. It looks specifically at the democratic processes of running Ós Pressan, choosing pieces for publication and the inclusion of artists that may not otherwise be thought of as authors. The focus is also on the reception of Ós Pressan and its members into the literary landscape of Reykjavík and Iceland.

Randi W. Stebbins is a founding member of Ós Pressan and past chair of the board of directors. Several languages, several careers and several countries have shaped Randi’s views of the world and of words. Ós Pressan is a non-profit initiative designed to support and promote new authors, to create an inclusive writing community and to challenge the reality of the publishing industry in Iceland

Angela Rawlings, PhD candidate, University of Glasgow, ospressan@gmail.com
Lara Hoffmann, PhD candidate, University of Akureyri, laraw@unak.is

By 2018, pop music has undergone a noticeable process of political resurgence. Spearheaded by Beyoncé’s notorious 2014 VMA performance that included the word FEMINIST written in capital letters on a large-scale screen, pop music has recently developed its own, almost obligatory, brand of feminism. Simultaneously, the requirement for artists to exhibit social consciousness has also become prominent with regards to politics of race and, in particular, cultural appropriation, and artists in the US have been expected to distance themselves from the misogynistic, queer- and trans-phobic as well as racist politics of the Trump administration. Vividly illustrated in these interrelated developments, pop stars have been increasingly required to raise their voices politically.
In the context of these broad developments, I will examine the politics of musical voices in contemporary pop music. Vocal performances in postmillennial pop music entangle multiple material-semiotic (Haraway 1988) spheres: corporeal techniques meet technologies of production, sounds are juxtaposed with words and images in videos and live performances, and their aesthetics are commonly intricate webs of reference to particular styles, eras, or artists. With these characteristics, voices in pop music intensify what have been theorized as the central paradoxes of voice: its insistently transgressive entanglement of bodies and subjects and its irreducibility to either of these spheres. It is in these intensifications that I locate their possible capacity for creating alternative embodied selves.
In this paper, I will consider recent vocal performances by female pop artists through a working concept of vocal figurations. Building on Donna Haraway’s feminist figurations, the concept seeks to examine voices in pop music as situated and performative processes in the field of tensions between pop-feminist and socially conscious proclamations and the resurgence of misogynistic, queer- and trans-phobic as well as racist public discourse and politics. By retracing the ways in which particular voices are muted, disciplined, manipulated or amplified, I will explore both their situatedness in our contemporary historical moment as well as their performative potentials of creating possible alternative visions for the future.

Veronika Muchitsch is a third-year PhD candidate in Musicology at Uppsala University, Sweden. In her dissertation project, she examines female voices in popular music with a particular interest in their intersectional politics and performative potentials. She has presented her work at “Un/Sounding Gender”, Symposium at Humboldt-University of Berlin (2018) and “Mixing Pop and Politics. Subversion, Resistance and Reconciliation”, IASPM-ANZ Conference at Massey University Wellington, New Zealand (2017), among others. Her article „Neoliberal Sounds? The Politics of Beyoncé’s Voice on ‘Run the World (Girls)'“ was published in Pop Scriptum, Vol. 12 (2016, Humboldt-University of Berlin) and recently awarded with the Harald-Kaufmann Price for outstanding publications in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the category Junior Researchers (University for Music and Performance Arts in Graz, Austria).

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The list of gender equality legislation in Iceland includes gender-based quotas for boards of directors, equal leave for parents, and the recent equal pay act. Despite this, Icelandic workplaces, especially the hierarchical power structures in them, continue to be highly gendered (Axelsdóttir & Halrynjo, 2018; Steinþórsdóttir, Brorsen Smidt, Pétursdóttir, Einarsdóttir, & Le Feuvre, 2018; Steinórsdóttir, Heijstra, & Eindarsdóttir, 2018). The norms for leadership in work are still what are often thought of as masculine traits (Atwater, Brett, Waldman, DiMare, & Hayden, 2004). Migrant women enter this gendered structure with the dual disadvantage of being female and foreign. As such, they are open to workplace violence in unique and vulnerable ways (Bauer & Ramírez, 2010; Fitzgerald, 1993; Vartia & Giorgiani, 2008). This became clear in January of 2018, when stories of interpersonal violence and workplace violence were published in Kjarninn (Júlíuson, 2018). Immigrant women told of facing workplace harassment ranging from microscopic oversight of their work to verbal and physical sexual abuse. The abuse was both overtly and covertly connected to their immigrant status and examples included not being trusted with money, being called an immigrant whore and being told that there would be no pay without sitting on the boss’ lap. Other stories include working for no pay and fending off the sexual advances of a supervisor. How do these narratives square with the political will towards equality in the workplace as shown in Icelandic legislation? Answering this question requires wrestling with the aura of gender equality (Péttursdóttir, 2010) or Nordic paradox (Garcia & Merlo, 2016) to broaden these concepts to include issues of intersectionality, such as immigration status. This paper addresses the almost complete lack of Icelandic and Nordic literature and understanding of the unique position immigrant women hold in the economy. It looks to literatures from Great Britain, Canada, and the USA to suggest ways in which Iceland and the other Nordic countries can better deal with intersectionality in research and legislation. This research is part of of IWEV: Immigrant Women’s Experiences of Employment- and Intimate Partner-Based Violence.

Randi W. Stebbins, J.D., has over 10 years of experience working with at-risk communities on social justice dispute resolution, humanitarian law, and immigrant rights. She is currently the Director of the Writing Centre at the University of Iceland School of Education and a teacher in the UNU – GEST program, a founding member of Ós Pressan and a volunteer peer counselor with W.O.M.E.N.

Brynja E. Halldórsdóttir, Assitant Professor, University of Iceland School of Education, brynhall@hi.is
Jón Ingvar Kjaran, Associate Professor, University of Iceland School of Education, jik@hi.is
Susan E. Gollifer, Adjunct Professor, University of Iceland School of Education, sueg@hi.is

For several years, if not decades, a politics of fear can be observed in many places of the global North, which now seems to have reached a new peak with the recent rise of right-wing populism. While some claim that these politics have especially been successful in instrumentalizing fear and more explicitly those fears that have emerged with neoliberal governing and its multiple crises, I would like to offer a different reading in my paper. Beyond a simple instrumentalization thesis I will ask in my theoretical contribution instead for the contemporary conditions of possibility within Western modern democracies that make a politics of fear so successful at this historical moment.

Referring mainly to the work of Wendy Brown, Avery Gordon, and Engin Isin, I argue that the contemporary Western modern politics of fear can be theorized as an expression of a crisis of sovereignty, which becomes apparent in the nation-state as well as in a new mode of political subjectivation. It is a ghostly sovereignty that finds both a form and an addressee in the neurotic subject. More explicitly, this implies a re-articulation of sovereignty in the face of wide-spread fears as well as a mode of coping with and appeasing these fears. Conceiving of sovereignty as a masculine and nationalist fantasy, as feminist and postcolonial scholarship has persuasively demonstrated, I will furthermore argue that this mode of ghostly sovereignty also proves to be a moment of both destabilizing and longing for hegemonic masculinity and masculinist statehood. As such, it is linked to a postcolonial melancholy, to use Paul Gilroy’s words, where the longing for ‘old’ dependencies and exploitative relations is both performed and reanimated.

Brigitte Bargetz is assistant professor at the department of Political Science (University of Vienna) and co-editor of ‘Femina Politica: Journal of feminist political science’ (Barbara Budrich). She was visiting professor at the department of social sciences at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and held research fellowships and visiting scholarships at different international and interdisciplinary research institutes such as the ICI Berlin, Institute for Cultural Inquiry, the IFK, International Research Center for Cultural Studies, in Vienna, or the Institute for Queer Theory in Berlin. Recently, she was a research fellow at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. In her current research project, tentatively titled ‘A political grammar of feelings,’ she engages with contemporary theories of radical democracy, debates about the current turn to affect and matter, as well as feminist, queer and postcolonial theories on political feelings.

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This paper theoretically locates and empirically examines the concept of alternatives to (biological) reproduction. By looking at the period right before in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) was invented in Britain (1978), this paper explores the idea of how individuals whose bodies, which in medical terms were uncapable of producing their own biological children, were meant to be advised, and hence what other reproductive futures could have been possible if ‘hope’ technologies like IVF would not exist. To make these connections, I draw on radical feminist perspectives of the time, such as by S. Firestone (1970) and A. Rich (1977). Their critique informs how against the borders of the nuclear family’s ideals about biological relatedness and procreation, the alternatives to (biological) reproduction emerged and became gendered not only with respect to procreation, but also and perhaps even more importantly with respect to when one ‘failed’ to procreate. I analyse 160 chapters/articles published between 1950 and 1980 in handbooks for childless couples and their family doctors, and in professional journals for family doctors, i.e. Family Planning, Practitioners, BMJ, and the Lancet. Through my analysis, I show that as early as in 1950s hope in technological progress to cure infertility and believe that couples should seek advice nurtured the desire to have biological children. This desire was further embraced in 1960s through artificial insemination and hormonal treatments, rather than adoption, as the major alternatives to achieve and control biological reproduction. However, as the women’s liberation movement challenged the pronatalist and oppressive nature of male-dominated reproductive health in 1970s, voluntary childlessness, which in 1950s was largely seen as a deviant lifestyle, now became appropriated – yet through the boundaries of nuclear family – as a way for practitioners to empower especially infertile women to find a new meaning in life when no other biological alternatives were available. While my findings illustrate that the needs of biological nuclear family were interlinked with how alternatives to (biological) reproduction were appropriated in medical advice before IVF, I argue that the concept of alternatives should be seen as a pathway to study reproduction, parenting, and relatedness beyond the boundaries of biological kin-making.

Yuliya Hilevych works on the sociological and historical study of reproduction, social relations and individual agency, and population politics in a comparative perspective of Western and Eastern Europe. After receiving her PhD from Wageningen University in the Netherlands in 2016, Yuliya is currently a Newton International Fellow (British Academy) at the Faculty of History, and an affiliated researcher in the Reproductive Sociology Group (ReproSoc) at the University of Cambridge. Previously, Yuliya held research positions in a United Nations project at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) and at Radboud University in the Netherlands. In her current project “The ART of Conception Before Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Infertility Identities in Britain, 1950-1980”, Yuliya studies the emergence of alternatives to (biological) parenting before the invention of IVF (1978) in Britain.

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This paper explores the effects of civil society interventions in the West Bank that seek to reshape Palestinian women in line with security-driven international aid agendas. Using original field research in Nablus and Jenin, two cities that were historically home to powerful militant factions as well as vibrant Islamic social sectors, I probe the relationship between the proliferation of aid programs designed to ’empower’ Palestinian women, and specific political agendas designed to delegitimize Palestinian resistance. Women’s empowerment, or increasing the role of Palestinian women in governmental and public decision-making, remains a key focus of civil society assistance in Palestine. I argue that these programs seek to cultivate a specific type of Palestinian public feminine, one which is tethered in the growth of of private sector commerce and the public insofar as it advances individual – but not collective – models of ‘success.’ Alongside this depoliticization is a tacit acknowledgement of the sort of Palestinian woman that is less legitimate, through a securitization lens: a woman ’empowered’ by her activism and activity in Islamic social and charitable circles. This paper examines the disjunctures between the policies behind women’s ’empowerment’ initiatives, and the way they unfold in local communities. I found that local women often voice skepticism or outright disdain toward international aid initiatives that are perceived as advancing foreign values instead of addressing their day-to-day concerns. Many women that I spoke with criticized the class of mustafideen, or beneficiaries, that international civil society interventions create, arguing that they contribute to the geographical fragmentation of Palestinians. Older women in Jenin and Nablus that I interacted with expressed a sense of alienation from the art festivals, start-up incubators, and women’s leadership courses prevalent in Ramallah and Bethlehem. Western initiatives designed to ‘empower’ women and drive a wedge between them and political Islam seemed instead to deter many Palestinian women from seeing value in engaging in the public sphere. This paper sheds light on the insertion and solidification of boundaries on Palestinian political articulation, and the ways in which Palestinian women’s subjectivities have been conscripted to the securitization of aid in the age of the ‘global war on terror.’

Jeannette Greven is a doctoral candidate at McGill University in Montreal, where she studies US foreign policy in Palestine in the Department of History and Classical Studies.

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This paper aims to display how spatial regimes such as the nation-state provide a fertile soil for the creation of politicized narratives in support of nationalist agendas and how a feminist approach could provide an entry point for creating a counter-narrative.
Narratives are constructed through the interpretation of facts that reflect certain perceptions and are translated into a subjective reality that reflects the perception of the situation rather than representing a neutral understanding of the facts. Perceptions are heavily dependent on the historical, cultural and societal context of its territorial and ideological space, such as the nation-state. Narratives within that space are often politicized to produce political action. This is especially visible in the context of nationalism, which uses the nation-state as a reference point for (homogenous) identity claims. This can be uncovered by processes that are perceived as change within the imaginary and ideological space that created the narrative, such as the influx of refugees in Europe.
The rise of nationalist tendencies in response to the migration influx in Europe is one example of the politicization of national narratives. More specifically, what we can observe with the influx of refugees in the European Union and the resulting narrative is a politicization of a perception that becomes heavily connected to issues over national security and portrayed as a threat to the “homogenous” population and especially women. The public perception of refugees focuses on the influx of men and disregards the actual statistics that contradicts this very perception. While the national male population already existing within a spatial regime, and patriarchal structures, issues connected with sexism and inequality are not part of the narrative, the influx in men through refugee migration is perceived as an issue for security, and often connected to the female population.
By analyzing the creation of narratives within the national border, this paper aims to identify an entry point for feminist theory for disrupting the perception of refugees entering the European Union and thus its potential for creating a counter-narrative to oppose the rise in nationalism.

Franziska Fischer currently pursues her Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Victoria in the faculty of Political Science under the supervision of Dr. Oliver Schmidtke and in collaboration with the Centre for Global Studies. She successfully balances her academic career and the arrival of her first child in January 2019. Her research focuses on hegemonic discourse creation within spatial regimes and physical and imaginary border disputes on the example of refugee migration since 2015 in a European and Canadian context. Franziska holds a MA joint degree in Erasmus Mundus Global Studies from the University of Leipzig and the University of Wroclaw with an additional research semester at Dalhousie University in Halifax Canada, and a BA in North American Politics and International Law from the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich and Bishops University in Quebec, Canada.

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While the inquiry of Indigenous Knowledge has increased within local, national, and international arenas, the intersection of these knowledge systems and gender remains largely absent. This absence is not due to any lack of effort on behalf of women but rather a reflection of how deeply colonial systems and institutions, such as universities, are rooted in patriarchy. Women continue to be unheard, minimized, or actively silenced and while there is a movement to “Indigenize” or “decolonize”, these actions appear merely symbolic with the focus being largely male-centric. Furthermore, the history of whitestream feminism is consistently guilty of diminishing or outright erasing the work done by women of colour, including that of Indigenous women. This has, in part, led to an aversion to the term “feminism” for many Indigenous peoples. Intersectional feminism has carved out space for non-western women but for Indigenous women, it is the specific knowledges we carry and roles pertaining to that knowledge, that truly speak to “Indigenization” and “decolonization”. The various ways in which Indigenous women have contributed to research based on their held knowledges, has often been reduced within academia and relegated simply to a deficit-focus of violence, identity issues and discrimination. Thus, undermining the greater context in which this knowledge is woven into. Women’s knowledge is a key piece of our culture’s worldview and speaks to the complex ways in which knowing is interwoven with governance, language, land and water, gender, and beyond. Therefore, my doctoral research seeks to explore how Indigenous Women’s Knowledge is sustained and re-envisioned in the contemporary context. It focuses on the Haudenosaunee of Turtle Island and the Maori of Aotearoa. Focusing on both the local and international emphasizes the responsibility of looking within our own communities but also the importance of looking beyond to conversations happening abroad to help inform and locate ourselves within the world. Indigenous peoples are connected beyond colonial borders and often our stories are the source of great sharing, learning and inspiration.

Nahannee Schuitemaker is of Kanien’keha:ka, French and Dutch descent. She is a 2nd year PhD student in Indigenous Studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada.

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Background: In response to the Syrian refugee crisis, between 2015 and 2018, Canada welcomed over 54,000 Syrian newcomers. Of these, more than 10,000 newcomers settled in Ontario, the majority of whom were women and children.

Methods: A community-based, qualitative study was conducted to explore the effectiveness of the three refugee sponsorship programs: Privately Sponsored Refugee, Government Assisted Refugee, and Blended Visa Office-Referred, for Syrian newcomers resettling in Canada. Focus group discussions took place with a total of 113 Syrian newcomers in three key arrival cities in Canada: London, Ottawa, and Toronto. Discussions were conducted in Arabic, audio-recorded with participants’ consent, translated into English and transcribed, and analyzed using thematic analysis. This presentation focuses on Syrian newcomer women and their (re)settlement experiences.

Findings: Participants explained how their pre-migration experiences shaped their expectations of (re)settlement in Canada. The majority of participants had come to Canada through countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. Those who came through Turkey received government financial and social support and felt relatively more prepared than those who had came from refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon. As such, at the time of arrival, the needs of newcomers differed. When participants were asked about where they expected to see themselves five years after their arrival, their responses varied from obtaining Canadian citizenship, completing credential equivalency and finding employment, improving English level, learning to drive, and opening their own businesses. Newcomers needs, expectations and goals demonstrate the importance of avoiding generalizations about women’s experiences across spaces, places, time, class, and racialized status.

Implications: Practice and policy recommendations about how the sponsorships programs could be improved in order to enhance the settlement experience, included: training for sponsors to help understand the needs of sponsored families, combining learning English with employment opportunities, enhanced financial support, and improved complaint system for newcomers about sponsors.

Sepali Guruge, RN, PhD, is Professor and Research Chair in Urban Health in the Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing at Ryerson University. Dr. Guruge’s research with immigrant communities pays particular attention to the health inequities resulting from socio-economic marginalization; lack of/limited access to healthcare, education, employment, and language training; housing insecurity; racism and discrimination; and the interactive effects of these issues. Since 2008, within this larger program of research, she has focused on elder abuse in immigrant communities. Her research findings have been disseminated in various formats in over 15 languages, making her work accessible beyond English-speaking audiences. Dr. Guruge has received numerous awards in recognition of her work. In 2014, she was selected to be part of inaugural cohort of the College of the New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada. Her work can be found at: www.ImmigrantHealthResearch.ca

Mia Hershkowitz, PhD(s), Ryerson University, mia.hershkowitz@ryerson.ca

In this paper I explore the intersectional situation of post-Soviet LGBTIQ asylum seekers and migrants in Berlin in 2018.
In times of a global shift to the political right and the local popularity of the right-wing populist party AfD in Germany it is more than necessary to understand the needs and difficulties of queer migrants. Classism, anti-migrant resentments, racism, homophobia, transphobia and interphobia affect LGBTIQ refugees and migrants and shape their daily experiences as well as their possibilities to process traumatic experiences.

What unites post-Soviet LGBTIQ refugees and migrants? In what do they differ from refugees from other contexts? Which support networks are needed and which knowledge is lacking?

I allude to my work as a counselor and group facilitator at Quarteera e.V. (2011-2016) and Lesbenberatung e.V. (2016-2018) and my research for my master thesis „Discrimination experiences of Russian speaking LGBT refugees in Germany“ as well as to my personal experience as a queer lesbian migrant from Ukraine. The intersectional situation of LGBTIQ asylum seekers requires an approach in counseling, group facilitating and therapy that is aware of both discrimination and trauma. The number of persons from post-Soviet countries applying for asylum because of persecution due to their sexual orientation or gender identity has been growing since 2013, when the first gay asylum seeker was given refugee status in Berlin. Seeking relief and protection in Germany queer refugees repeatedly encounter multiple and interconnected forms of discrimination and retraumatization – also within their support network. Focusing on institutional difficulties and structural discrimination I will explain the necessity of cooperations between NGOs/social institutions and queer communities, illustrating my argument with the example of translation/mediation for LGBTIQ asylum seekers. By lighting up best practice examples and lack of support I will suggest ideas for practical solidarity within NGOs and queer communities.

Masha Beketova, M.A. studied Gender Studies/Slavonic Studies and contemporary Russian literature in Berlin and Moscow. Masha is currently working on their PhD thesis in Slavonic Cultural Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin. Their research focuses on queer migration and asylum, migrant literature, queer readings of modern Ukrainian and Russian literature and intersectionality. Masha wrote their M.A. thesis about/for LGBTIQ refugees from the post-Soviet space in Germany. Masha works as a psycho-social counselor with LGBTIQ refugees and migrants at an outreach project for queers (Lesbenberatung e.V.). and is attending a course in systemic therapy at INSA Berlin.
Born 1989 in the Soviet Ukraine and raised in the independent Ukraine, Masha moved to Germany in 2004.
As a queerfeminist and migrant activist Masha focuses on community work, the intersections of queerness and migration as well as the empowerment of queer migrants in Germany.

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Background: A range of post-migration risk factors contributes to the vulnerability of older immigrants to elder abuse. There is no research about elder abuse in Arabic-speaking communities in Canada to inform strategies to address this problem. Our project aims to identify the risk factors for, and relevant strategies to address elder abuse in this community.

Methods: This mixed methods study involved a total of 97 older Arabic-speaking immigrant women and men, family members, community leaders, and service providers in separate group interviews. Participants rated the importance of factors in contributing to elder abuse, and engaged in a discussion of how these factors operated. An intersectionality framework guided the data collection and analysis to capture the diversity as well as the shared beliefs and values, across Arabic-speaking communities. This presentation will focus on the discussions with older immigrant women (n= 24).

Findings: Participants shared that senior and nursing homes were a pragmatic solution to reduce social isolation. Many noted gender discrimination and patriarchal discourse as the main barriers that prevented them from fully expressing their needs to their families as well as settlement, health, and social service workers. Older women wearing the hijab identify this as a significant risk factor for their vulnerability to abuse. Older women considered the lack of English, to be linked to their stigmatization inside and outside the home, especially in the context of multi-generational co-residence. They further explained that they have difficulties building a social network, exploring the city, and accessing information about available social services because of their inability to communicate in English. Financial dependence remains an important risk factor that contributes to abuse. Due to barriers to employment and insufficient government financial support, they become socially isolated and financially and socially dependent on family members that exposes them to vulnerability to abuse.

Implications: The findings provide a comprehensive understanding of risk factors for elder abuse for Arabic-speaking older immigrant women. Such an understanding can be used to design multi-level, multi-sector interventions to address elder abuse.

Sepali Guruge, RN, PhD, is Professor and Research Chair in Urban Health in the Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing at Ryerson University. Dr. Guruge’s research with immigrant communities pays particular attention to the health inequities resulting from socio-economic marginalization; lack of/limited access to healthcare, education, employment, and language training; housing insecurity; racism and discrimination; and the interactive effects of these issues. Since 2008, within this larger program of research, she has focused on elder abuse in immigrant communities. Her research findings have been disseminated in various formats in over 15 languages, making her work accessible beyond English-speaking audiences. Dr. Guruge has received numerous internal and external awards in recognition of her work. In 2014, she was selected to be part of inaugural cohort of the College of the New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada. Her work can be found at: www.ImmigrantHealthResearch.ca

Souraya Sidani, PhD, Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing, Ryerson University, ssidani@ryerson.ca
Mari Kozak, MD, Ryerson University, mari.kozak@ryerson.ca
Saad El Hakmi, MA, Ryerson University, selhakmi@ryerson.ca
Souhail Boutmira, Ryerson University, souhail.boutmira@ryerson.ca
Mia Hershkowitz, PhD(s), Ryerson University, mia.hershkowitz@ryerson.ca

Indigenous nationhood remains a growing political ideology, discipline, and rallying cry for Indigenous peoples in decolonially conceptualizing community and the self in relation to and opposition to the settler-colonial state. While Indigenous nationhood as a lived politic is shaped by historically-informed cultural, regional, and linguistically-grouped governance systems, our ancestral ways of living gender, intimacy, and love have been deprioritized as a subtopic in these efforts. Internalized oppression in our communities manifests not only as overt forms of queerphobia and transphobia, but also as whitewashed rhetoric of equality and inclusion, binary-focused fights against violence, and the regulation of Two-Spirit (2S) bodies and voices to preserve colonial comforts.

Indigenous 2S, Trans, Queer, non-binary, and agender community members persist despite the borders of exclusion drawn by our own kin: these boundaries include land-based knowledge transmission as sites of harm and erasure, gendered sustenance activities and practices, and the persistence of cis-patriarchy in leadership. Through cross-community networks of care, commitments to gender-informed and ancestrally-inherited responsibilities, and the re-crafting of family and mentorship, 2S people resist cishetero-nationhoods as decolonial pathways and re-center our existences as knowledge holders, decision-makers, and healers of our communities. This presentation will explore stories, current strategies, and needed shifts for alternate Indigenous futures that affirm our existences on our territories.

Nicole Davies (she/her, they/them) is a Saulteaux Anishinaabe and Métis Two-Spirit pan femme. She has a master’s degree from the University of Victoria with a focus on Indigenous queer ecologies and plant medicine revitalization, and she is currently an Indigenous Knowledge and Climate Change Research Fellow with the David Suzuki Foundation working to support Indigenous sustenance sovereignty efforts. Nicole is passionate about decolonial, accessible, and community-building engagements with more-than-human relations that work to de-center and dismantle settler colonial cisheteropatriarchy. She is the founder of the Mashkiki Collective, a plant medicine knowledge revitalization and reclamation project for Anishinaabe and Métis Two Spirit, LGBTIQA+, genderqueer, and womxn community members, and she currently lives in Tkaronto in so-called Canada.

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What kind of political work is accomplished when news agencies circulate descriptions of drug “kingpins” in shootouts, drug barons called “The Monster,” lingerie models running drug gangs, and “unsuspicious, beautiful angels” couriering illicit drugs across the Atlantic? This paper examines political and media representations of international illicit drug traffickers in the Americas since September 11, 2001, focusing specifically on the gendered and racialized orders produced and the ways such representations inform and are enacted through U.S. anti-drug policies and practices at U.S. border sites. I argue that the gendered and racialized representations of “the drug trafficker” help legitimate a militarized U.S. illicit drug policy, particular anti-immigration practices, and U.S. state power while shaping inequalities vis-a-vis economic neoliberalism. Drawing specifically on the literature in feminist security studies, I pay attention to the intersections and productions of gender, race, class, sexuality and nation within the practices of U.S. illicit drug control policies along the U.S. southern border over the last 17 years.

Dr. Ellie Schemenauer is Associate Professor and Chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin—Whitewater. Her research interests include feminist security studies, illicit drug trafficking in the Americas, feminist pedagogy and activism. Her work has been published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies, Feminist Collections and others. As a member of a small academic department, she teaches widely in the field of Women’s and Gender Studies including courses like Global Gender Politics, Gender and Sexuality in Cross-cultural Perspective, Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies, Gender and Violence and more. Dr. Schemenauer has a Ph.D. in International Relations from Florida International University.

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The rise of the far right poses a pressing challenge to democratic politics and the democratization of political participation in Western Europe. This paper addresses this issue in the Scandinavian context, examining the importance of welfare chauvinism and gendered citizenship claims in the political rhetoric of the far right. In so doing, we contribute to a need to examine closely the interplay between gender, citizenship, and welfare politics and the rise of exclusionary and anti-democratic politics. The paper draws on an examination of the party platforms of the three principle far right-wing parties currently active in Scandinavia: the Danish People’s Party, the Norwegian Progress Party, and the Sweden Democrats as well as descriptive statistics on ethnonationalist tendencies among the Scandinavian populations in recent years, retrieved from the International Social Survey Programme’s (ISSP) 2013 survey on national identity. We conclude that the far-right in Scandinavia uses gender and ethnonationalist claims to simultaneously valourize and challenge egalitarianism in the welfare state while also shoring up exclusionary and anti-democratic claims to citizenship and belonging in the Nordic welfare state.

Maria Finnsdottir is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, where she also completed her MA. Her research interests lie in the field of political sociology, with a focus on far right politics, welfare chauvinism, and nationalism.

Dr. Helga Krístin Hallgrímsdóttir; Associate Professor, School of Public Administration, hkbenedi@uvic.ca

This paper explores the potentially generative ambivalences of rhetorically embedding „the family“ as a site of political possibility in relation to mobility justice struggles. As feminist, queer, and decolonial scholars have well-established, „the family“ is a site of gender and sexual regulation, normalization/pathology, and a racialized technology of biopolitics and nation-state (re)formation. It is a central concept mobilizing moral(izing) discourses around sex work as a coercive form of labor and queerness as a modality of social destruction and nihilism. In Trump’s Amerika, however, #FamiliesBelongTogether has emerged as an ameliorative site of organizing against detention and deportation regimes that are weaponizing familial bonds and reliances in an effort to apprehend mobility in the name of national and ideological security. As those racialized as „migrants“, „refugees“, and „trafficked persons“ are subject to ever-intensifying tactics of dehumanization, how might we turn the political „ambivalence [of #FamiliesBelongTogether] into something else“ (Anzaldua 1999:10), a „something else“ that can begin to inch toward our otherwise utopian imaginaries of the abolition of borders, prisons, and capitalism?

Melissa Autumn White is an assistant professor of LGBT Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and co-founder of Feminist Researchers Against Borders, which held its first Summer School „Taster“ in Athens, Greece in July 2018. A queer migration and mobility justice studies scholar, her research has been published in Women’s Studies in Communication, Feminist Studies, Radical History Review, Sexualities, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies as well as numerous anthologies. Her first book, the co-edited volume Mobile Desires: The Politics and Erotics of Mobility Justice, was published by Palgrave in 2015.

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Multiple disciplines such as sociology, neuroscience, and the visual politics dimension of international relations point to the productive power of the visual in processes such as identity-formation, the co-constitution of societal knowledge, and the breaking down of barriers both physical and imaginary. Humanitarian thought and action, ranging from the perception and treatment of refugees to a willingness to assist and empathize with a distant Other, is greatly governed by a visual discourse rooted in the perpetuation of a victim paradigm astride a gender divide inadequately representing the needs and agency of those the discourse concerns. An over-utilization of female subjects – women and girls – in visual humanitarian imagery communicated by prominent NGOs as a means of eliciting compassion and empathy through the representation of victimhood points to an unequal sublimation of who may be deserving of an assistive response. This in turn illustrates the positioning of gender equality within the context of the origin of such communication. Rooted in a motivation to critically dissect subliminal factors contributing not only to understandings of gender roles but also to compassionate humanitarian practices, this paper examines the state of gendered hierarchies in the visual communication on social media by Oxfam International and Doctors Without Borders. As a visual discourse analysis following Panofsky’s iconology, the paper traverses through imagery posted by the two NGOs to their Twitter and Instagram accounts over a three-month period in 2018. Findings point to efforts towards a shift in communication away from patriarchal and colonizing portrayals of humanitarian subjects. However, these efforts are overshadowed by an overall lack of gender and contextual variability delineating who can and cannot be a victim and thus elevating gender roles and dichotomies and marginalizing agency across the board. The conclusions point to the importance of considering the role of interpreting and creating everyday visual communication, not only where NGOs are concerned, in the formation and/or perpetuation of gendered hostilities and anxieties along with the securitization of borders and bodies and also giving practices, both physical and compassionate, in the humanitarian and development sense.

Kamila Q. Suchomel is a communications professional and independent researcher focusing on humanitarian and development communication and media and its connection to relations between and among societies as well as to empowerment and resilience building. Her interdisciplinary work departs from critical perspectives and she pays special attention to the dimension of gender and the productive power of the visual. She holds an MA, magna cum laude, in International Relations from Anglo-American University in Prague and a BA in International Development Studies from Mendel University in Brno. Kamila currently serves as Assistant Editor for the student-led journal Politikon under the International Association for Political Science Students where she was previously a think tank member.

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Dear conference organizers,

Please accept my apologies for this late submission. For some reason I had mistakenly written in my calendar that the deadline was at the very end of this month instead of one day prior.

Once again, I sincerely apologize and thank you for organizing such a great conference!

With best regards,
Kamila Suchomel

How can we understand the little things we do during the everyday as acts of resistance or activism? Does resistance have to be active, visible and recognizable to others or can it be measures of self-protection?

Decolonial and intersectional feminist theories inform this study of everyday responses to racism among the African diaspora in Norway. African-Norwegians do not make a homogenous group. Rather, it is multifaceted in people’s different ethnic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds. However, through my work, I see a group identity being continuously created and negotiated around a common sense of Blackness, Africanness and a form of racialized solidarity. From this starting point, I aim to investigate the politics of Norwegianness at the intersection with Blackness and African heritage. With analytical inspiration from Critical Race Theory, Black Feminist Thought and contemporary studies of Blackness and coloniality in Europe, I seek to unfold how young, black Norwegians navigate their everyday encounters within the white majority Norwegian society. What kinds of identity ‘routes’ do they take (Gilroy 1993, Sawyer 2002), how do they see themselves, and how are they seen by others (Du Bois 1903, Fanon 1967)? Finally, what does this particular kind of marginality mean for African-Norwegians’ creation of belonging?

I work with youth between the age of 18-35, who all have African roots, and who all are ‘technically’ Norwegian in the form of citizenship. Some are actively working against racism and marginalization, whereas others practice different kinds of resistance in their everyday encounters with racialized stigma. These resisting practices can be ways of speaking, using one’s body or placing oneself in a room that impacts the level of friction produced in these specific encounters. Through these personal accounts from young Black African-Norwegians I suggest a nuancing of how we can understand activism with an appeal to pay attention to what racialized, colonial subjects do with their bodies.

Oda-Kange is a PhD Candidate at the Center for Gender Studies at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture. She holds a Master in Anthropology from the University of Copenhagen, During her Master’s education she took up interest in decolonisation and critical race studies. Her Master’s thesis looked into the intersections of race, particularly Blackness and gender in the context of Denmark and Danish academia as a predominantly white and male-dominated space. Her PhD research focuses similar issues, but with a focus on everyday practices of belonging and resistance to everyday racisms among young Norwegians of African descent. Oda-Kange has taught a course in norm-critical methodologies and has participated in several workshops on decolonisation in the Nordic countries.

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Though gender equality is well institutionalized in Nordic Countries and ranks high in United Nations’ index, both horizontal and vertical gender segregations are high in labour market, especially in sectoral distribution of labour-force and in jobs within the field of information and communication technology. In neo-liberal knowledge economies, linear “careers” are not the most desirable model to fulfil human potential. Career-building in larger degree involves boundary crossings in sectors as well geographical borders. The neoliberal political economy has impact on women’s mobility in the labour market and the ways in which gender equality policies take place. Relying on feminist scholars’ contribution to the theories of network, and neoliberal knowledge economy, in this article we investigate the patterns of sectoral and geographical mobility among women in ICT-related careers. The paper is based on a qualitative research on women’s career building in ICT related works in rural area and sparsely populated regions in public sector, industry and academy in Norway and Sweden. We have interviewed 45 women where they got opportunity to narrate their life and career histories.

Nina Algren (PhD) is a researcher and gender equality specialist at Uppsala University. Almgren’s research interests are in gender, organization and technology.
Minna Salminen Karlsson (PhD) is a lecturer in Sociology and a researcher at the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University. Her areas of research are gender in technology education, and gender in high-tech organizations.
Hilde G. Corneliussen has Dr.art in Humanistic Informatics and is a senior researcher in Technology and Society at Western Norway Research Institute (WNRI). Her expertise is on gender equality in STEM.
Gilda Seddighi has a PhD from Department for Information Science and Media Studies and affiliated with the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research from University of Bergen. She works as a senior researcher at WNRI.
Carol Azungi Dralega (PhD) is an Associate Professor at NLA University College, Norway. She is interested in ICT and empowerment in relation to marginalization and e-Inclusion.

Minna Salminen Karlsson , Researcher, Uppsala University, minna.salminen@gender.uu.se
Nina Algren, Researcher, Uppsala University, nina.almgren@uadm.uu.se
Hilde G. Corneliussen, Researcher, Western Norway Research Institute, hgc@vestforsk.no
Carol A. Dralega, Associate professor, NLA University College, Carol.Dralega@nla.no

In „Model Homes“ (2004-2007), Montreal-based artist Isabelle Hayeur frames the construction and commercialization of suburban housing, suburban ideologies, and quite literally the foundations on which suburbia is built in a manner that blurs the lines between architecture and surveillance. In keeping with urban historians and feminist scholars, such as John Archer and Chandra Talpade Mohanty who understand the built environment as performative, Hayeur translates suburbia into a sprawling system of surveillance through the performativity of architecture. Likened to the artist’s camera that documents the social circumstances of the body in real-time, place, and space, the model homes become embodied structures whose architecture and geography serve to manifest the ways in which bodies behave, live, and work in and around the domestic sphere as well as the suburban landscape.

In the context of feminist geography, suburbia, although a socioeconomic method for mapping the boundaries of urban and non-urban borderlands, transforms into a political strategy for segregation-turned-surveillance–the surveillance of class, gender and race. And when considered through Hayeur’s „Model Homes,“ the architecture of this neighborhood becomes an ideal case study for deconstructing the entangled relationships between non-urban communities, the gendered body, the racial body, and dare I say Marxism in the twenty-first century. Albeit in the writing and research of urban cultural historians, the contributions to contemporary spatial theory by feminist scholars, such as Dolores Hayden, Doreen Massey, and Pamela Moss, the complicated and politically layered subject of suburbia becomes a powerful system for watching, monitoring, and ultimately controlling the horrors of a suburban identity politic.

Dr. Jaclyn Meloche is the curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Windsor. Her curatorial projects include „Downtown/s: The 2017 Windsor-Essex Triennial of Contemporary“ (2017), „Isabelle Hayeur: Corps etranger“ (2017), „The Sandwich Project“ (2018), „Deicing/Decolonizing: Histories of Hockey in Canadian Contemporary Art“ (2019), „Johan Grimonprez: Twenty Years of Film“ (2019), and „Carol Sawyer: The Natalie Brettschneider Archive“ (2019). She is the editor of “What is our Role: Artists in Academia and the Post-Knowledge Economy” (YYZ BOOKS, 2018) and author of the recent book chapters: “Camera Performed: Visualizing the Behaviours of Technology in Digital Performance,” (Palgrave Macmillan), “The Politics of Perception: Re/Constructing Meaning Inside the Frame of War,” (Palgrave Macmillan), and “Houses, Homes and the Horrors of a Suburban Identity Politic,” (Palgrave Macmillan). She exhibits her art regularly and has earned reviews for her art in “The New York Times,” and “The New Yorker”.

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Today, homosexual activity is legally prohibited in thirty-six of Africa’s fifty-four countries. For Nigeria, its federal law criminalizes homosexuality and this makes a bad situation much worse for Nigeria’s beleaguered lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. The interplay between same-sex marriage and human rights has generated considerable debate since the act, which stipulates 14 years imprisonment for offenders, was enacted in the country. It has drawn international condemnation from countries such as the United States and Britain. But the overwhelming majority of Nigerians who support the same sex marriage (prohibition) law are adamant. This study therefore, interrogates the anti-gay law within the socio-cultural context of the Nigerian society and seeks to situate its international antagonism within the realm of human rights advocacy or cultural imperialism. It establishes the congruent locations and divergent paths of local issues within global relations.

Mike Omilusi holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and teaches at Ekiti State University, Nigeria. He has wider exposure as a researcher, scholar, humanitarian volunteer, essayist, election observer and consultant with government, civil society groups and international organisations. He is the executive director, Initiative for Transformative Policy and Inclusive Development. He is a volunteer with the Society for Peace Studies and Practice, African Media Association, Malta. SPSP and West Africa Network for Peacebuilding, WANEP. Omilusi’s writings have appeared in over seventy peer-reviewed journals and notable books. He has to his credit eight authored books. His research interests are in the field of electoral democracy, political sociology, gender and conflict studies in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Today, homosexual activity is legally prohibited in thirty-six of Africa’s fifty-four countries. For Nigeria, its federal law criminalizes homosexuality and this makes a bad situation much worse for Nigeria’s beleaguered lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. The interplay between same-sex marriage and human rights has generated considerable debate since the act, which stipulates 14 years imprisonment for offenders, was enacted in the country. It has drawn international condemnation from countries such as the United States and Britain. But the overwhelming majority of Nigerians who support the same sex marriage (prohibition) law are adamant. This study therefore, interrogates the anti-gay law within the socio-cultural context of the Nigerian society and seeks to situate its international antagonism within the realm of human rights advocacy or cultural imperialism. It establishes the congruent locations and divergent paths of local issues within global relations.

Mike Omilusi holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and teaches at Ekiti State University, Nigeria. He has wider exposure as a researcher, scholar, humanitarian volunteer, essayist, election observer and consultant with government, civil society groups and international organisations. He is the executive director, Initiative for Transformative Policy and Inclusive Development. He is a volunteer with the Society for Peace Studies and Practice, African Media Association, Malta. SPSP and West Africa Network for Peacebuilding, WANEP. Omilusi’s writings have appeared in over seventy peer-reviewed journals and notable books. He has to his credit eight authored books. His research interests are in the field of electoral democracy, political sociology, gender and conflict studies in sub-Saharan Africa.

Asebieko Esan Raphael
Researcher, Ijero Local Government Secretariat
Ijero Ekiti, Ekiti State, Nigeria

asebieko1@gmail.com.

Dahan, a Bengali novel by Suchitra Bhattacharya first published in 1996, proves to be a rich text for an exploration of the class and gender struggles that mark the act of ‘doing masculinity’ or ‘becoming masculine’ in the neoliberal urban Bengali society. The postcolonial, liberal society that Bhattacharya uses to explore the markings of who, how and what constitutes masculinity succinctly exposes the fragmentary nature of an elusive state of being – the state of being masculine – which goes beyond the specificity of the sex-gender binary of men-masculine. The novel revolves around an incidence of sexual molestation of Ramita, a newly married upper-class young woman in Kolkata while she is out with her husband Palash one evening. The aftermath of the incident in the novel unpacks multiple acts of masculinity mainly through the two sites – the immediate, public, and physical site where the act of molestation takes places; and the larger, private, socio-physical site of the marriage. It is a crucial text not only because it attempts to reimagine the sex-gender structure, but it also provides a vivid picture of the patriarchal resistance to such re-imaginings.

This paper will explore the gender troubles exposed by Suchitra Bhattacharya in her novel Dahan, not only problematizing the concept of masculinity but also delving into what appropriation of masculinity from the male identity can lead to. A woman not only needs saving, but she needs to be saved by a man. She successfully points out that the aim of patriarchy is not only the establishment of masculine superiority, but the continuation of the male-masculine duality. The woman as a saviour and the symbolic feminist political possibilities arising out of such an act as a possible rupture to the cycle of everyday violence is crushed by the society.

Arpita Chakraborty has submitted her PhD at Dublin City University in 2018, and currently acts as a Board Member of the Sibeal Network of Gender Scholars in Ireland and Northern Ireland.

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The Republic of Ireland is a unique postcolonial State. The prototypical British settler colony, the Irish were colonizers and colonized, emigrants and immigrants, black and white. The white Irish maternal body has been constitutionally ‘policed, controlled and abused’; when black female bodies entered the scene, colonial technologies of gendered racism were deployed to force them through Irish borders as texts—or bodyborders— on which State-led anti-immigration and anti-asylum discourses were written and circulated.
The paper draws from a year-long feminist participatory theatre research project with women from the African continent at the Irish asylum/migration nexus, using an Artist/Academic/Activist model to carve spaces for autonomous, self-directed representation. I first stage the re-signification of the ‘Third World woman’ in global refugee representations as hypervisible but speechless objects of a new humanitarianism, ripe for co-option in western liberal feminist projects (e.g. Women, Peace and Security, Gender-Based Violence and Migration studies). I then (re) attach the figurative/ represented black female body with the material flesh-and-blood bodies of women and their everyday lives at the Irish asylum/migration nexus. Warehoused for years on end in carceral spaces of Direct Provision (Irish asylum Detention), the women reported feeling ‘tired’ and ‘used’. I asked, ‘What work are they doing as they do asylum?’ As they circulate through the spaces of asylum—courts, State welfare agencies, charitable organizations, NGOs and the media—their bodies and identities are exhibited, surveilled,fetishized, and used to ‘market’ humanitarianism through feminism. Their everyday lives extract their representational and affective labour, and meanwhile, in immigration detention, their material labour—of waiting—is appropriated at the asylum-prison. This paper focuses on a border/space largely ignored in asylum literature —the body itself, and the maternal body in particular. It alter-narrates the postcolonial asylum encounter as non-performative of the promises it makes, but re-makes bodies and identities, manifests re-colonizing spaces and structures and puts black female bodyborders to political and cultural work in hyper diverse 21st Century white nations. Decolonial feminist research praxis can undo epistemic violence, decenter the white maleness of dominating ‘blockbuster’ theories and legalistic/human rights-based asylum scholarship and speak back to the whiteness of feminism.

Nilmini Fernando is a Sri Lankan born postcolonial feminist scholar and educator with special interest in intersectionality, critical race and whiteness studies and decolonial feminist praxis. She has worked in Ireland and is currently based n Melbourne Australia, where her research has focused on financial abuse in the family violence context. Nilmini is currently developing a practice-based tool for intersectional practice in the Australian settler colonial context. A member of Australian Women and Gender Studies Association, Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies and Institute of Postcolonial Studies, she originated Loving Feminist Literature, a women of colour collective that performs texts by feminists of colour.

Nilmini Fernando

A short film is available to illustrate the look and feel of the project.

In this paper, we explore the storied lives of the critically endangered Southern Resident Orcas who dwell in the cherished and endangered Salish Sea, situated alongside the coast of British Columbia and Washington State. Elder wisdom held and shared by Orca matriarchs is the lifeblood and Heart Knowledge of three related pods, J, K, and L. With the recent death of 105 year-old matriarch Granny J2, questions arise: Who will assume the role of knowledge keeper of the pods’ lived experiences? What is the future of the Southern Resident Orcas and the Salish Sea as matrilines diminish and disappear into Great Silence? (Saulitis, 2014). Devastated Chinook salmon populations combined with increasing threats of ocean traffic and military testing, existing and proposed oil pipelines, and pollutants have pushed the Southern Resident Orcas to the edge of anthropogenic extinction. This past August, the world watched and grieved with Talequah J35 as she carried her deceased newborn calf for 17 days and 1000 miles. Then, wee Scarlet J50, the much loved four year-old whose 2012 birth heralded an Orca baby-boom of 11 calves, died undersized and emaciated from failure to thrive. Only half of those calves remain with no successful births for two years. The Southern Resident population is at an alarming historical low of 74 whales. The whales’ heartrending stories are a call to action, and this paper is a response to that call. We will present conversations embracing Elder Knowledge and Elder Wisdom; Intersectionality of the human and more than human in this Age of the Anthropocene, storied through the lens of how “place” is lived by Elders facing the threat of displacement from their homes, community, and traditional spaces. We will share their lived experiences as Ki and Kin (Kimmerer, 2017), honour them with Respect, Reciprocity, Reverence, Responsibility, Rootedness (Archibald, 2008; Kimmerer, 2013, 2017), and nurture interspecies bonds through spiritual, corporeal, and cosmological connections (Fawcett, 1999; Jardine, 1998; Payne & Wattchow, 2009). We conclude with wisdom and inspiration from Robin Wall Kimmerer (2016): “To love a place is not enough. We must find ways to heal it (p. 317)”.

Sandra Scott – My work focuses on storywork and narrative inquiry within the contexts of elementary science, environmental education, and teacher education. I am a naturalist, scientist, and educator of, for, and in the environment and am a passionate advocate for learning experiences that nurture our sense of Wonder for the human and more than human world. The storied lives of the Southern Resident Orca community with whom we share a home, the Salish Sea, guide all that I do in my teaching, research, and life!

Fay Bigloo – Being through many events in my personal history, I identify myself as a complex being—a mixed character of many things—a collage. I may have arrived at a place in understanding of others residing within or without, but that is only in part. My educational interests lay in the areas that link philosophy, theory and history together.

Douglas Adler – My work focuses on the nature of science, elementary science, science education, and teacher education.

Sandra Scott, PhD: Senior Instructor, Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Fay Bigloo: Doctoral Candidate, Curriculum Studies, Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy, Faculty of Education, UBC, Vancouver, Canada
Douglas Adler, PhD. Lecturer, Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC. Canada

Thank you for this opportunity to share the lived experiences of the Southern Resident Killer Whale Community. We are witnessing their extinction and responding to their call for hope and healing.

The question of a researcher’s positionality and its subsequent impact on knowledge production is central to feminist theorization on science questions (eg. Harding 1992, 2004; Haraway 1999; Collins 2004; Nencel, 2014; Zhao 2015). With the emergence of transnational feminist (and non-feminist) scholarship (Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 1999; Katz 2001; Pratt and Yeoh 2003; Khagram and Levitt 2007), more and more scholars are doing research in transnational spaces, either as a consequence of mass transnational migrations, or to meet the norm of scholarly mobility in an international regime of knowledge production. This paper explores the methodological implications in practicing feminist anti-hegemonic knowledge production in the emerging transnational scholarship and the neo-liberalist transnational knowledge regimes (Mohanty, 2013; Koukkanen 2011, Puar 2003). We argue that the researcher’s positionality has become compounded, multiple and fluid due to one’s shifting locations in a transnational space. Therefore, any engagement in transnational feminist scholarship requires navigating not only various but intersecting sets of power relations that shape one’s positionality, but also the flows of these power relations in travelling between different research locations. Theoretically, we embed our analysis in the continuing discussions (including the standpoint/poststructuralist debates) on transnational feminisms (Alexandre and Mohanty 1997, Mohanty 2003, Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 1999, Conway 2017), and aim to go beyond the concept of intersectionality to grasp the vital complexity of the question of positionality. Consequently, we adopt the concept of ‘global assemblage’ (Collier and Ong 2005) to explore the multiplicity, fluidity and changing scales of positionality. The theoretical discussions will be illustrated by reflections upon our respective transnational research experiences, one as a settler-colonial Canadian who has worked as a collaborating visiting scholar doing research about intergenerational gender relations in contemporary Gansu Province, China, and the other with migration background doing migration studies with a focus on race and ethnic relations in Norway. We develop the concept of ‘co-positioning’ both to emphasize the situational dimensions of time and space informing positionality (as an outcome of concrete enacted power relations) and to stress the agency of the researcher in addressing the ethics and methodological consequences of positionality in collaborative research practice.

Dr. Yan Zhao is an associate professor at Nord University, Norway. Her research areas include migration and ethnic relations, adoption studies, and gender studies. She is an associate editor of Journal of Comparative Social Work, and a committee member for Sino-Nordic Women and Gender Research Conference. Her recent publications include a book chapter on gender (in)equality in China, in “Gender Equality in a Global perspective”, and an article on feminist methodology in European Journal of Women’s studies.

Dr. Marie Lovrod is Program Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies and leads the Interdisciplinary Chairs Committee of Council at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research engages the intergenerational, cultural and social effects of economic and structural violence in local, national and transnational contexts. Marie values reciprocity in community-engagement opportunities that help repair social bridges where relationships are distorted by social injustice. She is committed to the principle that everyone and everything matters.

Marie Lovrod, Ph.D.
Program Chair, Women’s and Gender Studies
College of Arts & Science
University of Saskatchewan
marie.lovrod@usask.ca

A full rereference list is availabe.
We are also willing to be place under other sessions.

In my research and for this particular paper I am interested in following SEE queer academics and their research and work, made in “Western” contexts yet having as object „Eastern“ situations and realities. I will look into the nuanced dynamics of the construction of a geographically displaced queer gaze, related to the ideas of safety and vulnerability. The angle of this research is also framed by how homonationalism permeates official political discourses with regards to other types of migration.
I am also interested in addressing the “queerness of the queer” in the sense of unfolding how Eastern European way of sometimes ignoring the rules and challenging the establishment finds or does not find its place in the proper West. If the strict categories of acceptability (be it in traditional feminist academia, self-sufficient and individualistic art contexts or in established human rights NGOs) are bended, what are the reactions and ways of breaking the “lagom” system which sometimes hides and feeds deep inequalities and social injustices?

PhD (2018) – Faculty of Journalism and Communication Studies, University of Bucharest

My research interests intersect queer cultural products in Romania, literary and media studies from a queer and feminist perspective and history of LGBT+ activism in SEE countries.
I am currently working on developing a project concerning queer Eastern migrants in Western spaces.

In 2014, I started to work together with my life partner, Simona Dumitriu and collaborated in collective performances and installations at Platforma space in Bucharest, Tranzit Iași and MuseumsQuartier Wien. We are the initiators and members of a women performance collective in Bucharest called Local Goddesses and organizers of QueerFemSEE International Conference.

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Thank you!

The aims of this text is to examine and document processes of violent transformations of the city of Mostar and Neretva river started during the war in Bosnia (1992-1996) that are still existing in form of post-traumatic landscape system. The analysis starts from the river banks and underwater space taking it as the living archive of the war and post-war relational ecologies with the inhabitants and the city. In the inhabitants’ everyday life, river and the city are not only formations of nature and architectures, but the city remains perceived as is Neretva herself. The city has been developed along the river banks known as east and west side of Mostar, connected with bridges that with river banks before the war where important spaces of sociality. Following the nature and bridges destruction, embodied traumas from the inhabitants’ war survival strategies, Neretva and her organic system significantly changed in environmental terms but also in its spatial and social role. In the wartime, the river started to collect and deposit anorganic materials, pieces of the exploded bombs, fragments of the bridges as are concrete and other rubble. Since than the river natural ecosystem is in constant becoming introducing natural and hybrid spaces and species. It is highly contaminated and productive environment containing war debris, waste of various origins, hybrid formations produced from the location itself but also by the immaterial remnants as are inhabitants’ war traumatic experiences. Text itself is a research process that intersects wartime and post-war conditions of Mostar relying on the Neretva river as the living archive, my own field research archives of interviews, archival photos and recent underwater filming. It is proposing to cross research and writing methods taking tools of architectural analysis and Rosi Braidotti (Posthuman, 2013) methodological proposal to look at the politics of location, situated knowledge practices that includes both human and all other forms of life. Finally, the article through intersection of methods aims to contribute to the field of studies on materiality and examples of speculative projects of the post-traumatic landscapes and posthumanism that can be used as rely for other interdisciplinary studies on the same or other post-war locations.

Armina Pilav is architect, researcher and lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment, TU Delft. She received the Marie Curie Individual Fellowship for her Un-war Space research (2016-2018). Armina is also a member of the Association for Culture and Art Crvena in Sarajevo. Her research and practice is related to observing, visualizing, writing about and spatially rethinking wartime and post-war cities, employing visual media and architectonic materials. Armina relies on a collaborative, feminist working approach and perspective in shaping and reading the city. Alongside her research, publishing and teaching activities, Armina develops visual works and co-seminars, individually and collectively, such as ‘State out of Order’ – a covert lecture and collective intervention by Crvena at the international conference New Political Mythologies and Art within the Mladi Levi theatre festival in Ljubljana (2016). Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennales of Architecture (2014, 2018), in Architekturzentrum Wien (2017) as part of Actopolis – The Art of Action project.

I am single author

Populist politic is spreading his influence in Europe ‘disfiguring’ (Urbinati, 2014) moral and institutional bases of democracy, contesting any inclusive development of democratic citizenship’s borders. As a matter of fact, in many democracies so PRRs are strongly supporting exclusionist visions of democracy (Beckam, 2009), portraying a bizarre – but really worrying – profile of politically engaged woman, both as party leader and institutional representative.
New materials and symbolic borders are de facto internally ‘walling’ (Brown, 2000) democratic systems, normalizing PRRs’ exclusionist issues or policies, frequently with the support of large segments of voters. In many cases leaders’ gender is even used as a ‘protection screen’ by PRRs to communicate discriminatory contents on immigration or religion. Definitively, populist politic is broadcasting a disturbingly ideal-type of party or institutional engaged woman.
By which sides populist politics effectively impacts on gender equality? And, at last, which threats for gender equality are reflected in the PRRs’ policies of party leadership and institutional representatives?
Starting from a four-countries cluster analysis (France, Germany, Italy, Spain) on populist parties’ impact, the paper will evidence that the so-called populist wave is affecting structurally democracies with a defeat of institutional modernisation, particularly in countries traditionally affected by low standards of gender equality on political-institutional side.
After a theoretical frame on populist parties, the first part of the paper will present an overview on populist parties’ trend in the four-country cluster, also considering vote trends of PRRs by gender.
The second part of the paper will investigate new invisible or visible gender boundaries supported by PRRs starting from parties’ programs and manifestos related to sensible issues (family policy, labor market, other), to demonstrate that populist politics impact on gender (in)equality increases in country democracy with a former limits on representative threshold by gender.
Last part of the paper will present an overview on parties policies on leadership and candidatures by gender ratio, trying to match a profile of gender storytelling of PRRs; the aim is to highlight that these parties use a formally inclusive but substantially regressive policy of gender representativeness to contrast progressives conception of gender equality.

Armando Vittoria, PhD, Research Fellow and Professor of Politics and administration at Department of Political Science, University of Naples, Federcio II. My principal research fields are democratic theory, border politics and immigration, populist parties, post-fordist Welfare institutions, commons’ policy.

NO co-authors.

Recent years have seen a revival of feminist mobilization in virtually all regions of the world. A particularly successful example is that of the Argentinian feminist movement Ni una menos. Grounding its struggle in long-established feminist practices such as regular nationwide assemblies of women’s rights collectives, Ni una menos became manifest to a global audience with a rally that brought some 500,000 people in the streets of Buenos Aires in early-June 2015. Since then, the popularity of Ni una menos grew to the point that feminist movements elsewhere in the world adopted its name and started speaking through some of its key frames. For example, feminist mobilization in the Italian context saw renewed impetus under the banner of a new feminist network called ‘Non una di meno’ (Italian translation of Ni una menos) since a rally in Rome in November 2016. Non una di meno is heavily indebted to Ni una menos for what concerns its visual identity, vocabulary, and frames of contestation. I argue that Connell’s (2007) Southern Theory can be a fruitful lens to make sense of frame circulation between the two movements. In a nutshell, Southern Theory denounces the violence of those processes of knowledge production that privilege theories produced in the so-called ‘North’ (Northern Theory) while treating the so-called ‘South’ as a testing ground for these theories and a repository of raw data. Mindful of this, I contend that the relationship between Ni una menos and Non una di meno is one in which the two movements share a system of symbols that privileges perspectives produced ‘in the South’ by Ni una menos. This system of symbols allows for commonality between the two movements while remaining flexible enough to be re-entextualized in the respective socio-political spaces in light of their differences. Together with Morrell (2016), I argue that exchanges between Ni una menos and Non una di meno produce a grey area between South and North that challenges the epistemic violence of Northern Theory.

Tommaso Trillò is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Early Stage Researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Lodz, Poland, in the context of GRACE – Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe (MSCA Grant Agreement #675378). His main research project aims at exploring how key institutions and private users contribute to the construction of “gender equality” as a core European value through a comparative analysis of discourses circulating on Twitter at the EU supranational level and at the Italian national level. Trillò holds an MSc in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford and a BA in Political Sciences from John Cabot University, Rome, Italy.

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Gendered dimensions of Accessing Asylum in the EU

Under current policies seeking asylum in the European Union is dependent on the asylum seeker’s physical presence in the territory or at the border of a European Union Member State – making access to asylum in the EU intertwined with access to territory. In international human rights and refugee law the right to seek asylum and the right to leave a country is explicit, but there is no corresponding right to enter a country in order to use the right to seek asylum. This asymmetry of rights has been institutionalized within the EU regulatory framework on asylum, creating a “non-entry” system which only a few can break through.

Of those who have applied for asylum in the EU over the last five years, only 30 percent were women. This figure does not correspond to the overall gender balance in terms of the global refugee population, which according to the UNHCR consists of approximately 50 percent women.

What does these statistics say about current policies and gender relations? Is access to asylum in the EU dependent on certain gendered conditions and are gender structures possibly being (re)produced by the EU regulatory framework on asylum?

With the help from feminist theory, my presentation will reflect on access to protection through asylum and family reunification, giving a brief insight into how law operates in and is constructed in a gendered context.

Kristina Wejstål
Doctoral candidate in international law
Centre for European Research (CERGU)
Department of Law, School of Business, Economics and Law University of Gothenburg

Kristina Wejstål is a doctoral candidate in international law at the Centre for European Research (CERGU) and the Department of Law, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg.

Kristina holds a LL.M. from the University of Gothenburg and is currently teaching migration law at the Law Department’s law clinic (the first law clinic in Sweden), and works with her dissertation “Gendered Dimensions of Accessing Asylum in the European Union”.

Kristina is also the initiator of a non-profit organisation working with issues on gender and sexuality, and is the artistic director of a theatre company in Gothenburg and has as a trained actress directed and acted for several years.

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In Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and other post-conflict contexts, ex-combatants are often depicted as war heroes, perpetrators of violence, or as victims of conflict. The roles of veterans in countering nationalist and extremist narratives, and their potential to act as agents (rather than spoilers) of peace remain under-explored. Despite an abundant academic literature on gender, nationalism, and political violence in the region of the former Yugoslavia, the lived experiences of female ex-combatants and women associated with fighting forces remain significantly overlooked. Furthermore, whilst women’s agency in conflict and peacebuilding is increasingly recognised by the expanding international agenda on Women, Peace, and Security, women continue to be stereotypically depicted by policymakers and practitioners as passive victims rather than as active agents of war and peace. In response, this paper makes female veterans visible as agents of wartime violence. It assesses whether and how their stories offer important counter-narratives to divisive, ethno-nationalist narratives of the 1990s war in BiH. Drawing on narrative interviews completed between 2015 and 2018 with over fifty female veterans from across BiH, the study deploys a feminist lens to examine: 1) women’s wartime roles (both combat and support); 2) their diverse motivations for participating in fighting forces; 3) the positive and negative impact of their war participation; and 4) their post-war experiences of disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration. As well as outlining how women sought to achieve security through direct participation in fighting forces, this research explores women’s diverse experiences of reintegration into post-war society, and examine their hopes and fears for the future. These silenced narratives provide crucial insights into the gendered nature of warfare, militarism, extremism, and post-conflict recovery processes. They offer important glimpses into the complex ways in which women can and do engage in, but also prevent and counter, violent extremism.

Maria O’Reilly is a Lecturer in Politics & International Relations, at Leeds Beckett University. Her research focuses on questions of gender, agency, justice, and security in conflict and post-conflict contexts. Maria brings insights from feminist theory, methodology, and activism, to understand the nature of violent conflict and peace.
Maria is currently finalising her research on ‘The Gender Politics of Demilitarisation: Examining DDR from the Perspective of Female (Ex)-Combatants’. This project examines the gender impact of Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration (DDR) initiatives in Bosnia & Herzegovina, via qualitative analysis of policy documents and in-depth interviews with practitioners and beneficiaries. This research received support via an Innovation Award from the Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research (PaCCS), jointly funded by UK Research Councils (AHRC and ESRC).
Her recent book, „Gendered Agency in War and Peace: Gender Justice and Women’s Activism in Post-Conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina,“ was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2017.

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This article draws on an interview interaction which gives insight into the limits of «the imagined subject» in a qualitative interview—when the interviewee’s frame of reference exceeds the boundaries of the imagined subject behind interviewee and resists the assumptions behind the research objective—namely when moving from East to West, interviewees will experience continuities and change in their embodied experiences. Resisting the notion of inevitable change, the interviewee constructs a story of the self, which appears to be outside the notion of change. By looking at the way in which the dynamics of the interview interaction is connected to immediate context of the interview and to the wider social processes in both Norway and Iran, I show how the story is paradoxically imbricated in the difference between East and West, despite the interviewee’s attempt to blur the same boundaries.

I am a PhD student in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture (KULT) at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). I work on my own project and it is titled “Embodied Experiences: A Study of Iranian Immigrant Women in Norway” in which I explores the ways in which dynamics of migration manifest and materialise in and on the body. In other words, I explore how migration from a country like Iran to a country like Norway with different gendered structure reveals dynamics of social equalities or inequalities that operate in the intersection of ethnicity, gender, and religion.

I have no co-authors!

Within the framework of the 1325 United Nations (UN) Security Council resolutions and the ensuing resolutions supporting it (1820, 1888, 1889, 1960, 2106, 2122, 2242), gender has progressively become one of the priorities within United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (UNPKOs) and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) peace operations. Within the framework of gender mainstreaming in these peace operations, the UN and NATO use various policy instruments in various fields concerning gender such as women’s empowerment, gender equality, gender-based sexual violence (SGBV), Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (SEA) with a focus on sexual harassment … For example, the UN and NATO organize workshops with civil society organisations as well as high-level conferences on gender or brownbag lunches with scholars; their staff staff both at headquarters and on the ground gets training etc. From resolutions to implementation, gender mainstreaming within these operations has been accompanied by significant media and communication activities as well as public relations. The rhetoric behind the implementation of the Women as well as Gender, Peace, and Security agendas (WPS and GPS) has been significantly built upon these activities. In view of all of this, in this paper, I will use intersectionality as a theoretical framework. I will contend that the use of images within UN and NATO has been among the approaches that have been “gendering” peace operations. I will explain how images have been conveying gendered messages, practices, symbols, narratives, ideals, cultural expectations of gender roles as well as relations building up gendered militarization. I will explore how standards of masculinity and femininity have been emphasized through these images. Moreover, by working on these images, I will show how these images have been constructing siloed understanding of gender in peace operations.

Dr Velomahanina Razakamaharavo is a Policy Leader Fellow at the School of Transnational Governance of the European University Institute in Florence. She is also a Research Associate/Scientific Collaborator at CESPOL in Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium. At EUI, she is working on gender training in UN and NATO peace operations. Velomahanina is a 2017 WIIS Next Generation Scholar, was a Visiting Fellow at the Center on Conflict Development and Peacebuilding at the Graduate Institute of Geneva and a Visiting Researcher at the Université Catholique de Louvain’s Center for Political Science and Comparative Politics where she developed a methodology bridging Qualitative Comparative Analysis and in-depth narrative analysis, studying the dynamics of conflict transformation and recurrence. She was a Teaching Assistant in Comparative Research Design at the European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR) winter school.

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Intersectionality represents a dynamic and vibrant theoretical field in academia, particularly among scholars engaged in gender studies. Based on a twelve months long anthropological fieldwork among several feminist groups in Stockholm – including a feminist and vegan safe-space café, a woman and non-binary trans separatist comic book group, and local fractions of the political party Feminist Initiative – this paper will explore the how concept of intersectionality is operationalized by feminist activists belonging to non-academic parts of the Swedish feminist movement. Specifically, how is intersectionality translated from academic discourse into an analytical and/or practical tool by feminist activists? What is locally dubbed “intersectional feminism” has emerged as a self-conscious feminist identity in this context. In turn, this observation encourages an ethnography of how such theoretical constructs actually do travel and are put to use by others than their academic innovators. In this paper, this focus will be concretized against a backdrop consisting of local articulations of the #metoo campaign, as well Sweden’s national elections in 2018. The political context is made explicit because it was particularly in relation to its central discourses that activists formulated their intersectional feminism. Some pertinent questions emerge from this. On the ground, what is the relation of intersectionality to identity politics in general and to anti-racist politics in particular? What are some of the creative political strategies that emerge from a practical engagement with intersectionality? From the anthropological point of view of this paper, it becomes crucial to explore the cultural tenets that condition the practical articulation of intersectionality by feminist activists. In the end, what can this tell us about the limitation and potentiality of intersectionality as a tool for activism?

Kristian Sandbekk Norsted is a PhD Student in Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University, at which he is also a part of the interdisciplinary research project Engaging Vulnerability. His research focuses on how feminism is conceived of and practiced by self-identified feminists belonging to different non-academic feminist communities in Stockholm, Sweden, where he has conducted one year of ethnographic fieldwork.

No co-authors.

The call to decolonize knowledge and scholarship in South Africa, as in other countries in the Global South, has given rise to a renewed interest in indigenous thinking and practices relating to gender. Chandra Talpade Mohanty argued four decades ago that European and American feminism are irrelevant to contexts in the Global South. Her point remains valid in protesting the appropriation of Southern phenomena by career-hungry, middle-class white scholars. Mohanty and other scholars of her persuasion call for separate forms of feminism to be practiced in different contexts. At the same time, the rapid growth of cyber-communication and social media has helped to speed up the spread of knowledge and communication between geographically distant regions and cultures. My paper interrogates these ideas through the idea of intercultural encounters between settler invaders (Manathunga 2014) and indigenous Southern knowledges. It is by no means clear how one decides what qualifies as indigenous people or indigenous knowledges; at the same time, taking Africa as an example, local theories of gender have been disregarded and discarded by colonial discourses. It is important in multi- and intercultural contexts to conduct oneself with respect for diversity and difference so that cultures that have been shattered by colonial violence may be restored to dignity and voice. My paper will take South Africa as a case study to address and trouble several questions in an attempt to think through the complexities of decolonizing feminism: what counts as indigenous knowledge of gender and feminism in the Global South? Is it true that local problems can only be addressed by solutions that arise from those contexts? Is “Southern” feminism different from feminism in the Global South? Ultimately, the paper concludes that the borders between Southern and Euro-American feminism are, paradoxically, as important as they are porous.

Deirdre C. Byrne is a full Professor of English Studies and the Head of the Institute for Gender Studies at Unisa. She is the editor-in-chief of the academic journal Gender Questions. She holds a rating from the National Research Foundation of South Africa as an established researcher and has recently co-edited Fluid Gender, Fluid Love (Brill 2018). She is currently researching Gender-Based Violence in University Contexts; the poetry of Ursula K. Le Guin; and South African women’s poetry.

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Due to the increase in the number of institutions dealing with higher education, the quality of educational policies put into practice in these institutions has begun to be questioned, and this situation has led to the development of standards in order to ensure quality in higher education. To improve the quality in higher education and create quality assured educational organizations, in 2015, The Council of Higher Education of Turkey published “Higher Education Quality Assurance Regulations”, in an attempt to achieve fair distribution and rational use of funds in higher education institutions. Within this framework, the leader of the organization is seen as the main actor who is responsible for change, and such increase in leadership responsibilities has borne a need for effective leadership in creating a successful organization. A great deal of research in the area has focused on the significance of positive characteristics of leaders in creating successful organisations, and a comprehensive literature review indicates that there are five main elements put forward among current leadership models: accountability, organizational health, development of school culture, need for effective leadership and leader as a change agent (Burns, 2007). Among other leadership theories, invitational leadership theory stands out with its focus on the leader as the pioneer of change and its search for ways to intentionally support people in realizing their boundless potential in various areas (Purkey, 1992; Purkey &Siegel, 2003). Thus, in this study aiming to examine the school director’s perceptions about his own invitational leadership characteristics as well as those of instructors related to their director’s invitational leadership characteristics from a gendered perspective at the School of Foreign Languages at an English-medium state university, data were collected from the director and the instructors using the survey of invitational leadership practices (IPLP) by Burns (2007) and follow-up interviews.

I have been working as an English Language Instructor at a state university, Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University, in Turkey. I was born in 1983, Turkey. My major is on English Language Teaching and my masters is on Gender and Women’s Studies, Middle East Technical University. I am interested in gender, learning and teaching English, Leadership and Gender and Teaching English to Adults. I want to study further on gender and language teaching and leadership.

GOLGE SEFEROGLU, PROF.DR., MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, golge@metu.edu.tr
HATICE KARAASLAN, DR.,ANKARA YILDIRIM BEYAZIT UNIVERSITY, hatice.bayindir@gmail.com

Refugee camps are non-spaces that are hostile for all its’ residents but proven to be particularly hard on women, one of the most vulnerable collectives there.
Many NGOs create women-friendly spaces which should become safe places where women can share their experiences, troubles and intimacies. There also exist informal women-friendly spaces that pop-up spontaneously in their families’ tents or even during visits to a hammam.
Those spaces seem to be in a confrontation with the reality of a refugee camp – a non-space where people live in constant transition and uncertain of their destiny. They create borders that protect women, and invocate their individual identities. In those spaces, others have a chance to become us and women have the opportunity to express freely their thoughts and even sexuality.
The general objective of this work is to listen to the first generation of women who lived at Katsikas and participated in women-friendly spaces. It will be done through a participative methodology that places women at the centre of the process where they are not objects of knowledge but active subjects in its’ construction, in order to know if those women-friendly spaces could serve as an empowerment tool and if they are something that could help women and their families into a passage from a refugee camp non-space to our occidental reality.
The specific objective is to design a project, conducted in the camp of Katsikas, that would implement the feedback and information we will obtain from this study and analyse the women-friendly spaces that already exist, taking into account social relationships and processes that arise in them.
In this study the information will be obtained through interviews and feedback of the following sources: first generation of women from Katsikas, NGO workers who participated in the construction of both the refugee camp and women-friendly spaces, and, finally, we also intent to get some real snapshots proceeding from women who are living there now.
We believe there is a strength in places where women can share their thoughts and become a tribe. This is why we want to hear them out.

Degree in Marketing and Communication (ITT Dublin) and Master Degree in International Cooperation and Development (Universidad Pontificia Comillas, Madrid). Her main areas of study and research are women’s studies with particular focus on women rights and transmission of knowledge between cultures.

Koro J-A Juanena, PhD in Anthropology, Rey Juan Carlos I University (Madrid), Diploma of Advanced Studies (DEA) in International and African Studies (Autonomous University of Madrid), Bachelor in Sociology (National University of Distance Education).

The emergence of terms such as “alternative facts”, the passing of policies and laws against grassroots groups and environmental organizations, and the rise of right-wing anti-science rhetoric in the US and in Europe suggest that ‘we’ have not only entered a new phase in the geological history of the Earth—that is, the Anthropocene, or the “Age of Man”—but also a new phase in the political debate on climate change and environmentalism. What we are witnessing currently is not only a rise in attacks against the scientific community, especially against women—as, for example, handbooks and manifestos published by far-right groups focusing on strategies of delegitimizing and threatening female scientists, journalists, and activists demonstrate—but also a deep mistrust in scientific knowledge production. Focusing on the question what it means for feminist and other critical scholars if today it is far-right and masculinist groups who are not only emphasizing the social construction of facts and the impossibility of separating science from politics, but also arguing that allegedly “uncomfortable, non-hegemonic” epistemic positions would be marginalized, in this paper, I will explore the relationship between a specific form of hegemonic masculinity, expistemic ignorance, and misogyny in the context of climate change denialism. How is climate change denialism, the rejection of scientific method, and antifeminism informing one another? And how are objectivity, facts, truth, and critique being hijacked and reconfigured in this debate?

Josef Barla holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Vienna. Currently, he is postdoc researcher in the Biotechnology, Nature and Society research group based at the Institute of Sociology at Goethe University Frankfurt. He was a visiting researcher the GEXcel International Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at Linköping University in 2015, and at the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2012/2013. His research focus lies at the intersection of feminist epistemologies, technoscience studies, the philosophy of technology, and the environmental humanities.

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In the past few decades, many scholars and international organisations have increasingly stressed the need for human societies to move towards more sustainable ways of living. This includes developing a more viable relationship to ecosystems and to other species, at a time of imminent threat to ecological and social sustainability.

This paper seeks to gain new insights into the practices and identities of men in the context of sustainability in the Nordic region. I focus on men based in Estonia and Finland who have embraced veganism – the practice of refraining from the use of all animal products. Vegan men could be thought of as active participants in transition to more sustainable ways of eating. From the point of view of gender and gendered power relations, the practice of veganism offers potential for doing masculinity differently.

Ecofeminist scholars have highlighted similarities between patterns of domination over women and animals, arguing that patriarchy endorses the objectification and exploitation of both women and animals. By refraining from consuming animals and going vegan, men disrupt the link between hegemonic masculinity and meat eating (Adams 1990), recognised as a powerful element in dominant constructions of masculinity. In this way, veganism implicitly challenges patriarchy. Besides practicing empathy, non-violence and compassion towards animals, many vegans seek to nurture caring relationships with other human beings. This may involve challenging hierarchies and power relations in human societies, based on categories such as gender, race and class. By becoming vegan, men open up avenues for “the negotiation of new, nonnormative masculinities that challenge our traditional understandings of what it means to be manly” (Wright 2015: 26).

This paper seeks to understand whether and in what ways the identities and practices of vegan men constitute new ways of doing masculinity. The analysis draws from qualitative interviews with over 50 vegan men based in Estonia and Finland. The findings help to understand the role of men in social change and ecological sustainability, by linking gender with the “challenge of sustainable dietary change” (Twine 2016: 243).

Kadri Aavik is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Tallinn University, Estonia, and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her recent research includes work in the emergent fields of critical animal studies and vegan studies which she approaches from feminist and intersectional perspectives. She has studied the animal advocacy movement and its links to other social justice movements in the post-socialist space, the reluctance of mainstream feminists to embrace animal justice and veganism, institutional resistance to veganism, on the example of medical encounters in Estonia, and the role of national dietary guidelines in promoting human use of other animals.

No co-author

Sweden was for a long time considered a ‘political exception’ in Europe, as no far-right party had been elected into parliament during this new wave of right-wing populism. Recently however, far-right, nationalist movements are not only gaining influence within established politics in Sweden – their presence on social media is also increasingly prominent. This prominence goes beyond their visibility, since they are better than other political groups at engaging social media users. Among the often-reoccurring topics are women, our clothing, rights and bodies, and our role in the (re)production of Swedishness. Drawing on Yuval-Davis’ (1997, 37) argument regarding how women function symbolically as “cultural reproducers of ‘the nation’”, this paper aims to explore how Swedish nationalist groups on social media (re)produce discourses of the female body. We focus on how nationalist groups use images of women to further their political agendas. Empirically, we use critical discourse analysis to study both visual and textual content in Swedish, nationalist Facebook groups. Our study casts light on different representations of women and how the female body is used for the (re)production of Swedishness in far-right nationalist Facebook groups, and more broadly for far-right politics in general.

Mathilda Åkerlund is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Umeå University. Her dissertation explores the role of influential users in the mainstreaming of far-right discourses on social media.

Johanna Bergström holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies from Erasmus Mundus. Her research interests include gender, equality, sustainability and social justice. She is currently working as an associate professor in Sociology at Umeå University.

Johanna Bergström PhD
Sociology Department Umeå University, Sweden
johanna.bergstrom@umu.se

Women and families in the Nordic migration to Utah, second part of the 19th Century.
Icelandic Migration to Salt Lake City, Utah, in the 19th Century has become a topic of historic interest in Iceland. This paper presents the Nordic context. More than two and a half million people left Scandinavia to settle down in North America in the 19th Century. A minority, 30.000, migrated as members of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the Mormons church. Mormon missionaries organized the journey. The Scandinavian Mormon Mission was planned in Utah in 1849, and the opened in Copenhagen in June 1851. Mormon missionaries’ main goal was to bring Scandinavian converts to „Zion“, „The New Jerusalem“ in America. The Mormon Church presented their doctrine of Polygamy in 1852, meaning it made it official that the Mormon Church permitted and even encouraged men to take more than one wife. It was a popular opinion that Mormon patriarchs ruled in Utah, and they always looked out for women to fill up their „harems“. Scandinavians, especially women and young families, were warned not to join the Mormons and never go with them to Utah.
But paradoxically the percentage of women migrants was higher in the Mormon migration transportations from Scandinavia than in the general migration from that region. For example: in 1869 females made up 43 percent of the Norwegian migration, while among the Mormons they accounted for 69 percent. From 1852 to 1914 57 percent of all Mormon migrants from Scandinavia were women. Families with children and elderly people to care for were very visible in Mormon emigrant groups.
This paper is concerned with factors that influenced Scandinavian women’s and families to emigrate with the Mormons and to settle down in the far west Utah-territory. It also comments on how women and families from Scandinavia managed as pioneers in the Mormon state. What strategies were chosen in order to survive and to become successful members of the Utah society? Did Scandinavian / Nordic Mormons practice polygamy?

Hanne Marie Johansen:
EDUCATION Dr.art. 1998, University of Bergen.
POSITION Associate Professor, Centre for Women’s and Gender Research University of Bergen (UiB) (50 % position)
Research librarian in History. The University Library in Bergen (50 % position)

MAIN TEACHING AND RESEARCH INTERESTS
Early Modern and Modern Norwegian History, History of the Family, Gender History, History of Religion and Urban History, Queer History

ONGOING RESEARCH
„Skeiv historie“ Queer history. Book project. Publisher: Det norske Samlaget [spring 2019).

Religious Migration. The Mormon Migration from Scandinavia to North America in the 19th Century; How the pioneers and pilgrims organised family life and work in The New World. Archival studies in connection to this project in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and USA/ Utah are for the most part finished.

No co-Authors

This paper developed out of research on the experiences of corruption of migrants on their journey to Europe. During the fieldwork for this research it quickly became apparent that two essential questions have remained largely unanswered in the current debate on corruption, especially in the context of migration: a) a more nuanced analysis of how corruption experiences are gendered b) a detailed discussion on the impact underlying gender regimes, i.e. patriarchy, have on corruption experiences. To illustrate the importance of including patriarchy and an understanding about the gendered nature of power in corruption research, the discussion in this chapter is centered around a relatively new concept, sexual extortion (’sextortion’), which has been defined as the “the abuse of power to obtain a sexual favor”(IAWJ, 2012, p. 9). This specific form of corruption was chosen for two reasons. Firstly, it is a phenomenon that shows the importance of broadening the classical male-centric view of corruption focusing on the exchange of money and goods. Secondly, as the discussion will show it is an example of the problematic implicit assumption of power hierarchies in corruption itself which have not been studied in enough detail until now. This paper thus discusses how underlying gender power structures can be linked to corruption. One of the most paradigmatic gendered abuses of power is sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), which as feminist research has shown, is embedded in a very particular power system that legitimizes and perpetuates such violence; the power system of patriarchy.
The research is based on approximately 50 interviews with experts and female and male migrants. Experts interviewed included policy makers, representatives of local, national and supranational government organizations, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, practitioners in the field of migration, corruption and/or gender and academia. This research is ethically sensitive and has been approved by the Ethical Review Committee of the Inner City and strict guidelines regarding interviews, consent, anonymity and data storage were followed

Ortrun Merkle is a post-doctoral researcher at UNU-MERIT/Maastricht Graduate School of Governance working on the relationship of migration and corruption. Clara Alberola is a research and education officer at UNU-MERIT/ Maastricht Graduate School of Governance as part of the migration team. The authors have been working extensively on the gendered experiences of corruption during migration with a focus on the Central and Western Mediterranean Route.

Clara Alberola
UNU-MERIT/Maastricht Graduate School of Governance
clara.alberola@maastrichtuniversity.nl

This presentation will examine theoretical insights from the field of Indigenous Feminist Studies, as perceived by a non-indigenous but non-majority female anthropologist. I will explore the possibility for more general application of critical analysis of anthropological and ethnographic epistemologies inspired by Indigenous Feminist Studies. I will focus on research about women in the Russian part of the Arctic conducted by Russian and other scholars at different periods in the 20th century. My goal is three-fold: 1) to test to what extent a culturally and politically situated epistemological and methodological practice like Indigenous Feminist Studies can provide critical analytic tools broadly accessible for scholars from different cultures and schools of thought; 2) to provide some insights into how indigenous women in Russia and their place in society have been portrayed within different national and theoretical traditions of academic anthropological practice; and 3) to contribute to the understanding of the epistemological grounds of Soviet and Russian ethnography in different times at its interface with research on gender in the Russian North. The suggested presentation thus addresses the issue of borders and follows crossings between borders at different levels: 1) epistemological borders 2) cultural borders 3) time periods.

Vladislava Vladimirova, PhD, is an Associate Professor in Cultural and Social Anthropology at Uppsala University. She has long term research interest in Circumpolar Russia. In her publications she has addressed a wide range of topics, among which Indigenous economic practices, ethnicity and Indigenous activism, Indigenous law and self-determination, gendered relations, cultural heritage, nature conservation within the green economy, morality and justice.

no co-authors

PAPER 3: (Re)producing the Scandinavian welfare state through exceptional migrations
Ingvill Stuvøy and Lene Myong

In the Scandinavian welfare states, transnational adoption and its displacement of children has long been institutionalized. More recently, transnational surrogacy has emerged, amidst controversy, as another type of ‘repro-migration,’ with both intended parents and children crossing borders in order to finally settle in Scandinavia. While transnational adoption and transnational surrogacy are often contrasted to one another as respectively ‘good’ and ‘bad’ reproduction, they are also commonly depicted and homogenized as ‘alternatives’ to dominant reproductive norms. In this paper, we suggest that such conceptualizations effectively work to conceal how both of these phenomena are imbricated in global, historical, and material inequalities, all the while contributing to the (re)production of the Scandinavian welfare states. Thus, we propose a different analytical vocabulary that understands transnational adoption and transnational surrogacy as central reproductive domains in which Scandinavian welfare state biopolitics are calibrated and produced. Following from this, we argue that transnational adoption and transnational surrogacy may be thought of as exceptional migrations conditioned by a set of racialized logics that organize the welfare state around white reproductive desires. Empirically, the paper takes its point of departure in the different contexts of transnational adoption in Denmark and transnational surrogacy in Norway and as a first step, we ask how the states regulate, stimulate and facilitate for these repro-migratory phenomena.

Chairs:
Ingvill Stuvøy is a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at the Department of Sociology and Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Her dissertation entitled Parenthood at a price. Accounting for the viability of transnational surrogacy (2018) examines the symbolic and material economies of transnational surrogacy. Her work has been published in Anthropology & Medicine and Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online, and in a Norwegian anthology on reproduction and gender equality (Ravn, Kristensen & Sørensen 2016).

Lene Myong is head of Gender Studies, University of Stavanger in Norway. Her work on transnational adoption, affect, and racism is published in journals such as Kunst og kultur, Peripeti, GLQ, Cultural Studies, and Sexualities.

Ingvill Stuvøy (chair): Ingvill.stuvoy@ntnu.no
Lene Myong (co-chair): lene.myong@uis.no
Johanna Gondouin: johanna.gondouin@gender.su.se
Suruchi Thapar-Björkert:Suruchi.Thapar-Bjorkert@statsvet.uu.se
Kim Park Nelson: parknelson@mnstate.edu
Eleana Kim: eleana.kim@uci.edu

Those are tumultuous time for women. While the experience of solidarity and sisterhood through campaigns such as #MeToo can be empowering, hearing the numerous accounts of sexual violence, harassment, and humiliation has been painful and draining for many as well. And while women are in increasing number speaking up against gender discrimination and mistreatment on various forms, things seem to be sliding backwards in parts of the world. The rise of authoritarian movements with fascistic tendencies is bound to be perceived as a threat not only to women‘s rights, but to many other social justice movements that we thought had made progress in the past decades. And as is often the case, the more severe problems tend to be aggravated for women belonging to other marginalized and underprivileged groups.
Recent events have clarified that if there is anything that all women can be considered to share, in spite of all their other differences, then it is having to live under the threat of sexual violence, the experience of sexual harassment, and experiences of various forms of gender-based humiliation and disrespect, if not downright violence. However, we may still wonder whether this feature is something that should define the category ‘woman’. Does being a woman downright consist in being undervalued, abused, and disrespected? Definitions of womanhood of that ilk have been put forth (e.g. by Sally Haslanger), but others have found such accounts unfulfilling because they are bound to be eliminativist and getting rid of gender altogether is unrealistic or undesirable. In this respect, we can think of a double bind within feminism, concerning whether to appreciate or reject womanhood (e.g. Ann Snitow‘s essay “A Gender Diary”).
If we consider what makes up a social category such as ‘woman’, the hope for a clear definition may be futile. Rather than think of the category, or womanhood, as determined only by the ideas and norms of those holding power, we should think of the many forms of women’s resistance to those ideas and norms, and women’s own conflicted attitudes to womanhood as highly relevant to determining it as well.

Eyja M. Brynjarsdóttir holds a PhD in philosophy from Cornell University and works at the University of Iceland. Her research is focused on feminist philosophy and social metaphysics and epistemology. She recently participated in two projects funded by the Icelandic Research Fund: „The Reality of Money“ and „Feminist Philosophy Transforming Philosophy“. Her book „The Reality of Money: The Metaphysics of Financial Value“ was published by Rowman and Littlefield last October.

There are no co-authors but apparently this field cannot be blank.

In October 2017 #MeToo mobilised an international movement against sexual discrimination. What had started over a decade ago as grass root work in the South of the United States became a global community of survivors and allies. Local and global actions are now combined under the umbrella of #MeToo. Regarding the MeToo movement it is evident that the developmental conditions of political bodies and resistance practices have changed. One reason for this are social media and digital networks whose importance not only for the constitution of the MeToo-movement but also for the rise and conjuncture of populist, alt-right and fundamentalists groups in recent years, is undeniable. Nowadays, digital media enable alliances between people living in different geographical locations and time zones. MeToo serves as an example for deterritorialised practices of resistance, which are becoming increasingly important in times of new nationalisms, increasing territorial demands and hardening border regimes.
However, MeToo also shows that social media transformed the dynamics, scope and reference framework of actions and created new forms of participating in social and political processes. Via social media people are not only involved in local processes, but can participate in global politics. Moreover, we witness increasing reciprocal effects between actions on the global and local level in social networked formations.
In this paper I will argue that the term “affective net” can help to understand why people participate not only in local but in global fights and political processes. The term also allows to grasp the impact local and global actions have on each other and to see how alliances can be formed beyond territorial borders. I advance this term against the background of the immanent ontology of substance and affect theory Baruch de Spinoza proposes in the Ethics. By referring to the MeToo movement I aim to illustrate this affect-theoretical concept. Overall, I will formulate a contemporary approach towards political participation in networked societies and stress the importance of affects in political processes.

Marie Wuth is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Aberdeen and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow. She holds an M.A. in Philosophy and a B.A. in Cultural Sciences and Philosophy. Her research focuses on the role of affects for political agency and the formation and dynamics of political bodies.

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The concept tolerance, as used in a Western tradition, has moved from describing the medieval church’s relation to other religions and unwanted minorities to becoming a secularized political discourse, symbolizing a modern democracy. Today, tolerance is mainly used in political discourse, together with concepts such as gender equality and diversity, and is considered a central democratic virtue. It positions the „good“ and the „bad“ citizen in relation to each other and is used to identify threats towards liberal democracies. This very specific and late modern use of the concept of tolerance serves a specific function in present-day liberal democracies, especially in relation to strategies of societal changes. Using the case-study of a Swedish governmental agency and the theoretical work of Wendy Brown, this paper focuses on the specific functions of tolerance as praxis.
I focus on the implementation of tolerance as policy in Sweden, and specifically on the institutionalization of the Swedish governmental agency Forum for Living History. The aim is to trace how tolerance has been defined and applied by the agency over time and how these definitions and applications contribute to regulating different parts of the population.
Before 2004, the agency – as well as The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brottsförebyggande Rådet) – only attributed intolerance to racist groups and outspoken individual racists, assuming a young, uneducated, white man with an unstable socio-economic background looking for comradeship and a sense of belonging. The reasons for intolerance were hence closely connected to explicit White Power movements, and the victims of this intolerance were distinctly defined ethnic and religious minorities, as well as LGBT-people. This focus was an effect of the governmental use of tolerance as a majority-tolerance (see Forst). The majority (white, heterosexual, Christian/secular) population tolerated minorities, while right wing extremists did not. The minorities’ level of intolerance was not measured in any of the surveys until 2009.
In the 10’s, the majority-tolerance was challenged both by anti-racist and gay activists and lobby organizations that pointed out the paternalism imbedded in this view. This contributed to a shift from the focus on the white male racist towards intolerance in between minorities, especially the measured intolerance towards homosexuals and Jews within Muslim groups. Efforts were now directed towards “vulnerable populations”, a.k.a. young men with immigrant background in socio-economically poor areas (see, e.g., URBAN 15 and the debate on “No-go-zones”). The focus on socio-economic background that provided the white racist with a sociological rationale was replaced by a focus on religious extremists with no discernable rationale.

Sara Edenheim, Prof. History, Umeå Centre for Gender Studies at Umeå University, Sweden

no co-author

Where is the academic debate in gender studies and gender research today? With few Swedish journals – committed primarily to publishing research findings and theme issues – there is little space for discussion and that which is provided is usually sporadic. In this article, I seek to understand how and why we have ended up where we are. I also want to contribute to what I hope can become an ongoing conversation to break the paradigm we are all part of these days and which I will attempt to identify here. The point is, I do not believe that the lack of space is the only answer to the question of why the discussions are conspicuous by their absence.
My analysis is based mainly on two recently published books – The Politics of Hope – Feminist Activism in Today’s Sweden (Cuesta and Liinason, 2016) (original title: Hoppets politik: feministisk aktivism i Sverige idag; HP) and Ambivalences and Systems of Power – Feminist Readings of Neoliberalism (Fahlgren, Mulinari, Sjöstedt Landén, eds, 2016) (original title: Ambivalenser och maktordningar: feministiska läsningar av nyliberalism; A&M). Both books seek to uncover and problematize the meaning of neoliberalism in our contemporary social structures. The question of the relationship between neoliberalism and other ideologies, such as socialism, liberalism, and conservatism, as well as to community and emotions, has, like the role of and reason for identity politics, been the object of analysis, debate and conceptual development in both feminist research and related fields.
The primary contribution of these two books is unfortunately suppressed by a far too avid inner longing for feminist consensus and a far too strong antagonistic positioning against that with which the authors would prefer not to be associated. This occurs partly through how the field of research is described, partly through a specific approach to using references, and partly through a tacit assumption that there is no need to argue in favor of feminism in precisely the manner I described above. When this occurs, feminism becomes neither an argument nor a critique, feminism becomes an identity, an emotion, and a community. Tthe problem with identities and emotions is not that they exist – they are hardly something we can wish away – but that unlike arguments, they cannot be refuted. They are also highly vulnerable to the specific form of depoliticization of our time, where change is conceivable only on the planes of identity and emotion (Brown, 2006c; Somek, 2011). I thus seek instead to argue in favor of feminist research that proceeds from the notion that agonism and trust should be more important to feminism today than community and safety (see Ek and Safrankova, 2015; also Edenheim and Rönnblom, 2014 and 2016).

Sara Edenheim is a senior lecturer at Umeå Centre for Gender Studies, Umeå University, Sweden and associate professor in History

no co-author

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Veera Kinnunen is a senior lecturer in sociology working on the threshold of more-than-human sociology, environmental humanities, and feminist ethics.

Rebecca Lund is a post-doc in Gender Studies and Editor-in-Chief of NORA (2019-2021). Her research focuses on institutional ethnography, the social organisation of academic work and epistemic injustice.

Susan Meriläinen is Professor of Management. Her main area of research is feminist theorizing of organizations and management, feminist activism at work, as well as embodied an material aspects of feminist knowledge production.

Alison Pullen is Professor of Management and Editor-in-Chief of Gender, Work and Organization. Her work is concerned with analyzing and intervening in the politics of work including gender discrimination, identity politics, ethics, affect and materiality, and injustice

Anu Valtonen is Professor of Cultural Economy. Her research interests relate to critical and feminist theories, qualitative methodologies, bodies, senses, and sleep cultures. Recently, she has been engaging with feminist new materialism, affect theories, and more-than-human methodologies

Veera Kinnunen, Senior Lecturer, University of Lapland, Finland, veera.kinnunen@ulapland.fi

Rebecca Lund, Postdoc, University of Tampere, Finland,
rebecca.lund@uta.fi

Susan Meriläinen, Professor, University of Lapland, Finland, susan.merilainen@ulapland.fi

Alison Pullen, Professor, Macquarie University, Australia
alison.pullen@mq.edu.au

Anu Valtonen, Professor, University of Lapland, Finland
anu.valtonen@ulapland.fi

Gender Backlashes in Latin America: the case of Brazil and Mexico
After the UN Beijing conference on women in 1995 gender policies and gender studies expanded notoriously all over Latin America. Most Latin American countries adopted new sorts of legislations and policies to improve the women situation in different areas and Gender studies became a recognized and respected field of studies intersecting with most disciplines in Social Sciences and Humanities but also with other science fields. However, several of these advances encountered serious difficulties in the form of conservative mentalities and open machista attitudes that tried to reverse the conquests women had attained. This was the case of the political representation advances that met in several cases, strategies of political harassment from social groups (mostly of men) that felt threatened by women politicians’ advances. This resistance to the feminist wave became even more open with the victory of conservative political forces, like in the case of Brazil, that reject in an open way all that has to do with what they call “the gender ideology”.
This paper will present an overview of this continental backlash and develop two cases: 1. Mexico´s contradictory trends regarding an increased political parity together with mounting rates of gender based violence and in particular political violence and 2. the case of Brazil’s recent turn to the extreme right that consolidates a trend already started some years ago regarding the questioning of gender studies as a legitimate discipline within a crusade against ‘gender ideologies’.

Edmé Domínguez R.(born in Mexico, resident in Sweden) is Associate Professor (docent) in Peace and Development Studies. She has a BA in International Relations from El Colegio de México and a PhD from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (IEP), Paris, France. She has been working at several universities in Mexico, USA, Spain and Sweden. At present she works as lecturer in Latin American Studies, Gender studies and Global Political Economy at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. During several years she worked and published on the issues of Soviet foreign policy towards Latin America but since the beginning of the 1990s she has been working on the social and gender implications of NAFTA for Mexico, on gender issues related to citizenship, political participation, labour, transnational activism and free trade agreements particularly in the case of Mexico, El Salvador and Bolivia.

Dr Cirila Quintero, Researcher
Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Mexico
cquintero@colef.mx

Dr Cristina Wolff
Senior lecturer, researcher
History Department
Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina – Brasil
cristiwolff@gmail.com

Comparing the two non-Arab yet dominantly Muslim states in the Middle East -Turkey and Iran – is not new in social sciences. This paper, too, aims at comparing them by focusing on the divergent interpretations of Islamic feminism in both countries. While both Turkey and Iran entered the 20th century with top-down Westernization and strict state feminism, Iranian women already reached a level of feminist consciousness by 1979, and the Islamic Revolution had a significant female support. In Turkey, however, state feminism was dominant until 1980s and an idiosyncratic feminist wave emerged only after 1980s. Therefore, keeping in mind the common roots of Islamic feminism and post-colonial feminism, this paper firstly looks at the “women question” in the foundation of both Turkey and Iran, secondly compares and contrasts the ideological sources of Islamic feminism in both. While secular feminists in Turkey looked down on the Iranian women and interpreted the veil as oppression, Islamist spheres viewed the revolution as the independence of Islamic way of life from imposed Western values. The increasing appearance of veiled women in public sphere in Turkey but their failed attempts to enter universities with headscarves resulted in a great support for Islamism. However, soon it became obvious that while Islamists supported the educational rights of veiled women, they were suspiciously silent on problems of women in general: traditional gender roles, domestic violence and honour crimes. Hence, the main idea of Islamic feminists that religion is interpreted by men and is therefore irresponsive to the needs of women is somehow proven. Keeping in mind that Islamic feminism has its unique roots and experiences, this paper will lastly try to prove that Islamic feminism is understood and interpreted differently in both countries.

Graduated from Middle East Technical University, Turkey in 2004 with a BSc in Political Science and Public Administration. Holds an MA degree in European Integration from Kent Law School, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. After working for two years as a Project assistant in a EU funded Twinning Project, she joined to Kocaeli University’s International Relations department in 2008 where she completed her PhD thesis on the protection of women’s human rights in times of war and peace. She is an assistant professor at the same department. She is a researcher on gender studies with a focus on nation building, political Islam and Islamic feminism, and migration.

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This paper was accepted for oral presentation at the ‘Sexual and Gendered Moralities’ which took place in Ghent, Belgium on 26-27 November 2018. However, due to the economic downturn in Turkey and the restrictions on public expenditures which also cover travel grants for researchers, it was not possible for me to attend the conference. Therefore, the paper has never been presented at any conference before.

While Western feminist discourses are usually pictured as normative, the discrepancy between how these discourses portray “non-Western” women and how the “non-Western” women would like to be portrayed has been increasing. When realities of “non-Western” women are, through epistemological lance of Western feminist discourses, usually studied partially and stereotypically, Western feminisms are gaining their steady validations. These, of course, lead into creating further binary narratives of “us” and “them”, in which “them” symbolize “the other” and “the different” (Lazreg, 1988). Whatever has been written about “non-Western” women is therefore documented as a difference from the norm, which has been, through the means of knowledge production, considered as an objective fact.

Although such narratives emphasize the difference between women across the globe, opposite initiatives which insist that women are actually similar or even identical also exist. The concept of so called “sisterhood” is based on presumption about the same struggles against patriarchal repressions. Despite same biological sex and assumption of the same social gender, “non-Western” feminists stress that struggles against hegemonic patriarchy might not have been the same. As Spivak warns, the post- and de- colonial female subjects’ struggles are double. Women have been oppressed by both, domestic private and foreign public patriarchal spheres (Spivak, 1988). Patriarchal social structures differ and so do the struggles against them. The construction of ‘sisterhood’ in this way completely ignores the very important categories such as race, class, ethnicity, historical, political and cultural influences, which are, in the nowadays world, very significant entities in someone’s struggle. So, the postulate of transnational sisterhood on one hand creates mutual identities, and on the other hand causes imperialistic and racist effects (Amos in Parmar, 1984).

As we witness the era of globalization which indicates culture of similar and fluid identities on one side, and a rigid revival of border regimes and nationalisms that are almost necessarily patriarchally oriented on the other, we should be asking ourselves how are these phenomenas (re)shaping the relationships between women around the world. Are we sisters, friends or opponents?

Aleksandra Gačić is born in 1986 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She holds a double BA degree in Philosophy of culture and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. She persuaded a MA degree in Sociology of Gender and Sexuality at the Faculty of Social Science, University of Ljubljana with the thesis focused on post-colonial feminist movements which also allowed her to spend some time at the School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London. Currently she has been researching the colonial legacy in development strategies of family planning. As a freelancer she also works as a literary critic and a programme manager of various cultural projects related to African literature.

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I am not very sure if I chose the right stream for my title of paper.

While Western feminist discourses are usually pictured as normative, the discrepancy between how these discourses portray “non-Western” women and how the “non-Western” women would like to be portrayed has been increasing. When realities of “non-Western” women are, through epistemological lance of Western feminist discourses, usually studied partially and stereotypically, Western feminisms are gaining their steady validations. These, of course, lead into creating further binary narratives of “us” and “them”, in which “them” symbolize “the other” and “the different” (Lazreg, 1988). Whatever has been written about “non-Western” women is therefore documented as a difference from the norm, which has been, through the means of knowledge production, considered as an objective fact.

Although such narratives emphasize the difference between women across the globe, opposite initiatives which insist that women are actually similar or even identical also exist. The concept of so called “sisterhood” is based on presumption about the same struggles against patriarchal repressions. Despite same biological sex and assumption of the same social gender, “non-Western” feminists stress that struggles against hegemonic patriarchy might not have been the same. As Spivak warns, the post- and de- colonial female subjects’ struggles are double. Women have been oppressed by both, domestic private and foreign public patriarchal spheres (Spivak, 1988). Patriarchal social structures differ and so do the struggles against them. The construction of ‘sisterhood’ in this way completely ignores the very important categories such as race, class, ethnicity, historical, political and cultural influences, which are, in the nowadays world, very significant entities in someone’s struggle. So, the postulate of transnational sisterhood on one hand creates mutual identities, and on the other hand causes imperialistic and racist effects (Amos in Parmar, 1984).

As we witness the era of globalization which indicates culture of similar and fluid identities on one side, and a rigid revival of border regimes and nationalisms that are almost necessarily patriarchally oriented on the other, we should be asking ourselves how are these phenomenas (re)shaping the relationships between women around the world. Are we sister, friends or opponents?

Aleksandra Gačić is born in 1986 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She holds a double BA degree in Philosophy of culture and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. She persuaded a MA degree in Sociology of Gender and Sexuality at the Faculty of Social Science, University of Ljubljana with the thesis focused on post-colonial feminist movements which also allowed her to spend some time at the School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London. Currently she has been researching the colonial legacy in development strategies of family planning. As a freelancer she also works as a literary critic and a programme manager of various cultural projects related to African literature.

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I am not sure if I chose the right stream for my title of paper.

The strategy of gender mainstreaming has now been advocated by the UN for over two decades. In many western countries, gender mainstreaming was implemented as a means to reach national policy goals of gender equality. This coincided with the implementation of New Public Management (NPM) in state governance, which has affected the practice of gender mainstreaming. NPM can be seen as a management doctrine which became institutionalized and consequently self-evident to use for all kind of policies, including that of gender equality. As a concept used for governing public sector administrations in trying to make them work more efficiently, NPM implies detailed goal setting and stricter accountability standards. In processes of becoming accountable, administrations make themselves auditable by means of more management accounting. Being able to show goal attainment quantitative measures are much more valid than qualitatively assessed aspects.
The focus on quantities is a problem concerning gender mainstreaming where gendered power relations are to be scrutinized. The management accounting systems are often regarded as gender neutral, but feminist research has shown that such a view is ignorant. To disclose gendered power relations only by the counting of women and men hampers the intended results of gender mainstreaming. From a feminist standpoint, it is not enough to discuss gender as a variable, treating women and men as two separate categories and drawing on a calculative perspective. Symbols, discourses, interactions and the shaping of individual identities are all aspects of a more diffuse and discursive kind that are impossible to represent in figures.
This paper discusses the borders constructed by NPM to gender mainstreaming. Evidence stems from a longitudinal case study of gender mainstreaming in the policy field of infrastructure and transportation in Sweden.

PhD (econ), Assistant Professor and Director of The Academy of Management Accounting and Control in Central Government (AES) at Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University. AES is a forum for thoughtful dialogues between researchers and practitioners examining how the state is governed. The research focus is on how internal management control practices functions to reach policy goals. In an interpretive critical approach by empirical case studies, we search for unintended effects. Eva’s special interest is to conduct such research including a gender perspective.

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Double binds are a kind of “problematic” statement in which words themselves exert an emotional force which become embodied in physical form of relationship; an example is the dialectic of “problem/solution” created in the presentation of a “problem” which sets forth a set of actions and “solutions” or exacerbation. The double bind of “problems” is one kind of “design language” in which words and ideas alone are no longer sufficient in describing relations; rather embodied experience requires a consideration of spatialized relations and their dynamics over time. Discourse around identity, “problems” of capital, power, borders, and justice are further examples which set forth “solutions” and for “wicked problems,” even ultimate removal and destruction; “final solutions.” These phenomena, which are only increasing in presence and pressure in the information age, therefore necessitate an enlivened practice of spacemaking through vital lived experience, sanctuaries within discourses of “problems,” living while being considered a problem, living on the borderline, inside the borderline as thickened intersubjective space. The Japanese tea ceremony is one such sanctuary opened within a problem, that of the Buddhist problematic of “Tanha” or desire. The Japanese tea ceremony enters this space through an aesthetic atmosphere of “wabi sabi” or “broken down loneliness” roughly equivalent to the English phrase “rhythm and blues,” creating intersubjective sanctuary rather than exclusion, elimination, and problem solving.

The author has been doing Japanese tea ceremonies in the southern Kyoto Yabunouchi style for over a decade, most recently as “Matchaparty” urban planning events mostly in NYC that bring together diverse segments of the population for freestyle exploration (37 events completed since 2015). The author proposes doing tea ceremonies at the Nora conference as part of the proceedings.

Alan Waxman MLA Harvard 2014 (awecosocial.com) creates ecosocial design for health equity and cultural resiliency. By operating in locations of fragility in space and time, he aims to bring people together to reopen critical narratives. His Urban Rhythms studios with Mark Morris Dance Group, the Center For Court Innovation, and other partners, assess urban patterns by way of participatory engagement; setting up emic spectrums of data derived from meaning for cultural insiders. Resident participants, those who have the most to gain and the most to lose, make real time interventions through events, dance, and environmental change. Waxman has deployed ecosocial design in Brooklyn NY, the SF Bay Area, and Kyoto, Japan, where he served with the University of Oregon in their Myoshinji Zen temple based urban design program. He has contributed design to dozens of public parks in NYC, Hangzhou, Xian, Chengdu and currently works as a landscape designer with Elizabeth Everdell in San Francisco.
(Cv: https://www.awecosocial.com/portfolio)

No co authors at this time.

Please feel free to contact me if I need to uplaod the picture or if there are any issues with access to cv, affiliation, awecosocial.com etc

During the last years decolonial thinking has grown as a new epistemology to deal the coloniality of power. However, awareness has emerged with the criticism addressed by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui against the explicit forms of coloniality used by Walter Mignolo and associated scholars at Duke University to introduce this epistemology in the global anglophone north. This paper follows Cusicanquis criticism in relation to the newly established school of decolonial thinking headed by Ramon Grosfoguel and Enrique Dussel in Caracas, and which counted with the personal support of the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Based in an ethnographic fieldwork conducted in short periods between 2010-2018 in Caracas the paper contests the approach used by these scholars of coloniality to deal the transition of Venezuela toward a supposedly decolonial regime. The paper argues that as far as key aspects of a decolonial methodology are not adopted in the research, such as to be entangled in the struggling stories among different constellations of grassroots movements in Venezuela, the approach used by Grosfoguel and Dussel turns instead into another showcase of the coloniality of power.

Juan Velasquez Atehortua is PhD in Human Geography from the University of Stockholm, and Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Sciences, University of Gothenburg – Sweden. Velasquez has been working with different approaches on participatory action research to develop FEMSUSDEV, an ethnographic video archive on feminist sustainable development accessible in youtube and Vimeo. Building the archive has been seminal to establish the decolonial agenda that will be presented at the conference.

No other co-autors

Background: Reproductive health rights (RHR) were declared as fundamental human rights since the International Conference on Population and Development 1994 and the Beijing 1995 conferences. Acknowledgement of the importance of these rights was a momentous point for reproductive health. In the Palestinian context, RHR are severely affected by the combination of constraints of the political system and the cultural context. RHR remain one of the least prioritized matters making them extremely unmentionable. The aim of the research is because of growing attention, interests and efforts to strengthen women and promote their reproductive health rights in Palestine.

Methods: This research was designed in two parts; drawing on reviews of previous literature and an empirical qualitative study using semi-structured interviews which were carried out via Skype. A sample of ten Palestinian women, aging between 18-55 years, and living in the Bethlehem Area in the West Bank was selected by purposive sampling. These interviews formed the basis of the analysis. Ethical approval was obtained from Queen Margaret University Ethics Committee. Informed consents were signed by participants. This research employed the Theory of Intersectionality to guide the various discussions and debates.

Results: Findings of interviews were considered under several themes and sub-themes: knowledge, information and education: levels and access to information and knowledge; services and resources: accessibility and distribution of services; Palestinian context and norms: patriarchal society and loss of privacy and decision making; conflict and occupation: restriction on movement and discrimination and humiliation; and violence against women. These themes shaped women’s knowledge of reproductive health rights, highlighting factors that influence the existing opportunities and challenges for women to access to reproductive health rights, health seeking behaviors, and overall well-being.

Interpretation: This research emphasizes the great importance of this topic. It is rare in its kind in the Palestinian context. Two significant limitations were the unavailability and scarcity of literature for the topic, and the sensitive nature of the political conflict. It is recommended that governments demonstrate commitment to prioritizing reproductive health rights initiatives. Further researches regarding reproductive health rights should be conducted in other areas of Palestine.

Yara Hadweh, 24 years old from Bethlehem, Palestine. Currently working as a project manager at the Palestinian Family Planning and Protection Association, and a guest Llcturer at Bethlehem University and Al-Quds University. A holder of a Master’s Degree of Sexual and Reproductive Health from Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom, and a Bachelor’s Degree of Nursing from Bethlehem University, Bethlehem, Palestine. Participated at the Lancet Palestinian Health Alliance 9th Annual Conference at the American University of Beirut-Lebanon/ March 2018; won the best poster presentation of the second day, and at the Scottish Trade Union Congress Conference in Aviemore, United Kingdom as a speaker on behalf of Scottish Universities Supporting Palestinian Students (SUSPS)/ April 2017. Personal competencies are: Quick learner and analytical thinker with good interpersonal and organizational skills and have a high sense of responsibility, open to new experiences, and interested in culture and learning about others.

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Participating at your respective conference would be an excellent opportunity for me as a woman on both personal and professional levels.

Thank you.

This paper discusses the experiences of LGBTPQ migrants’ from the Global North, and their resocialisation and sense of belonging to the queer community, their immigrant community and the wider Icelandic society. It examines how participants’ gender, sexuality, “race”, ethnicity, nationality, and class intersect and transform their experiences, through the migration and integration process, as well as through the continuous process of managing information about their sexual orientation and gender identity. The conceptual frameworks of Othering, transnationalism and intersectionality are applied, and the study engages with theoretical frameworks such as theories of critical whiteness, social class, the politics of belonging as well as affective belonging, and queer hybridity.
The findings suggest that although managing information about one’s sexual orientation and gender identity can pose a challenges, within the Icelandic context as well as elsewhere, being racialized and labelled as the immigrant other seems to be the predominant challenge, which is, in some cases, impossible to overcome. This othering of immigrants is nonetheless strongly embedded in “racial”, cultural and class hierarchies, as white migrants from the Global North often have a more privileged experiences of inclusion and belonging than non-white migrants from the Global South. On the other hand, participants coming from Central and Eastern Europe are, in many cases, automatically made to occupy a lower social standing within society, compared to other white immigrants.
The originality of this research project is that it brings together migration studies and LGBTQ studies, sometimes also referred to as queer migration studies, within the Icelandic context. Queer migration studies critically engage with issues of imperialism, racism, sexism and heteronormativity, while also giving voice to queer migrants’ within the academic world and highlighting their agency. The impact of this study is that it bridges a gap within queer migrations scholarship, which is queer migrations to a small population in northern Europe while also critically examining predominant notions of the Nordic counties. Such as, ideas relating to how racism and racialization is assumingly a foreign import in Iceland, and how that connects to the concept of Nordic exceptionalism.

I am currently a doctoral candidate in anthropology, at the University of Iceland. I have a MA in sociology from City, University of London and an BA in sociology from the University of Iceland. I further took several gender studies courses in my undergraduate studies in Iceland, as well as in my doctoral studies but mainly abroad. I was awarded a Rannís grant from 2014 till 2017 and a teaching assistant grant from the the Faculty of Sociology, Anthropology and Folkloristics at the University of Iceland from 2017 till 2018. I have already published two articles in international peer reviewed journal from this research, on queer migrations from the Global South and from Central and Eastern Europe, this paper is based on my third article.

None

This is a panel proposal

Michael Nebeling Petersen (PhD) is an Associate Professor at University of Southern Denmark in the Department for the Study of Culture. He has worked extensively with gay culture and citizenship, new technologies of reproduction and kinship, and digital media and mediated cultures of intimacy. His research centres questions on culture, power, and identity, and he is interested in the intersections between gender, sexuality, kinship, race, and nation. He is currently working in two interdisciplinary research projects: 1) Media Assemblages of Medicalized Masculinity in which he works on medical and cosmetic interventions in the male body within different sites of subcultural and marginalized forms of masculinity; and 2) Ice Age: Entangled Lives, Times, and Ethics in Fertility Preservation in which he works ethnographically with cultural anxieties and changing meanings of cryopreserved embryos.

Karen Hvidtfeldt Madsen (PhD) is an Associate Professor at theUniversity of Southern Denmark in the Department for the Study of Culture. She heads the research project Medicine Man: Media Assemblages of Medicalized Masculinity funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark from 2018-2021 and is a participant in the research project: Young Danish cancer patients use and experience of social media (Aarhus University 2018-2019). Her research lies in the border area between critical cultural studies, gender studies and health sciences, and examines how cultural analytical methods may be applied to issues related to health, disease, reproduction, sexuality, gender and the body. Her research includes independent and collaborative studies on transnational surrogacy, motherhood, family, and cultural aging.

Camilla Bruun Eriksen (PhD) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern Denmark in the Department for the Study of Culture. As part of the research project Medicine Man(2018-2021) focusing on somatechnics, medicalization and masculinity her research pays special attention to bodies, narrativity, biopolitics, and popular culture. Using critical disability, feminist and affect theory Camilla is concerned with how bodies take shape and has written on the intersections of fatness, body norms, power, gender and sexuality.

Kristian Møller (PhD) is a postdoc at the IT University of Copenhagen. His research centers on the mediatization and medicalization of queer life, drawing from critical theory to conceptualise the ways digital media transform gay men’s social and sexual lives. Currently work on medicalized and mediatized MSM sexuality is embedded in the research project Medicine Man. Further, Kristian is dedicated to the methodological and ethical advancement of critical communication studies, and recent works develops a media go-along method, and boundary work as an approach to practice based ethics.

Sheila L. Cavanagh (PhD) is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, Department of Sociology, York University, Toronto. Cavanagh is a co-editor of the Somatechnics Journal at Edinburgh University Press. She coordinated the Sexuality Studies Program at York University and chaired the Canadian Sexuality Studies Association. Her scholarship lies in gender and sexuality studies with a focus on queer theory, feminist psychoanalytic theory and LGBTQ performance ethnography. Her performed ethnography titled Queer Bathroom Monologues (QBM) premiered at the Toronto Fringe Festival (2011) and was given the Audience Pick Award. She has published in a wide range of international journals and given keynotes addresses at conferences in Sweden, Turkey and Canada. Cavanagh teaches an undergraduate course titled Sociology of Gender and a range of graduate courses in sexuality studies, feminist theory and queer theory.

Chair: Michael Nebeling Petersen, Associate prof., University of Southern Denmark. nebeling@sdu.dk

Panelists:

Michael Nebeling Petersen (PhD), Associate Professor, University of Southern Denmark. nebeling@sdu.dk
Karen Hvidtfeldt Madsen (PhD), Associate Professor, University of Southern Denmark. hvidtfeldt@sdu.dk
Camilla Bruun Eriksen (PhD), Assistant Professor, University of Southern Denmark. cbe@sdu.dk
Kristian Møller (PhD), Postdoc, IT University of Copenhagen. krimo@itu.dk
Sheila L. Cavanagh (PhD), Associate Professor, York University. sheila@yorku.ca

In the focus of my investigation there are a number of women’s employment problems in the Russian Federation. Post-soviet reforms changed social and economic life of women that’s why it is necessary to re-evaluate views and approaches to these problems. Over the past century, the situation of women has changed dramatically but it is too early to say that there is gender equality in Russia. More than 450 jobs are forbidden for women and half of some of the prohibitions have already been outdated. The country’s economy suffers from gender inequality. Author is going to answer several questions in his research: Why are there huge differences in salaries between women and men? what difficulties does a woman face in finding a job? Why is it so difficult to find well-paid jobs for young and aged women? Also Author is going to compare women’s situation in labour market in the Russian federation with other countries. As a research method author uses the analysis of official statistics, the labour code of the Russian Federation and different sources of federal researches.

My name is Daniil. I am from Russia. I live in Moscow. I am studying at university “Moscow State Institute of International Relations”, faculty of Politics and Governance. I speaks English fluently and I am also studying French. I have already taken part in the IAPSS conference.

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Although white men still remain overrepresented among the economic, political, cultural and academic elites and in managerial positions, their dominance in other arenas of social life is changing. Women’s altered positions in society in combination with a steadily increasing ethnic and racial diversity is dramatically changing the future for white men, who subsequently are losing faith in the future and increasingly see themselves as being dispossessed of their previous entitlement to power. This presentation is inspired by the intersection of whiteness studies and masculinity studies in order to be able to theorize the current social, cultural, and political changes surrounding white men’s declining dominance in late-modern Swedish society. It offers an analysis of the growing politicization of white men and white masculinity in Sweden; both as unorganized individuals and by means of new political movements like organized radical white male right-wing campaigns and political parties. This rise in a new type of politicized gender and race relations has not yet fully been explored in Sweden, although this current development most probably will shape present and future political struggles for a long time in the near future. Our analysis focuses on the gendered dimensions of Swedish whiteness in a white nation in crisis, and how a sense of white melancholia – that is the loss of homogenous and progressive Sweden – is currently developing into a crisis of white masculinity and into a violent uprising of white male right-wing radicalism. Such an analysis contribute to a) an understanding of the specific dynamics of Swedish white masculinity with all its differences and similarities in relation to the situation in the Anglophone world wherein theories on white masculinity are more explored and pronounced, b) a theoretical understanding of the intersection between historically privileged gender positions and an existential sense of loss among white men today, and c) a nuanced understanding of the intersections of whiteness and masculinity in a contemporary Swedish setting.

Catrin Lundström is Associate Professor in Sociology and a LiU Research Fellow at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), Linköping University in Sweden. Her latest book is White Migrations: Gender Whiteness and Privilege in Transnational Migration (Palgrave Macmillan). Lundström is the author of several international articles within the fields of ethnographic research, migration studies, critical race and whiteness studies, and feminist sociology, published in Social Identities, Gender, Place and Culture, Journal of Intercultural Studies and European Journal of Cultural Studies, among others. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and the University of California, Santa Barbara in the US.

Tobias Hübinette, Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer
Department of Language, Literature and Intercultural Studies, Karlstad University, Sweden
E-mail: tobias.hubinette@kau.se

The growing call for countering climate change along with increasing demands for so called “environmentally friendly” – “renewable” – energy production modes continues and increases the dispossession of Indigenous (including Sámi) peoples from our traditional lands and waters.
What is commonly referred to as “environmental friendly” technoscientific language and imagery continue to shape and reflect racist power relations which favor the colonial nation states and dis-favor/abuses/displaces Indigenous rights and peoples. While challenging this rhetoric is important, another important task is to enter into the very technologies and propose solutions regarding design and development.
I will elaborate on the potentials and possibilities of Sámi land based knowledge as a basis for innovative designs of energy production technologies, in collaboration with the field of fluid mechanics.
Current “renewable” energy productions modes are in fact actually major environmental destructors and are outdated designs: Nuclear power plants are but steam engines, a billion times more environmentally hazardous systems. Design of the current windpower plants gigantic windmills, demanding immense natural resources for their construction while claiming massive areas to be erected and cause the death of whales, insects, bats and birds. Current designs of hydropower kill fish and destroy entire bio systems.
Departing from Sámi /Indigenous Feminist Technoscience, this paper engages with the socio-material, innovative thoughts within fluid mechanics and discusses Sámi perspectives and proposals for sustainable and non-colonial non-racist energy production and consumption – for a good life for all, humans and non-humans and forms part of a research proposal to the Swedish research council.

May-Britt Öhman, Centre for Multidisciplinary Research on Racism, CEMFOR, Uppsala University, and Unit of History, Luleå University of Technology, PhD History of Technology, 2007, Lule/Forest Sámi from Lule River/Julevädno, and Tornedalian background. Active in Sámi associations; the Sámi association in Stockholm, board member of Silbonah Sámesijdda since 2011, board member of the Swedish National Saami Association (SSR) 2011-2015, deputy member of the Sámi Parliament 2013-2017.
Öhman is co-founder of UPPSAM –network for Sámi related research in Uppsala, founder of Káfastallat – a Sámi/Indigenous research network, board member of Swedish Association for Gender Research. Research focus on large technical systems, hydropower, water resources, energy, mines, environment, risk and safety, decolonisation and healing from colonial traumas, Feminist Technoscience and Indigenous Methodologies. Having research and personal experience from West, East and North Africa, her current main geographical focus is on the Arctic with comparative studies with Indigenous territories around the world.

No co-authors

Also fits into stream 5.

Please see below for Panel Description and Individual Paper Titles and Abstracts.

Vicki S. Hallett is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador (NL). Her research lives at the confluence of feminist postcolonial and decolonial studies, and focuses on the co-constitutive elements of life narrative, identity/subjectivity, and place. Her most recent publications include the monograph Mistress of the Blue Castle: The Writing Life of Phebe Florence Miller (ISER Books, 2018), and the article “Reading (for) Decolonization: Engaging with Life Writing in Labrador’s Them Days Magazine.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies. 18.5 (2018): 326-338.

Carol Lynne D’Arcangelis is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Memorial University in St. John’s. Her research applies a feminist, anti-colonial and critical race/critical whiteness lens to examine the challenges and promises of Indigenous/non-Indigenous solidarity relations in Canada, with a focus on white settler subjectivity. Her current scholarship brings to bear decades of social justice work in Canada on the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women, as well as in the US and Central America with a variety of entities from grassroots groups to NGOs to the United Nations. Her publications include the article “Revelations of a white woman settler-activist: The fraught promise of solidarity” (2018) in Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 18(5), 339–353. In addition, her monograph with the provisional title Pursuing Proximity: Gendered Colonial Relations in the Solidarity Encounter, is currently under review with the University of British Columbia Press.

Joanne Harris is a Master of Philosophy in Humanities student at Memorial University in St. John’s. Her research focuses on the role that narrative and power have played in the erasure of Mi’kmaq people on the island of Ktaqamkuk. This work has come to encompass a myriad of subjects including memory, biopolitics, land, boundaries, stories, and law. She is particularly interested in restorative and transitional justice practices. As a Ktaqamkuk Mi’kmaw, her work is autoethnographic—that is, it has been through her own experience of silence and erasure that she has found collective presence in her people’s absence.

Vicki Hallett, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Gender Studies, Memorial University
vshallett@mun.ca

Carol Lynne D’Arcangelis, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Gender Studies, Memorial University
carollynneda@mun.ca

Joanne Harris, Graduate Student, M. Phil. in Humanities Program, Memorial University
jharris.nfld@gmail.com

Being a successful academic, or just keeping up with the academia, requires mobility. In Finland, for instance, the funding application to the Academy of Finland must include both collaboration with international partners and mobility plan where the funded scholar(s) make research visits to universities or research institutes in other countries. Though some extra funding is available for scholars with families, sometimes a longer than few days’ mobility is undoable because of family or other intimate relations, or the lack of money. To stay in the academia, the mobility must be between research institutes, whereas the mobility to other sectors, like to industry, is often considered as undesirable because in certain fields, like in medicine, but recently in most fields, this kind of mobility shows as a lack of scientific productivity in one’s CV. In other words, it is not easy to come back to the academia once you have left it. In my presentation, I will discuss what kinds of gendered implications do these meritocratic requirements of our current university policies have? How do they affect the career experiences and trajectories of women who work in the fields of bio- and health technology? What kinds of borders do they need to cross to survive in the academia; what kinds of gendered practices are going on in and around these borders; and how do they (re)construct the (gendered) meanings of being an academic, and the gender equality in Finnish universities? I will consider these questions through the women’s career interviews we have made, with the lens of new materialism. Following Karen Barad, this means “knowing in being;” thus understanding the research process itself as a phenomenon under study where all agents, like our interviewees, I as a researcher, the interview methodology, as well as the socio-material realities of the university intra-act to make boundaries emerge.

Tiina Suopajärvi is a feminist anthropologist who works as a senior researcher in Nordwit, a Nordic Centre of Excellence collaborating with scholars from Uppsala University and Western Norwegian Research Institute. The Tampere team of Nordwit studies women’s career experiences and trajectories in the fields of health and biotechnology in and outside of the academia. The aim of the project is also to co-create good practices to support women in their careers in the RDI environment of Tampere region. In addition to new materialism, Suopajärvi focuses on the anthropological and feminist studies on emotion, place, embodiment and design. Previously, she has studied, for example, ageing in a smart city.

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In previously colonized parts of the world there is a rising need of re-thinking categories of ‘women’ and ‘men’ beyond mainstream Western understandings. Having worked as a gender researcher in Mozambique for decades, however also with a (somewhat slighter) research background in Greenland, it has been striking for me to realize to which extent, in these two places, processes of colonization and Christianization have impacted in similar ways on pre-colonial conceptions of personhood, sexuality, men and women.

The presentation is rooted in my own empirical work in Greenland and in Mozambique. It is informed by theoretical contributions by Karla Jessen Williamson and Oyeronke Oyewumi, among others. Jessen Williamson’s insights regarding a situation of ‘genderlessness’ in pre-colonial Greenland matches Oyewumi’s statement that there were no ‘women’ in her native Yorubaland (Nigeria) prior to colonization. Gender did not have the implications and connotations, which are today often taken for granted. With her notion of ‘the coloniality of gender’ Maria Lugones is thinking along very similar lines. Applying concepts developed by these scholars I will show how European ideas of sexuality and gender power relations clashed with pre-existing notions and ways of behaviour, in Greenland as well as in Mozambique.

Maria Lugones is pointing to “the dichotomous hierarchy between the human and the non-human as the central dichotomy of colonial modernity” (2010), accompanied by other dichotomous hierarchical distinctions, man/woman among them. Lugones is, however, also interested in tracing ongoing processes of resistance to these types of gender categorizations. Following this line of thinking, I will highlight how tacit resistance to such notions have managed to survive ‘under the radar’ of church, state and development organizations, in Greenland as well as in Mozambique.

Signe Arnfred is a sociologist and a gender scholar, associate professor at the department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, Denmark. Lived in Mozambique 1980-1984, working in the National Women’s Organization. Lived in Greenland 1988-1990, teaching at Ilisimatusarfik. Worked at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden, 2000-2006, coordinating a research programme on Sexuality, Gender and Society in Africa. Fields of interest: gender relations in previously colonized parts of the world; post- and decolonial feminist thinking. Most important books: „Re-thinking Sexualities in Africa“ (2004) and „Sexualities and Gender Politics in Mozambique“ (2011).

no co-authors

Transnational migration involves adjustment to a new set of norms, also on the level of the body. Migration to Sweden from conflict ridden African and Middle Eastern countries where female genital cutting (FGC) is prevalent raises new questions about bodily norms and integrity, well-being, and health care needs, as migrant and local populations grapple with social identification, gender roles and conflicts in body perceptions. A positive marker of womanhood in FGC-practicing communities, FGC is criminalised and ostracised in Sweden. Recently, the relatively new surgical/medical practice of clitoral reconstruction (CR) is made available for FGC-affected women in Sweden. While growing in popularity, little is known about what motivates women to seek out this surgery or the socio-cultural dimensions involved. Furthermore, CR is controversial as it concerns sensitive issues such as women’s sexuality, ethnic minorities, ethnocentrism, racism, western moralizing attitudes towards Muslim and African practices, histories of imperialism and violence on the African continent, and fear of conflict in many European countries when touching upon sensitive, racialized issues. This study aims to explore the meaning of FGC and CR in socio-cultural, bodily, and socio-political terms, and is based on qualitative interviews with 21 immigrant women asking for CR surgery in Sweden. Preliminary results indicates that women perceive their genitals as sexually incapable, deformed, and abnormal, something that evoke distress and shame. They seek surgery to become normal and equal to the host population in terms of sexual self and self-esteem and to take control over their body and becoming sexually agentic. These results raise new questions regarding the extent to which the Swedish health care should prioritise health care needs specific to immigrants, how to engage with cut women and what to offer, and whether or not CR should be considered a human (or citizen) right.

Malin Jordal (Uppsala University, Sweden) is a PhD with experience in the field of International Public Health. She is currently employed as a teacher and university lecturer at the Center for Gender Research working on a qualitative project on women’s motives, expectations and experiences of clitoral reconstructive surgery in Sweden.

No co-authors

This paper draws upon an interview study with age players, which forms a part of my doctoral thesis in Gender Studies. Age play can be seen as a specific kind of BDSM practice, which uses performative age positions as a central component, in a sexual role play or as an integrated part of everyday identity. For example, a person can assume the position of a child, while their partner is taking the position of a caregiving adult. Drawing upon theories about queer temporalities, such as the work of Jack Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman, Lee Edelman, José Esteban Muñoz and Kathryn Bond Stockton, I investigate how age play can create non-linear, perverse temporalities. I explore how the adult-appearing-as-child renegotiates central aspects of the heteronormative structure, exposing the normative and sexed assumptions about natural progression and distinct boundaries between grown-ups and not-yet-grown-ups. The specific paper that I aim to present at the conference explores how the figuration of the monster can be used as an analytical tool to discuss how age play challenges the boundaries between the past and the here and now, as well as the boundaries between the innocent child and the (hetero-)sexualized adult body. Monster theory, which has been developed within the theoretical fields of transgender studies and crip studies, shows how phenomena that cannot be sorted into a binary system, or that are composed of parts that are considered as each other’s opposites, are understood as monstrous. The adult-appearing-as-child in a sexual age play context creates a confusion of the boundaries between sexuality and asexual innocence. By claiming identities, attributes or behaviors that are connected to childhood or youth, age play practitioners are considered as not only perverse and unnatural but also as a pedophilic threat against children – even though there are no real children present. The paper discusses how ageplay creates both monstrous children and a monster-shaped (non-)presence in the form of the threat from the pedophile, and how these monstrous concepts can help us theorizing the boundaries of gender, age and sexuality that are fundamental in heteronormativity and chrononormativity.

I am a PhD student in Gender Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. I hold a Master’s Degree in Gender Studies from Sodertorn University and a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from Lund University. I have also studied at Biskops Arno’s Nordic School of Creative Writing. My research interests are focused on queer sexualities and temporalities. In my Master’s thesis, I did a queer temporal analysis of identity politics and ressentiment in the theoretical work of Sara Ahmed and Wendy Brown. Apart from my PhD studies, I work as a novelist. My debut novel Mellan vinter och himmel was published in 2013. My second novel Ormbunkslandet was nominated to The August Prize and the Nordic Council Prize. My most recent novel, Rosenregimen, was published just a few months ago. Before I initiated my PhD studies, I worked as a project leader at the Swedish Association for Sexual Education (RFSU).

No co-authors.

In traditional art museums, indigenous art, feminist and queer art are invisible because the dominant narrative is the Western, international canon. However, in current museum practice and exhibitions, feminist perspectives, female artists, queer art and indigenous art are highlighted and recirculated as part of museums’ consciousness raising in favour of these perspectives. The problem, though, remains that these perspectives get absorbed into contemporary art instead of being used to redefine existing narratives and canons in the museum. They are used for all the wrong reasons and in the long run they risk staying invisible. Territoriality is the basis of the national art museum as an institution. National galleries of art represent the nation at the level of high culture and in a comparative perspective with other civilized nations. This is the function of the national survey museum. And as to contemporary art, the global art marked has already redefined the borders of national art, as well as the global “curator-regime” (biennials and kunsthalle) since the 1990s has changed power relations in contemporary art (C. Bydler 2004; H. Belting and A. Buddensieg 2009). This leaves the question of territoriality in relation to art somewhat different than the one sketched in the call, but does the globalisation of the art world mean that all is good and well? Indigenous, feminist and queer perspectives are “trending” and exposed rather than marginalised nowadays, but where does this leave their critical potentials for rewriting art history in the long run? Through Norwegian cases we will discuss how Sámi and feminist perspectives in fact problematises existing narratives but risk obscurity in the end because in contemporary art, they are used to promote fleeting identity policies. A thorough reformulation of the institution according to indigenous, feminist and queer perspectives would mean to reconsider the structure of the collection, the labelling of objects, the understanding of contexts, etc.

Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen is Associate Professor of Art History at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research focuses on Nordic twentieth-century and contemporary art, feminist art history, post-colonialism, visual culture along with globalisation and technology and the arts. She has participated in interdisciplinary research projects on gender and aesthetics, Nordic art and globalisation, and currently, with Sigrun Åsebø, she leads the project Gender and Diversity in Nordic Art Museums. Her publications include the book Kropslig kunst (2007), chapters in Globalizing Art (2011), Kjønnsforhandlinger (2013), and Sámi Art and Aesthetics (2017). In 2015, she was the co-curator of the exhibition WOMEN FORWARD! at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde, Denmark. Coming publications include chapters in Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art (Toft); Black Venus: Body, Figuration, and Aesthetic Practices (Gjerden, Jegerstedt, Švrljuga); A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950 (Hjartarson, Kollnitz, Stounbjerg, Ørum).

Sigrun Åsebø, Associate Professor, University of Bergen, sigrun.asebo@uib.no

I don’t know which stream we fit into. Could we get back to this?

This paper follows a small group of medical tourists travelling from the UK to Tunisia for cosmetic surgery, exploring their experience of place as ‘dis-orienting’. We unpack this encounter by drawing on work discussing cosmopolitanism and conviviality and argue that the ways the women understood both their own journeys and those of the other people they met in Tunisia can be usefully interrogated by thinking about conviviality. In their meetings with each other, with medical staff and crucially with patients being treated for injuries sustained in the civil war in Libya following the Arab Spring uprisings, these patients experienced both a global geopolitical reality that they were unaware of, and moments of empathy, vulnerability and generosity that were as transformative as the surgeries they came to Tunisia to access. Such encounters can be read as producing cosmopolitan beginnings – shifts in worldview that emerge as unintended effects of the surgical journeys this group of women embarked upon. However, encounters between these medical travelers and patients with ‘real’ injuries inevitably evoked gendered discourses of cosmetic surgery as vain, selfish and unnecessary. In some cases this spoiled new identities the women traveled to Tunisia in search of, invoked shame and limited their cosmopolitan possibilities.

Ruth Holliday is Professor of Gender and Culture at the University of Leeds. She is a former Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies and is best known for her work on the Sociology of the Body. She has written on Identities, Visual Methods, Kitsch, Cosmetic Surgery and most recently Medical Tourism.

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In contemporary Montenegrin society, the issue of managing the ethno-cultural differences is based on mechanisms and multiculturalism policy measures that should ensure full integration and respect for human rights, while preserving the identity specificities of all ethnic-cultural communities. As an exceptionally multi-ethnic state, Montenegro strives to preserve and promote ethno-cultural diversity, based on the assumption that it is one of the basic pre-conditions of stability and preservation of the Montenegrin society cohesion. When it comes to the integration issues, a special place belongs to Roma ethnic community, especially particularly vulnerable categories within it, such as women and children. Members of the aforementioned ethnic group are in a position characterized by exclusion, marginalization, discrimination and expressed ethnic distance by the rest of the society. It is necessary to analyze the existing domains of this community integration and to detect the most important problems that it encounters with in the process of their full social integration in Montenegrin society. In that sense, we will specifically focus on Roma women and the problems that this part of the community faces.

Biljana Maslovarić is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Montenegro. Her scientific field of interest includes managing in education, education for democracy and intercultural education. E-mail adress: biljana.maslovaric1@gmail.com

Danijela Vuković-Ćalasan is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Montenegro. Her scientific field of interest includes ethnic and national relations and identities, globalization, political ideologies, politics of multiculturalism. E-mail address: danijelacalasan@gmail.com

Danijela Vuković-Ćalasan, Phd, Assistant Professor, e-mail: danijelacalasan@gmail.com

The paper offers a feminist ecocritical reading of Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga’s play Heroes and Saints (1992) and proposes Moraga’s ecocritical dramaturgy as a decolonial theater of testimony. Heroes and Saints stages a fictionalized account of the actual atrocities suffered by thousands of Mexican American farmworkers in the 1980s who, as a result of working on Californian vineyards fertilized by the American government’s toxic pesticides, are disproportionately affected by cancers and diseases of the female reproductive system.
I explore the biochemical violation of both the environment and maternal bodies as material sites of witness to expose and display the continuation of colonial subjugation of Mexican Americans in the United States by neocolonial means of environmental racism. Relying on Ana Fornictio’s generic definition of testimony—“the urgency to bear witness to an event or series of events perpetrated with aim of eliminating a community” (239)—I demonstrate that Moraga draws on the narrative genre of testimony as a discursive mode of resistance against the systematic political erasure of Chicano/a communities.
The testimonial value of the diseased female bodies and the desecrated landscape (gendered as feminine motherland, or Tierra Madre) in the play, therefore, transcends the portrayal of women of color as passive victims of neocolonial violence. Moraga radically reconfigures the inherent interconnection between damaged bodies of women and agricultural fields and transforms them into active agents in social protest and female empowerment. Moraga’s performative act of decolonizing Chicanas resides in evoking the indigenous philosophy of mestiza identity which calls for reestablishing the broken spiritual tie between the (mother)land and the female body. The paper, thus, investigates how transgressive images of the female body and motherhood intersect with spirituality, and ecological destruction and promote a decolonial performativity of the marginalized Chicana identity.

Babett Rubóczki is a Ph.D. student in the North American Studies program at the Doctoral School of Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Debrecen. Her research focuses on contemporary U.S. Latina literature with specific focus on the gendered representations of vulnerability in Chicana and U.S. Caribbean women writers’ and playwrights’ works. Her scholarly interests also include cultural and literary theories in diaspora studies, queer studies, and ecocriticism. She has published articles in both Hungarian and English in journals including the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies.

No co-author

In traditional art museums, indigenous art, feminist and queer art are invisible because the dominant narrative is the Western, international canon. However, in current museum practice and exhibitions, feminist perspectives, female artists, queer art and indigenous art are highlighted and recirculated as part of museums’ consciousness raising in favour of these perspectives. The problem, though, remains that these perspectives get absorbed into contemporary art instead of being used to redefine existing narratives and canons in the museum. They are used for all the wrong reasons and in the long run they risk staying invisible. Territoriality is the basis of the national art museum as an institution. National galleries of art represent the nation at the level of high culture and in a comparative perspective with other civilized nations. This is the function of the national survey museum. And as to contemporary art, the global art marked has already redefined the borders of national art, as well as the global “curator-regime” (biennials and Kunsthalle) since the 1990s has changed power relations in contemporary art. This leaves the question of territoriality in relation to art somewhat different than the one sketched in the call, but does the globalisation of the art world mean that all is good and well? Indigenous, feminist and queer perspectives are “trending” and exposed rather than marginalised nowadays, but where does this leave their critical potentials for rewriting art history in the long run? Through Norwegian cases we will discuss how Sámi and feminist perspectives in fact problematises existing narratives but risk obscurity in the end because in contemporary art, they are used to promote fleeting identity policies. A thorough reformulation of the institution according to indigenous, feminist and queer perspectives would mean to reconsider the structure of the collection, the labelling of objects, the understanding of contexts, etc.

Sigrun Åsebø (PhD), Associate Professor in Art History, Univ. of Bergen, Norway. Publications include articles on feminist theory and historiography, the status and work of women artists historically and today, and questions of gender, sexuality and identity in contemporary art. Together with Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen (NTNU), I am the co-founder of the Nordic Network for Gender and Diversity in Art Museums bringing together researchers and museum curators from the Nordic and Baltic Area (https://www.ntnu.no/kunstmangfold) Current research focuses on gender and diversity in a museological context, working to grasp gender and diversity as they are embedded, played out and negotiated within art museums and curating. Recent publications include articles on readings of landscape artist Kitty Kielland and her involvement in the women’s movement (with Janeke M. Utne), embodiment, gender and sami in Aslaug Juliussen’s art, and readings of feminist curatorial practices in Norwegian art museums.

Sigrun Åsebø, Associate Professor, University of Bergen. E-mail, Sigrun.Asebo@uib.no
&
Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen, Associate Professor, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, ulla.jorgensen@ntnu.no

This is a panel proposal.
Please find the individual abstracts in the panel proposal.

There are altogether 5 authors. Please refer to their bios in the panel proposal

Linda Lapiņa, Roskilde University, Denmark llapina@ruc.dk
Mante Vertelyte, Aalborg University, Denmark vertelyte@cgs.aau.dk
Magdalena Nowicka, DeZIM e.V., Germany magdalena.nowicka@hu-berlin.de
Marie Lovrod, University of Saskatchewan, Canada marie.lovrod@usask.ca
Yan Zhao, Nord University, Norway yan.zhao@nord.no

Dr. Yan Zhao (yan.zhao@nord.no ) will serve as the panel coordinator.
We are also open to include one more paper with similar or relevant topics from the conference’s other submissions.

Abstract
Indigenous gender roles have been distorted by colonialism, both through imposed systems of patriarchy and redefining gender roles within Indigenous communities. In Canada, the Indian Act of 1857 initiated a system of patriarchy which resulted in the loss of matrilineal family lines and Indigenous women’s rights to represent their community in leadership roles. This system still exists today, and despite numerous attempts to modify the law, the Indian Act still exerts patrilineal bias on Indigenous communities. In spite of this, there exists a large volume of research and literature by Indigenous women which investigates Indigenous feminism and the agency of Indigenous women in their communities. Examples include the writings of Sherry Farrell-Racette (Farrell-Racette 2010), Lee Maracle (Maracle 1996), Beverly Singer (Singer 2001) and Carol Rose Daniels (Daniels 2018) as well as online campaigns such as Rematriate (Rematriate 2018). Moreover, many Indigenous women in Canada are now stepping forward to address patriarchal systems in Indigenous institutions, such as the Assembly of First Nations, and outdated laws favouring male representation over female in meeting with governmental institutions.
My research considers decolonization methods in relation to Indigenous feminist perspectives in research practice. Through an Indigenous research paradigm based on the teachings of the Indigenous Cree medicine wheel, this paper aims to decolonize homogenous forms of research by promoting Indigenous women’s knowledge. The medicine wheel in Indigenous teachings is a philosophy and a practical method of interpreting the physical, mental and transcendental domains. For research purposes, the medicine wheel offers a unique representation of Indigenous epistemology, ontology, axiology and methodology for use in research. Furthermore, following decolonial theory and Indigenous methodologies this research investigates the intersections of Indigenous feminism in decolonizing knowledge production and dismantling paternalistic affects in educational institutions.
Including Indigenous approaches to listening, participation and storytelling as opposed to standardized interviews, as well as observation and document analysis, this thesis opens space for generating community-based definitions of Indigenous feminism. Focusing on the Canadian context, Indigenous women in Saskatchewan possess a vast amount of traditional knowledge and ways of knowing which have been devalued since the enforcement of the Indian Act. One vital way of Indigenizing cultural revitalization is by reclaiming Indigenous women’s epistemology as a means of decolonizing gender roles and negating the impacts of the Indian Act.

Amanda Fayant is a Cree/Métis artist (B.F.A-film production) and University of Tromsø Master student based in Trondheim, Norway. Amanda is originally from Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, Treaty 4 land. Amanda’s art practice deals with dichotomies in identity construction and confronting the colonial history in Canada. Amanda is completing a Master of Philosophy in Indigenous Studies and concluded her field work in Regina, SK. Amanda’s research focuses on developing Indigenous research methodologies as well as decolonizing cultural knowledge production through Indigenous feminist leadership at the community level. After her Master studies, Amanda plans to study further in the field to achieve a PhD and teach as well as plan research projects involving Indigenous feminist theory and methods of decolonizing and reclaiming cultural identity. In addition, Amanda plans to include law and sustainability in her future study plans. Amanda has published in forskning.no about volunteer network and institution building in Marka Sami area.

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The paper studies how the views of Russian society changed after the spread of
feminism in the country and how the transformation of gender roles influenced on
it. The topic is relevant because the attitude to feminism is still uncertain. Despite
the fact, the modern society is considered as fully equal, many global problems are
related to gender inequality. Originally, feminism developed in the West, where
women fought for their rights. In Russia, this movement spread in the XIX century.
At various stages of the country development, the attitude, goals and character of
feminism have changed, and gender roles have shifted. Many social organizations
have researched on these issues: surveys and experiments were done, scientific and
journalistic articles were published. The transformation of gender roles in Russia
has been taking place over the last 20 years. This has greatly affected on family
relations, on which the demographic situation and other spheres of Russia depend.
What developments are changing views on gender inequality related to? After all,
for many years women have believed that it is the only way to fight for their
political and socio-economic rights since the appearance of feminism. However, it
has got some positive results. Gradually, with the changing position of women in
society, feminism has changed. The world is moving forward, women have
achieved equal rights and great opportunities. But in Russia there are still separate
groups of the movement. What are they fighting for in the modern Russian
society?
Our paper is based on statistic and analytics materials and social surveys.

I’m Shakhtarina Nadezhda Anatolievna (29.03.2000); 2st year student, Faculty of Politics and Governance. My research interests are social and political inequality, social policy management, etc. I participated in different scientific conferences and forums.

I’m the only author

In reaction to a record low of annual birth rate in Japan in 1989, the phrase “1.57 shock” was coined. Shortly after that, a new idea was developed regarding the way some married couples shared housework; a man works fulltime and does housework and a woman does housework and pursues hobbies or hobby-related work. Some previous studies on the images depicted in the Japanese women’s magazines in the beginning of the twenty first century have demonstrated that the articles in those magazines encouraged fulltime housewives in their forties to go back to work and promote a youthful and attractive image. But there is a problem. These studies focus on only one economic level and cover a short period of time. In this study, I have analyzed the images of marriage which are featured in three women’s magazines published from the late 1970s to the early 2000s in Japan. In particular, firstly, I used the articles regarding marriage targeting single women to find out the transition of the image of marriage in each period. Then I examined the possible reasons of the transitions through readers’ points of view as expressed in the comment pages. Finally I further analyzed the articles in magazines targeting different economic levels published from the 1990s to early 2000s. Based on the results I found in this research, I can conclude that a new idea regarding marriage coined after the “1.57 shock” did not have a great impact on the idea of what makes a good housewife. It has changed only slightly in the 30 years since the late 1970s with variations on the view of ideal housewives depending upon one’s economic level in society.

Mika Hattori Vermeulen is a Tenured Lecturer in the Department of World Liberal Arts at Nagoya University of Foreign Studies, where she has been since 2015. She received an M.A. from Graduate School of International Development at Nagoya University. Her research interests include consumer culture, social transition, and multi-cultural society.

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The aim of this paper is to discuss some methodological complexities involved when we, as two rather differently positioned researchers, are entering the same local community to do a collaborative research project on everyday practices of migrant integration.
The idea of border-crossing is an inherent part of the research project. Firstly, some of our research subjects have crossed geographical borders to get to Norway. Others are crossing societal and personal borders when they interact with the newcomers. Also, as it is commonly described in migration and diaspora studies, migrants challenge borders between social groups, between “we” and “you” (Eriksen 1995, Stolcke 1995). Secondly, as researchers we were also crossing borders when we were in field. Whereas one of us, a German migrant herself, was entering a new territory and hence being positioned as a newcomer and a stranger, the other was already familiar with the place, but still new to it as a researcher. And for both of us, complex power dynamics, privileges and ambiguities made us outsiders in some contexts and insiders in others.
Looking at the notion of the insider-researcher and taking Sandra Harding’s standpoint epistemology as a vantage point, we use these experiences to reflect critically on our own positionalities and methodological choices during data collection and analysis and the ways in which they are privileging certain kinds of knowledges and findings over others.
Altogether this raises attention to more general questions concerning the potentials and limits of feminist epistemologies and methodologies, including the question whether everyday practices of migrant integration can be a “proper object” (Butler 1994) for feminist studies.

Angelina is a PhD candidate at the Department for Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture at NTNU, Trondheim (Norway). She studied social anthropology and sociology at Heidelberg University, Germany (B.A.) and Anthropology of Development at the University in Bergen, Norway (M.Phil.). Her research interests include gender studies, discourse analysis, critical studies and Pacific studies.
Her PhD Project “Becoming Part of Society: Migrant Integration through Everyday Practices in Rural Norway” is a qualitative, anthropological study about the practices and biographical narratives of everyday integration in rural communities in Norway. It is part of the project called “Living Integration” (short title), financed by the Research Council of Norway.
Guro Korsnes Kristensen is a professor at the Department for Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture at NTNU. She holds an MA in social anthropology and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, with a specific focus on gender. The project
„Living Integration. At the crossroads between official policies, public discourses and everyday practices“ is only one of three projects she is currently working on.

Guro Korsnes Kristensen , Professor
Department for Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, NTNU
Trondheim, Norway
guro.kristensen@ntnu.no

Paper is devoted to the issue of mainstream feminism in the post-colonial world and its impact on militarism in the East. At present, the problem of gender violence in the East region targeted towards women and justified by laws is very urgent, but the attitude to this problem among feminists might be disputable. Most feminists believe that their movement serves the empowerment of all women, especially those in a more vulnerable position, such as women in conservative countries with a predominantly Islamic population. These opinions lead to a growing perception that Western intervention is essential for the creation of a „democratic society“ in the Middle East.
The paper tries to explore mainstream feminism and its effect on the attitude to the issue and prove that western feminism is failing to make positive change for women. Based on post-colonial criticism, Islamic feminism shows that the path of “saving Muslim women” has colonialism roots. The author tries to find better ways for supporting women in Islam and criticizes the attempts of Western society to interfere in Islamic culture.
During the investigation, information was collected by the data collection method and works concerning the problem and interviews by Muslim women speaking about religion and Western colonization were explored, as well as articles and news reports in the European and Russian online magazines, providing actual information about current political and social situation and public opinion on the issue.
The outcome of the study implies that another solution to the problem which will not continue developing “white savior complex” can be found. Current wrong attitude contributes to intercultural tension, Western colonialism and military incursions conducted under the pretext of establishing democracy and equality, while women should be asked about their own opinion in the first place. The paper suggests acting accordingly to women’s position on the subject and showing different points of view on Islam in order to challenge Islamic fundamentalist propaganda, weaken the influence of the „white savior complex“ and prevent militaristic actions.

Daria Romanenko is a second-year student, studying languages at MGIMO university in Moscow, Russia. She is working towards becoming an interpreter and a linguist and will be graduating with her BA in May of 2021. She is currently learning several languages, such as English, French and German. In high school Daria participated in a large number of school Olympiads, studied successfully and finished school with honors. At the university she is a very active and hard-working as she participates in all department events and is one of the best students. As for the future, Daria hopes to work in a sphere connected with foreign languages and cultures because she is very interested in this field. However, she also manages to combine studies with extracurricular activities such as, for example, volunteering.

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In an attempt to elicit public compassion, often refugee advocates construct and promote assimilationists narratives that refugees are people just like us. While well-meaning in their intention, such a narrative follows a colonial trope of a supreme (white) nation who is saving the poor and vulnerable. This creates a single narrative of who can be a refugee both in terms of identities and circumstance as well as a degree of one’s trauma and availability of one’s testimony. This limiting nature of existing narratives about refugees inevitably impacts narratives about queer refugees. Similarly to an overall narrative, cisgender male experiences are implicitly privileged in accounts of queer asylum. It is rare if not uncommon to hear cisgender female or transgender accounts.
Additionally, sexuality triggers something else. Queerness gets to be equated with the sign of modernity and progressiveness. Queer refugees are presented as more deserving of protection not because they are ‘people just like us’ but because they are ‘queers just like us’.
Simultaneously, their queerness is assigned an extreme state of vulnerability because of the oppressive regimes they are coming from. The single narrative about refugees privileges stories of those who come from countries where homosexuality is criminalised over stories where violence is not legislated but inflicted by all possible actors (such as both state and family) on the societal level. Given that in many instances it is gay men relationships that are criminalised, violence against queer women goes unnoticed but normalised.
In this presentation, I seek to explore the construction of narratives about queer refugees and the places of queer refugee women in them. Reflecting on my work with 8 queer refugee women through my PhD research, I aim to discuss those experiences that are silenced because of one’s gender, sexuality, and biopolitical governance of bodies in situations of exile and asylum-seeking.

Tina Dixson is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University. Her thesis is an autoethnographic narrative inquery that is looking into lived experiences of queer refugee women.
She is also an experienced policy, advocacy and communication professional with a strong expertise in LGBTIQ, refugee and women’s rights in Australia and overseas. She has previously engaged with the UN human rights treaties such as CEDAW and the UN programmes such as UNHCR through participating in the development of the Global Compact on Refugees.
Tina is also a co-founder of the Queer Sisterhood Project, a peer-run support and advocacy group for queer refugee women in Australia.

Tina Dixson, PhD candidate, Australian National University, tina.dixson@anu.edu.au

It is almost impossible to disentangle the impact of colonisation from both queer bodies and archival practices. Achille Mbembe says there is no such an archive as “secular”. An archive is primarily the product of judgment, the result of the exercise of a specific power and authority. The archive is fundamentally a matter of discrimination and selection, the results in the granting of privileging status to certain documents, and the refusal of the same status to others. Archive as a system of discursivity, as developed by Michelle Foucault (1972) which is inextricably connected with power and knowledge, it becomes obvious how it is in the interests of power to present a particular view on the history and what is considered as “fulfilling the criteria of archivability”.
The use of state libraries is still affected by the existing stigma around LGBTIQ people. Personal prejudices of librarians and hegemonic library classification structures affect the dignified representation of marginalised groups. Libraries are using structured vocabularies that fail to respectfully organise materials about LGBTIQ groups. Patrons, using this structure to find related information about LGBTIQ people, inevitably learn negative stereotypes about the community. The archives and libraries are shaped by power, authority and discrimination. Social process reproduces the marginalization of LGBTIQ materials in archives and libraries.
With my PhD thesis, by creative work, I want to address these issues. I aim to challenge this hegemony of power and knowledge through creating a digital LGBTIQA+ archive for a community-led collection and preservation of LGBTIQ culture and history.

Renee Dixson is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University. She works within the Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Research where she aims to develop a prototype of a crowdsourced digital queer archive designed to support collections and preservation of LGBTIQ history in Australia and Ukraine.
Prior to coming to Australia, she had established the first in the region LGBTIQ NGO and worked there for 5 years. However, she was forced to leave Ukraine. With her work in Australia, she is continuing to help the queer community in Ukraine. Additionally, she and her partner are running a peer support and advocacy group for queer refugee women in Australia.
Renee’s research interests are the digital humanities, decolonisation of knowledge, feminist theory, and the intersection of gender, sexuality and refugee status.

Renee Dixson, Developing a crowdsourced Digital Queer Archive: challenging knowledge hegemonies and hierarchies of normative archival practices, PhD candidate, Renee.Dixson@anu.edu.au

In this paper, I will discuss recent claims to asylum in Austria that were submitted by queer men from Muslim-majority countries. The responsible Austrian officials rejected the cases in question because the gender representations of the men were assessed as either “too girlish,” or “not gay enough,” and, the claimants’ stated sexualities were consequently – in both cases – read to be “fake.” While mobilizing homophobia in their assessments, the officials’ negative decisions contain an implicit transfer of homophobia to the Other/Muslim country. I elaborate how homophobia is here strategically transferred to the Other/Muslim/migrant; and, what is more, I argue that this move is most significant when read in its explanatory potential regarding the European self. In other words, sexism, homophobia, and/or transphobia transferred to the Muslim Other functions here to silence self-criticism and buffers the constructed illusion of a “self” that is, then, precisely not sexist/homophobic/transphobic, et cetera. Drawing on decolonial and feminist scholarship, I will point towards alternative epistemologies and ontologies that can escape the binary thinking inherent in dominant Western thought. It is these binaries that, for me, lie at the heart of the ‘unbelievability’ of Black/Brown/Muslim men as queer subjects. I will analyse the binary construction of gender and sexualities, and the intersections of gender, sexualities and ethnicity/race/racialized religion. While Black and Brown men are framed to have “access masculinitiy,” within a patriarchal, heteronormative and homophobe paradigm, homosexuality is placed to be antithetic to masculinity. I conclude by analysing the policing of boundaries and borders that in the case of the public servants’ negative decisions reinforce both the nation’s borders and the dichotomies of men/women, and straight/queer simultaneously.

Riikka Prattes has a background in Social and Cultural Anthropology (University of Vienna) and completed her doctorate in an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Social and Political Thought at the Institute for Social Justice at ACU, Sydney. At present, Riikka lives in Cadi/Sydney and works as an independent researcher. Her research interests include feminist epistemologies, epistemologies of ignorance, and decolonial theory, feminist care ethics, the international division of reproductive labour, and critical studies of men and masculinities. Her recent publications include: Prattes, Riikka. 2019. ‘I don’t clean up after myself.’ Epistemic Ignorance, Responsibility, and the Politics of the Outsourcing of Domestic Cleaning. In: Feminist Theory.

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This is not a paper but a panel proposal

This panel is made up by members of the research project “Gender, Diversity and Societal Security”, funded by NordForsk (2018-2021). The research team has a broad representation in the Nordic countries and a strong multi-disciplinary profile. At the NORA conference, four of the six researchers will participate, representing research efforts in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. All four researchers have worked with questions of gender and diversity within security forces for years.

Panel participants:
• Associate Professor Alma Persson, Theme Gender, Linköping University, alma.persson@liu.se
• Professor Dag Ellingsen, The Norwegian Police University College & Work Research Institute, Oslo Metropolitan University, dag.ellingsen@oslomet.no
• Professor Ulla-Britt Lilleaas, Center for Gender Research, University of Oslo, u.b.lilleaas@stk.uio.no

I hope I have understood the format of this submission form correctly – if not, please let me know.
// Beate Sløk-Andersen

The paper is devoted to the contradictions of position of women in Russia in the sphere of science and education of Russia. The problem of gender inequality can be viewed as an object of social and humanitarian knowledge based on interdisciplinary theoretical and empirical studies of Russian and foreign authors.
The paper is based on statistics and analytical reviews, results of sociological surveys and experts interviews with 20 highly educated women teachers of universities and scientists.
Analysis of gender inequality in the scientific and educational fields makes us think about the causes and origins of this imbalance, reveal the main aspects of this issue. The author analyzes the contradictory and paradoxical nature of the current situation as a manifestation of gender asymmetry and inequality in one of the most important social areas of modern Russia.
We found out several contradictions in the position of women in education and science:
– the contradiction between the state ideology of equality and stereotypes of the mass consciousness (“women must first have a family”, “men are the best teachers, lecturers, scientists”, “women are not smart”);
– the contradiction between the legal guarantees of the state and the actual actions of employers (the choice between a man and a woman holding an important position, priority is usually given to a man, they prefer not to use women with children, they give women more ordinary tasks, while men have an interesting project) ;
– the contradiction between the feminization of education and science and low wages in these areas;
– the contradiction between the high intellectual potential of women and a good education and the implementation of painstaking, routine and responsible work with a very small chance of promotion.

Tatiana N. Litvinova, Doctor of Sciences (Political Science). Professor of Regional Governance and National Politics Department, MGIMO University, Moscow, Russia. Author of three monographs concerning ethnopolitical problems in the Russian Federation. Has more than 80 publications in authorized Russian scientific and analytic collections and journals. Field of scientific research is the ethnic and political problems in modern Russia, democratic reforms in Russia. Teaching disciplines: Political Science, Public Administration, Political Technologies, Applied Political Analysis.

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This paper challenges the ways in which public/private, physical/non-physical and direct/indirect dichotomies organize feminist research on violence. We argue that the reiteration of these dualisms in feminist research on violence is problematic, not only because they re-establish the hierarchic distinction between the binaries, but such frameworks do not disentangle how gender order produces and normalizes diverse manifestations of violence. In this paper we propose that inquiry into experience of indirect violence within the privacy of the home can enable new insight on how normative violence is configured in culture and society. The paper presents two different types of experiences of violence; one of experiencing war from a distance, and another of emotional abuse in the absence of physical violence. By bringing these under-researched cases into the feminist IR framework, the paper argues that it is possible to recognize how the diverse experiences of violence are similar in terms of experience of trauma, shame and isolation and enable to see how large-scale violence such as war is configured in the experience of private violence in complex ways. We show how the different categories of violence used to organize research do not make sense from the perspective of the target, as violence is always felt emotionally and physically. Moreover, we show how these experiences of violence are entangled with gender norms and normative notions of gender and are situated in the larger continuum of violence. Therefore we argue for a multi-vocal and multi-sited research approach for feminist research in order to grasp the complexity of violence and how the diverse experiences are inter-connected.

Elina Penttinen is a University Lecturer and Director of Master’s programme in Gender Studies, University of Helsinki. She is the PI of a multidisicpilinary research project Incorporating Vulnerability: a non-fragmented approach to feminist research on violence, funded by University of Helsinki Three year grants. She is the author of Gender and Mobility: a critical introduction (2017) Rowman & Littlefield; Joy and International Relations: a new methodology (2013) Routledge, Globalization, Prostitution and Sex-Trafficking: corporeal politics (2008) Routledge.

Ada Schwanck is a Doctoral Candidate in the doctoral programme Gender, Culture, and Society, University of Helsinki. In her dissertation she explores contemporary documentary films and novels depicting asylum seekers’ and refugees’ experiences of war and displacement at the intersections of race, gender and sexuality. She conducts her PhD project as part of Incorporating Vulnerability research project.

Ada Schwanck, University of Helsinki, ada.schwanck@helsinki.fi

This paper-presentation addresses the existing problematic structures and discriminative borders which are embedded both in academic spaces and in everyday life in Finnish society, and for non-Western people who are academic, artist and feminist-fighters. This paper will bring up unspoken neutralized and problematic matters which constantly create strong (in)-visible borders and walls for non-Westerners to be part of Western societies, paying attention to the existing borders after migration. Borders which are created strongly around the differences, geographical background, class and race. By bringing examples on several recent cases I further write on vulnerability, what realities exist and what can be done. Specifically, what can contemporary art do to bring change in society by challenging the problematic borders and norms (both physical and non-physical). Being an Iranian woman, migrated to Finland seven years ago and understanding Middle-Eastern cultural and traditional ways of being, through different artistic projects I have been investigating the impacts of growing nationalism, sociocultural and geopolitical conditions on one’s body and mind, ways of being and everyday life. So that social, racial and cultural differences create (in)-visible blocks for individuals prevent them from living a normal life. I believe by means of art one can create communication-dialogue between people in society where it is under constant changes based on global or national forces.

My artistic work and research is focused on representation and livelihood of Middle Eastern women (including myself) after migration to Finland. In my research, I am focused on doing (decolonizing) more than theorizing, yet it is concentrated on intersectional feminism and its discourse together with the postcolonial theory. Main questions of the research are: How female bodies become politicized in society and in contemporary art? What is the role of contemporary art in addressing complex/difficult subjects in society and what methods it employs to address/represent concepts such as gender/cultural identity? How to tackle stereotypical, discriminative and problematic representations/perceptions by means of contemporary art and its narratives in public place? Whose voice is being heard in society and through contemporary art and its representations?

Sepideh Rahaa (1981, Iran) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher based in Helsinki. She is one of the collective members and founders of Third Space (in Helsinki) which is a cross border transcultural collective that seeks to erase the invisible lines that separate us. In her current practice, she is focused on womanhood and resistance, migration and representation. Currently in her doctoral studies at Aalto University she investigates concept of identity and its hybridity with a critical and analytic view on representation, how female bodies become politicized in society and in contemporary art. In her research and work, she aims to initiate methods within contemporary art to bridge from individual perception to the social perception by creating spaces for dialogue. Body and its performative presence through time and space are significant elements of her works where she combines memory, sense of belonging and personal narrations of everyday life together.  

There is no Co-Authors

I would like to have conversational presentation.

The negative spiral of violence among young men in Swedish suburbs has been apparent since 2011. For the past nine years the yearly average has been forty persons killed and 500 injured in gang-related assaults and shootings. In this study, women/mothers have stopped waiting passively for the state to react and instead choose to form networks between themselves in order to defend their neighbourhoods and their children in the suburb, on Friday and Saturday nights. They consciously build their conflict-resolution strategies using the fact that in this context they, as mothers that have passed child-bearing age, carry an aura of pondus and respectability that can calm rather than provoke more violence. This represents both a novel move of agency in the public sphere, but it is also in line with traditional motherhood, the mother as the first protector of all, with her special relationship to reproduction. What happens when the mothers become defenders, as the state monopoly of violence is clearly out of order? Do women, when no longer removed (excluded) or hidden away in the private sphere of home and family, change in relation to others and society into political subjects? If so, how does this manifest itself? What sources of resistances from husbands, family, neighbourhood, religious community and the state do they experience?

Dr in Political Science from Lund University. Presently a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Global Political Studies and a Member of the Steering Committee of the Gender Studies Collegium at Malmö University. Previously for eight years Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at Örebro University (with Professor Anna Jónasdóttir and Sofia Strid).

Have co-edited (with Annica Kronsell) Making Gender. Making War (2012) Taylor & Francis. Peer-Reviewed chapter titled „East- West Negotiations“ in Karin Aggestam & Ann Towns (Eds.) Gender & Diplomacy (2017)

No co-authors

I imagine that my paper would fit into theme 4. Along and across Borders: Proper Objects and Intersectionalities

Why was sperm competition the focus of the new discovery of widespread multiple mating in females? Why was the equivalent idea for females – cryptic female choice – developed later than sperm competition and met with skepticism by some investigators? This project explores how the international evolutionary research community radically shifted perspectives on the role of females in evolutionary biology. The project aims at understanding the histories, social dynamics and epistemological norms producing this shift in canonical knowledge. I have conducted oral history interviews with researchers in the field.
I have made a cultural cartography of the shifts in views of females – from monogamous to multiple mating, from passive to active – to outline the history of females in sexual selection and how the boundaries of the canonical knowledge was upheld and challenged. I use epistemology of ignorance to understand how and why diverse forms of knowledge have not formed or are ignored or delayed. Boundary-work, a concept from Sociology of Science, is used to investigate the scientific community’s reactions, such as resistance and scepticism, towards new ideas and empirical evidence on the role of females. The project shows how cultural assumptions influence biological research and how culturally induced ignorance of female perspectives can be perpetuated into new research fields.

Malin Ah-King is an Evolutionary Biologist and Associate Professor in Gender Studies at Stockholm University. She has a PhD in Zoology, and has worked with interdisciplinary gender/biology research in different ways, by problematizing notions of biological sex as binary and stable, highlighting gender stereotypes and heteronormative conceptions in theory and research.

I am the only author.