The report gives an introduction to the Linköping-Örebro Centre of Gender Excellence: GEXcel - Gendering EXcellence: Towards a European Centre of Excellence in Transnational and Transdisciplinary Studies of Changing Gender Relations, Intersectionalities and Embodiment.
This chapter is an interview conversation with feminist performance studies scholar Swati Arora who shares her thoughts on transnational and decolonial feminisms and epistemes. The conversation draws on Swati’s research on performance cultures, her activist engagements with ”Decolonize the University” movement, and her experiences from her intertwined academic and political trajectory, informed by embodied experiences of inhabiting a multiplicity of different geopolitical locations in the Global South (Delhi and Cape Town) and the Global North (Amsterdam and London). Interweaving Swati’s highly charged descriptions of activist practices and performances with her in-depth theoretical reflections, the interview digs into the ways in which her transnational trajectory and overlapping situatednesses have made her very aware of epistemic differences, erasures, and the urgent need for deploying the tricksterous feminist practice of translations as a point of departure for pluriversal dialogues, and a conscious move away from monologic universality. In the interview, Swati shares insights from her forthcoming book on performance cultures in Delhi, a manifesto she wrote to decentre Theatre and Performance Studies, and her research on a feminist performance Walk by the Indian performer and playwright Maya Rao, which engaged with translation as an act of transnational solidarity in highly complex ways.
Framed by a theoretical understanding based on key concepts such a preconfigured user and unexpected stakeholders, the report presents the collaboration between Volvo Group Trucks Technology and Tema Genus, Linköping University, which have initiated a pilot project to foster disruptive norm critical innovation at Volvo. The aim has been to 1) further develop existing methods for initiating innovation by bringing in disruptive norm critical innovation methods into already existing ‘tool boxes for innovation’ at Volvo, 2) develop a particular tool box to enhance disruptive norm critical innovation across existing ‘tool boxes’, and 3) develop a disruptive norm critical innovation tool box targeting the leadership program at Volvo Trucks to enable better management and integration of norm critical innovation processes at Volvo. The aims were fulfilled through two workshops, based on radical models for democratic discussion and unfolding of social fantasy: the future workshop and the world café.
This volume centers on theories and methodologies for postgraduate feminist researchers engaged in interdisciplinary research, in a context of increasing globalization, giving special attention to cutting-edge approaches at the borders between humanities and social sciences and specific discipline-transgressing fields such as feminist technoscience studies.
In honour of feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti, the chapter celebrates Braidotti's forceful contributions to feminist philosophy of sexual difference, nomadism and posthumanism, as well as to the building of feminist studies in Europe.
Tourism is an important employer for women in many countries. However, despite this seeming women friendliness, women are still underrepresented at the top of tourism businesses. Previous research on women managers careers in tourism has neglected the analysis of their careers in the light of new career concepts, such as the boundaryless career. Hence, in-depth semi-structured interviews were carried out with twenty-four female senior managers in Portuguese hotels and travel businesses, including entrepreneurs across a wide range of business sizes. The aim was to analyse these womens perspectives on how they have reached the top. It is concluded that women regard their careers as an outcome of their inherent characteristics, agency and a desire to seize challenges that lead to intrinsic satisfaction. They downplay the role of both structural enablers and structural barriers. This article analyses these issues from a boundaryless career model perspective and with a gender lens.
This article considers how Ackers (1990, 2012) framework of gendering processes can be a tool for the analysis of women managers careers in tourism organisations. Twenty-four women toplevel managers in hotels and travel businesses were interviewed. The analysis of gendering processes in the organisations where these women work revealed that hidden discrimination is more pervasive than overt discrimination. Three main gender subtexts underlie these gendering processes: the notion of the ideal unencumbered worker and assumptions of womens greater family-orientation; the expectation that women are less competent than men; and male homosocial ties and exclusionary practices. It is concluded that Ackers framework can be a good tool for de-legitimising subtle and normalised forms of discrimination in tourism organisations.
The purpose of this article is to analyse female top managers suggestions of what could be done towards gender equality at three different levels (state, organisational and individual), so that more women reach the top of tourism organisations. Looking at the state and organisational measures proposed by the interviewees, it seems that they regard lack of time and lack of childcare solutions as the main problem behind womens representation at the top. Interviewees place the problem of the provision of childcare in the states hands, and the problem of lack of flexibility in the organisations hands. However, when analysing the individual strategies proposed by these women, these clearly target a completely different issue, namely the prejudice against women in organisations. Interviewees emphasise individual strategies the most, since they believe that the solution to achieve equality lies in the hands of women, while other participants believe that equality will be achieved naturally The individual strategies proposed by women can be grouped under the following main themes: hard work, competence and meritocracy; showing skills and availability; confrontation strategies and assertiveness; protection of family and personal lives from excessive work demands; strategies for fitting in; doing what one likes; investment in education; and family planning. Their answers can be interpreted in light of how challenging they are in terms of disturbing the gender order. While some of these strategies align with the status quo and leave gendered structures unchallenged, others confront gendered structures and the prevailing gender order.
In the article, poet-philosopher Nina Lykke and visual artist Risk Hazekamp contemplate - in words and images - their love of micro-organisms, especially Diatoms and Cyanobacteria. The article is a textual and visual experiment, building on a previous digital exchange in which the voices of Nina and Risk eventually has merged into one shared ‘I’. A speculative, passionate conversation is shaping up in the article, investigating the precarious conditions of life and death on the planet, and figuring out pathways towards more joyful and ethical co-becomings with the planet body than Anthropocene extractivism can offer.
Are feminist coalitions magical enough to survive and endure while questioning and shaking the colonial/racist foundations of Swedish academic knowledge production and the overall Swedish society? Can feminist bridging and collective writing remain a magical process even when grappling with difficult experiences and memories of othering and racialisation? This is a creatively and collectively written article on feminist coalition building, and its importance in thinking, articulating and deconstructing race, racialization and racist structures. More than two years ago, seven interdisciplinary gender studies scholars of mixed ethnic and racial origins, came together to explore our differently situated experiences of disidentifying with Swedish academia and society in a collective we call Loving Coalitions. Against the background of Swedish exceptionalism, historical amnesia of Sweden’s colonial past and present, and the deafening silence on Swedish whiteness and racism, we are sharing our poems, letters, texts and testimonies of racist interactions in Swedish academia and society. While doing so, we discuss how moving away from conventional ways of doing research and experimenting with creative methodological alternatives, such as automatic writing, epistolary formats, poems, fiction, collective memory-work, allow us to acknowledge and embrace our different life backgrounds and academic trajectories as a mode of knowledge production. We hope and believe that our experiences, refl ections and ways to resist racism and Othering in Sweden and Swedish academia through alternative coalition building, based on mutual care and love, can be relevant in a Danish context as well.
The interview conversation focuses on Victoria Kawesa’s take on African and decolonial feminism, discussed against the backdrop of her life story as an anti-racist, feminist activist, writer and scholar. Victoria has been based in Sweden since she arrived there as nine-year-old in 1984 together with her mother and siblings, coming as political refugees from Uganda, a country steeped in civil war at the time. As a practising Catholic, Victoria’s father had been brutally murdered by the secret police of the then Ugandan leader, Idi Amin. The interview aligns itself with the personal-political-theoretical startingpoints of Victoria’s research, working its way from her childhood in black-normative Uganda to her experiences of racism in white-normative Sweden. It links glimpses of her life history narrative, as told in her forthcoming dissertation, Black Masks/White Sins: Becoming a Black Obuntu Feminist, with the theoretical and political perspectives she also develops there. The conversation focuses on corpo- and geopolitical situatedness, and how it matters for transnational feminist cartographies, onto-epistemologies, and possibilities for alliance building. From her situated perspective, Victoria emphasizes the need for differentiation within Black Feminism to make space for African and decolonial feminisms, based on other genealogies than the middle-passage epistemologies that dominate US contexts.
Prompted via 20 written questions from the literary authors of the mixed genre text collection, poet, short story writer, and novelist, Naja Marie Aidt, dramatist Line Knutzon, and poet Mette Moestrup, Nina Lykke gives a broad account of key ideas and concepts in contemporary feminist thought as a background for the poetic articulation of feminist and anti-racist approaches of the collection.
This article reviews current debates on epistemic habits of critique and affirmation, specifically focusing on approaches which combine criticality with ways to encourage unfoldings of alternative futurities, figurations and worlding practices. Embedded in a process of critical self-reflection regarding epistemic habits, the article discusses disidentification (Butler 1993, Muñoz 1999), cruel optimism (Berlant 2011), and everyday utopianism (Cooper 2014) understood as examples of such habits. The article explores how feminisms, unfolding within academia, and thus institutionally embedded in the logics of global capitalism, neoliberalism and particular nation-state politics, on the one the hand, are bound to a performance of cruel optimism, glossing over dilemmas and contradictions, and, on the other hand, perhaps enabled to enact messy kinds of everyday utopianism. Finally, the article reflects upon possibilities for changing one’s epistemic habits, suggesting a couple of changes: to systematically integrate reflections on changing conditions of academic knowledge production, as well as on geopolitical grammars. These issues are addressed as being interwoven with and mixed up in the epistemic practices that are produced by messy links with both feminist activist resistance and institutionalized and professionalized academic feminisms.
Feminist historian, Pernille Ipsen’s book is a moving, nuanced and groundbreaking historicalanalysis of the early years of the Redstocking Movement and Lesbian Movement in Denmark.It is also a passionately committed biography of Ipsen’s seven mothers who were among theinitiators of both movements. They were part of a commune of women, who occupied the firstwomen’s house in Copenhagen in 1971. Some of these women also, just a few months earlier,formed the core group of activists, organizing the first feminist summer camp at the Danishisland, Femø. Finally, four of the seven mothers were also active in the formation of anindependent Lesbian Movement in Denmark in 1974. The organizing of the summer campand the women’s house occupation were both influential events, creating a strong momentumfor the formation of second-wave feminisms in Denmark, while the initiation of the Lesbian Movement facilitated the shaping of a lesbian feminist milieu. Due to the central role thatIpsen’s mothers played in these events, their biography and the story of their communal livingarrangement, first in the complex of occupied houses in central Copenhagen, and later ina suburban villa, stand out as a history of early second-wave feminism in Denmark. The bookis told through the eyes of a daughter, Pernille Ipsen, born into the commune in 1972. Shebecame part of the experiment in communal living during the first years of her life, welcomedand taken care of as the child of the whole commune, not only of her biological mother. Thebook combines auto/biography and movement analysis in elegant and highly interesting ways.It is beautifully written, and it is well deserved that Ipsen recently was awarded the prestigiousMontana Literature Award for it.
The article is an invited comment on Guy Madison and Therese Soderlund (Mamp;S): Comparisons of content and scientific quality indicators across peer-reviewed journal articles with more or less gender perspective: Gender studies can do better. Scientometrics 115(3):1161-1183. The article pinpoints a series of serious problems in Mamp;Ss quantitative quality assessment and analysis of the field of gender studies, pertaining to their overall conceptual framework, their general approach and their specific analysis. It is argued that the over-arching problem in Mamp;Ss study is their lack of expert knowledge of the field of gender studies, their lack of respect for differences between qualitative and quantitative research, and their research design, which is biased towards quantitative social and natural science research. Firstly, it is demonstrated that a key concept, gender perspective, is used in an incoherent and confusing way in Mamp;Ss analysis. Secondly, it is argued that the confusion is not an isolated definitional problem, but related to a series of slippages between Mamp;Ss source of inspiration (Ganetz in Genusvetenskapliga projektansokningar inom humaniora-samhallsvetenskap - en uppfoljning av Vetenskapsradets beredning och utfall ar 2004. Vetenskapsradets rapportserie, Stockholm 15/2005, 2005) and their own adoption of the category. Thirdly, differences between qualitative and quantitative research, and between hermeneutic and explanatory knowledge production, are discussed more broadly to sustain the argument that the mentioned slippages occur, because Mamp;S transfer analytical tools from Ganetz qualitative study, based on a peer review methodology, to a quantitative quality assessment, carried out without field specific expert knowledge. It is argued that, to be adequate and relevant, a quality assessment would need to respect these differences, and develop tools and research designs accordingly. Fourthly, the validity of Mamp;Ss content analysis-the core of their study-is questioned in detail because of its use of inadequate analytical categories, and because of its exclusion of central elements from the analysis. Finally, it is argued that the bias in Mamp;Ss research design is reproduced in their results.
The chapter presents the Linköping-Örebro Centre of Gender Excellence, GEXcel.
The article is an autophenomenographic-poetic, eco-critical meditation on diatoms. It combines a reflection on the role of this algae species in the author’s posthuman modes of mourning her passed away lesbian life partner, with a discussion of philosopher Isabelle Stengers’s notion of wonder in materialist science, defined as open-ended approaches to unexpected diversity. Diatoms are single-celled aquatic algae, a kind of phytoplankton, which, due to their ability to photosynthesize, have been categorized as plantlike. However, in 2011, it was discovered that diatoms have an animal-like urea cycle, assumed to provide robustness in times of nutrient scarcity, but also making diatoms resist categorizations as either plant- or animal-like. Taking the author’s entangled commitments to human–diatom relations and this unexpected discovery as entrance point to reflect on wonder in technoscience, the article discusses ways of shifting from instrumentalizing to wonder-based algae research, asking if speculative art and poetry can open new horizons, interpellating pathways to ethically care for diatoms. The article introduces two poems, articulating the author’s relations to the diatoms of Limfjorden, the Danish fjord, where her partner’s ashes are spread. The author’s autophenomenographic-poetic work is also brought in conversation with feminist technoscience scholar Astrid Schrader’s critical research on utilitarian instrumentalism in current harmful algal blooms (HABs) research.
The article discusses Gender Studies as an inter- and postdiscipline giving special attention to differences between European and US contexts for the organization of the field.
The chapter uses a poetic, autophemenographic text, contemplating the cliffs, built by fossilized micro-algae, species diatoms, as an entrancepoint to a reflection on a planetary ethics of companionship. Rather than approaching the 55 mio year old diatomite cliffs as material from which to extract value, it is suggested that they should be seen as wise ancestors, who can teach us lessons about life, death and time. To frame the discussion, the chapter, firstly, gives a brief introduction to diatom biology and the geohistory of diatomite (sediments of fossilized diatoms), to the author’s intimate feelings of companionship with alive and fossilized diatoms, and to the posthuman autophenomenographic methodology which guides her contemplations of the diatoms. Secondly, the author discusses the revised understandings of life, death, and time which her efforts to corpo-affectively empathize (symphysize) with alive and dead diatoms helped her to establish. She also accounts for the ways in which these revisions are sustained by a vitalist materialist and immanence philosophical approach. In an open-ended conclusion, she suggests an ethics of planetary companionship, based on the contemplations of the corpo-affective bonds, she has established with the diatoms.
Depuis une cinquantaine d'annees, le reflexion philosophique prend la mesure des developpements de la medecine et des biotechnologies, mais en Europe, elle ne s'attarde guere aux enjeux des diverses representations de la femme et de l'homme en bioethique. Attentive a cette dimension, la perspective genre analyse la sexualisation des roles sociaux, politiques et economiques et la maniere dont l'egalite des droits est reellement respectee dans la vie publique et privee. Prenant le contre-pied des manipulations ideologiques ou des rejets violents et mal informes, cet ouvrage temoigne de par la variete des themes abordes de l'interet differencie que des philosophes issues de cinq pays europeens accordent aux questions soulevees actuellement par la bioethique. Loin de se cantonner au domaine de la reproduction medicalement assistee, ces etudes de genre abordent le statut du corps techniquement reconfigure a travers le cyborg, analysent le concept de sujet, envisagent de maniere critique l'ethique du souci de l'autre, confrontent les objectifs normalisateurs de la bioethique a la pluralite des approches contextuelles, s'interrogent sur la notion de generation ou menent des recherches comparatives en biodroit.
The paper reviews the monograph Dahl, Ulrika, Marianne Liljeström and Ulla Manns. 2016. The Geopolitics of Nordic and Russian Gender Research, 1975–2005. Stochkholm: Södertörn Academic Studies. The paper points out how important the monograph is in terms of demonstrating the blindspot which "the Nordic" makes up in Nordic gender research in the mentioned period, and comments on the dicsussion of intersections of gender/race/class, and their status in gender research in the Nordic gender studies communities.
Fifty Key Sociologists: The Contemporary Theorists covers the life, work, ideas and impact of some of the most important thinkers in this discipline.
Concentrating on figures writing predominantly in the second half of the twentieth century, such as Zygmunt Bauman, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault and Claude Lévi-Strauss, each entry includes:
Clearly presented in an easy-to-navigate A–Z format, this accessible reference guide is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociology, cultural studies and general studies, as well as other readers interested in this fascinating field.
A compreensão da cultura, da estrutura social, da socialização, da ação, do conflito e da mudança passou por significativos debates e importantes elaborações teóricas no último século. Questões como gênero e raça ganharam muito espaço entre os pensadores contemporâneos. Organizado de maneira objetiva e fácil de consultar, este livro traz como diferencial o perfil e a análise dos principais pensadores de dentro e de fora do campo da Sociologia à luz do século xxi, como Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Norbert Elias, Melanie Klein, Roland Barthes e Edward Said. Dando continuidade e incluindo referências cruzadas ao livro 50 sociólogos fundamentais - também publicado pela Editora Contexto -, esta obra é essencial para sociólogos, historiadores, antropólogos, psicólogos e todos os interessados nas ciências da sociedade
The editorial presents the work-in-progress report from the Centre of Gender Excellence: GEXcel.
The article discusses naming in academic feminism, suggesting that institutionalising naming practices should take into account the multiplicity and diversity of what bears the name Gender Studies by attaching an asterisk: Gender* Studies. The idea is borrowed from Transgender Studies and politics which sometimes use an asterisk, “trans*” to spell out the problems of fixed and essentialising, binary gender identities. The asterisk signals an opening towards multiple expressions of gender diversity and dissidence. The timeliness of a parallel shift from gender to gender* in institutionalising discourses on Gender Studies is argued through a series of examples of historical and current key discussions in the field, which, sensu strictu, cannot be contained within the framework of something defined as studies of a delimited, ”proper” object, called ”gender”. The historical part is introduced through the author’s personal history as an academic feminist activist who has taken part in the building up of “Gender Studies” institutions in Denmark, Sweden and on a broader European basis since the 1980s. The contemporary part introduces examples of current key discussions within the field which share the problem that they can be contained within the framework of Gender Studies only when this term is understood in a broad umbrellalike fashion. The discussions referred to are among others transgender critiques of cisnormativity, feminist intersectionality debates and feminist technoscience studies studying other phenomena than “gender”. Against the background of these and other examples, it is argued that adding an asterisk to “Gender*” in ”Gender Studies” could signal excess and diversity, aptly addressing what Judith Butler (1993) conceptualised as the “constitutive impossibility” of finding non-exclusive names.
Since World War II, the biological and technological have been fusing and merging in new ways, resulting in the loss of a clear distinction between the two. This entanglement of biology with technology isn't new, but the pervasiveness of that integration is staggering, as is the speed at which the two have been merging in recent decades. As this process permeates more of everyday life, the urgent necessity arises to rethink both biology and technology. Indeed, the human body can no longer be regarded either as a bounded entity or as a naturally given and distinct part of an unquestioned whole."Bits of Life" assumes a post-human definition of the body. It is grounded in questions about today's biocultures, which pertain neither to humanist bodily integrity nor to the anthropological assumption that human bodies are the only ones that matter. Editors Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke aid in mapping changes and transformations and in striking a middle road between the metaphor and the material. In exploring current reconfigurations of bodies and embodied subjects, the contributors pursue a technophilic, yet critical, path while articulating new and thoroughly appraised ethical standards. Anneke Smelik is professor of visual culture at the Radboud University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Nina Lykke is professor of gender studies, Linkoeping University, Sweden, and head of the Nordic Research School in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies