Current events and seminars

The politics and intersections of COVID-19: critical perspectives from gender studies

Online Talk Series – 23.09.2020 and 28.10.2020 (09:00-17:00)

The current global pandemic has brought with it many challenges. Most obviously, the costs are seen in the lives lost and the health, emotional, social, and economic challenges that many people face around the globe due to the pandemic. While some also point to positive side effects of COVID-19 such as stark reductions in CO2-emissions, the pandemic is more likely to intensify already existing (social) inequalities than to alleviate them. This is most noticeable when it comes to health. Older people and people with pre-existing conditions are more likely to die from the virus. At the same time, according to public statistics men fall victim to COVID-19 more often than women.

What is more, as more knowledge emerges about those infected with and dying from COVID-19, well-known intersections of gender, class, and race appear to determine who will survive this pandemic and who won’t. Socially, the pandemic also acerbates existing inequalities. In professions heavily exposed to infection risks, such as healthcare or daycare workers or teachers, employees are overwhelmingly women. In professions hardest hit economically, people in the lower income ranges feel the consequences by getting laid off and losing their income. This is paired with racial discrimination. After the American president called Corona “the Chinese virus”, people identified as Chinese by others experienced an increase in racial discrimination in public in the US and Europe. At the same time, prejudices against racial minorities also gained traction in China where Black Africans, after reports of them supposedly bringing Corona-infections back to China, were discriminated against because of their skin color.

Not least, the current pandemic also points to the violent heritage of colonialism, empire, and capitalism, with countries in the Global North paying themselves out of the direst consequences while at the same time being unwilling to share the financial burden of countries from the Global South. All this begs the question how social inequalities structure the current crisis and how the crisis will come to shape social inequalities in the future. In two one-day events, the Centre for Gender Studies will tackle these questions.

See the right hand column for the program and please register via e-mail in order to attend the event: luca.tainio@kau.se

Higher seminars

18 November, kl.13.00-14.30

This seminar will take place on Zoom. If you wish to attend please contact Jennie Särnmark at jennie.sarnmark@kau.se. Please remember to register for the seminar before November 16th! 

Researching race in a color-blind society, Tobias Hübinette, Karlstad University

Contemporary Sweden is arguably the world’s most color-blind antiracist country or antiracial society to allude to David Theo Goldberg’s division between antiracism and antiracialism/antirace. Tobias Hübinette has since over a decade conducted research on race in today’s Sweden and both with regards to different minorities and to the white majority population and he has simultaneously worked to establish a research field of Swedish critical race studies within Swedish academia.

In this presentation, Hübinette will present some of his previous, recent and on-going research on race in relation to Sweden, Swedes and Swedishness as well as to introduce the current state of Swedish critical race studies.

Biography

Tobias Hübinette is fil dr in Korean studies or Korea’s language and culture. He is an associate professor in intercultural pedagogy. He teaches subjects related to intercultural studies and Swedish as a second language, gender studies and literature. Hübinette’s research focuses on critical race- and whiteness studies, such as research on adoption, immigration, minorities, Asians and Swedishness. Among other things, he has published the book ”Att skriva om svenskheten. Studier i de svenska rasrelationerna speglade genom den icke-vita svenska litteraturen” (2019), which discusses contemporary non-white Swedish literature. He editted and co-editted the anthology books, ”Om ras och vithet i det samtida Sverige” (2012), ”Ras och vithet. Svenska rasrelationer i går och i dag” (2017) and ”Studier om rasism. Tvärvetenskapliga perspektiv på ras, vithet och diskriminering” (2018).

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25 November, kl.15.00-16.30

This seminar will take place on Zoom. If you wish to attend please contact Jennie Särnmark at jennie.sarnmark@kau.se. Please remember to register for the seminar before November 16th! 

Moral metalanguaging in mediated discourse: On the popular reception of public apologies in the wake of #MeToo, Peter Wikström & Erica Sandlund, Karlstad University

We will present work-in-progress from an ongoing discourse analytic project on public apologies connected to the #MeToo movement. We investigate how local negotiations of linguistic normativity form part of a structure of civic engagement or political participation in today's socially mediated publics. The public apology is a discursive genre that has received much folk linguistic attention in public debate, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

Several prominent examples of such public apologies have been characterized as empty apologies, pseudo apologies, or, simply, "non-apologies". The project is focuses mainly on metapragmatic negotiations and contestations in the reception of public apologies as non-apologies in social media spaces, connected to prominent public figures who have been accused of sexual transgressions. We compare multiple cases, but focus in this paper primarily on Donald Trump’s "Pussygate" apology video, which was published in October of 2016 on Trump’s Facebook page.

The paper presents analyses of both mainstream media and lay social media responses to this apology. Negotiations of the Trump video’s merits as an apology are rarely only that, but rather tend to be interwoven with affectively charged ideological positionings – in relation to party politics, progressivism, feminism, and more. Through articulating notions of what constitutes a non-apology, we argue, social media interactants are blending folk understandings of norms of linguistic interaction with political and moral interactional work.

Biographies

Peter Wikström holds a PhD in English Linguistics and is specialized in social media discourse analysis. He primarily works with textual material from popular sociala media platforms, but often combines this with multimodal discourse analysis. His doctoral thesis concerned how social media renegotiate formal and normative aspects of the relationship between spoken and written language. Since 2018, his research has mainly focused on political discourse and metadiscourse in social media, but he has also conducted a postdoc on how the application Snapchat is used by Swedish teenagers in a school context.

Together with Erica Sandlund, he is involved in the project Non-apologies: The reception of public apologies in mediated interation in the era of #MeToo (Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, reg. no P19-0213:1). He also does research on uses and negotiation of the terms race and racism in a Swedish popular mediated discourse context together with Tobias Hübinette, in the project The Swedish r-word (Swedish Research Council, reg. no 2019-03291).

Erica Sandlund’s research centers on social interaction, particularly institutional talk such as higher education seminars, multilingual classrooms, organizational meetings, performance appraisal interviews, second language speaking tests, and news interviews. Through the ethnomethodological lens of Conversation Analysis (CA), Erica is interested in how social institutions shape, restrict, and promote particular interactional conduct, and how social phenomena such as affect or norms are socially organized in talk and action.

She works with audio and video-recordings of social interaction and examine closely the sequencing of talk. Together with Peter Wikström, Erica currently do research on discursive practices of rejecting public apologies in the wake of the #MeToo movement, in both journalistic mediated interaction and informal social media interaction. Such practices are analyzed in terms of how the discourse participants practice ‘folk linguistics’, negotiating notions of what constitutes a ‘real’ apology.

Further, the practices are analyzed as a way of doing ‘everyday’ political participation in the social media context. The project, which runs between 2020-2022, is funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation [Reg. no. P19-0213:1]. She also teaches a recurrent master/PhD course in English Linguistics on Language and Gender.

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2021 

17 February, kl.15.00-17.00

This seminar will take place on Zoom. If you wish to attend please contact Jennie Särnmark at jennie.sarnmark@kau.se. Please remember to register for the seminar before February 15th!

“Cake is not an attack on democracy”: Building queer coalitions and moving beyond carceral Pride in post-22/7 Norway

Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen (Centre for Gender Studies, University of Stavanger) 

This paper draws on a case study from Oslo Pride 2016 when a queer activist threw a cake at the then Minister of LGBT+ rights, and member of right-wing populist party and government coalition member Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet), Solveig Horne. I discuss the disruptive event of the pieing itself, and examine media, activist and legal discourses from the ensuing criminal case where the activist was sentenced to 45 days in prison for ‘attack on democracy’, a legal paragraph that was re-drafted after the right-wing terrorist attack in Oslo/Utøya in 2011 but rarely applied.

In particular, I analyze blog and radio texts from the imprisoned activist and their collective, Cistem Failure, to argue how increasingly homonormative Pride festivals together with the protective support of law enforcement, have redefined the meaning of the ‘good queer citizen’ (Russell 2019, Puar 2007).

On this basis I demonstrate the changing relations between sexuality and the Norwegian equality and welfare state, and argue that it is imperative to build alternative coalitions and knowledges, and continue to expose the violent effects of dominant tendencies of depoliticizing queer lives at the expense of conditional carceral state protection.

Biography

Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Gender Studies, University of Stavanger, and an Affiliated Researcher, Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Her research interestes include queer and feminist theories and methodologies to do with identities, inequalities, activism, kinship and knowledge. Engebretsen is the author of Queer women in urban China: An ethnography (Routledge 2014), co-editor of Queer/tongzhi China: New perspectives on research, activism and media cultures (NIAS Press 2015), and a special issue of Sexualities on “Anthropology’s queer sensibilities” (2018).

Current research projects include  Transforming Identities: Exploring Changes, Tensions and Visions in the Nordic Region through the prism of Identity Politics, and  A Nordic Queer Revolution? The Formation of Gay, Queer and Trans Activism in Scandinavia, 1948–2018. Engebretsen is the editor-in-chief (with Erika Alm) of lambda nordica.