CGF events 2021
Here you will find old CGF events from 2021!
Higher seminars
3 February, kl.15.00-16.30
This GEXcel seminar will take place on Zoom. If you wish to attend please contact Jennie Särnmark at jennie.sarnmark@kau.se. Please remember to register the latest by January 31st! The link will then be sent out on February 2nd.
Being Trans in Iran: The Soul of the Body
Zara Saeidzadeh, PhD (Örebro University) with a commentary provided by Prof. Sima Shakhsari (University of Minnesota)
Mainstream media, mainly Anglophone represents sex change in Iran as an oppressive act of the Islamic state that is forced on homosexual people. The existing literature published outside Iran, too portrays trans as the construction of Islamic state. I perceive these assumptions as not only Islamophobic, but also homonormative and anti-trans. For, my research proves such arguments to have failed to notice 1) the legal (Iranian and Islamic laws) complexities of sex change, 2) the knowledge and experience of trans people’s gender embodiment who want to undergo sex-change surgery to change their legal gender, 3) the social and legal violence and discrimination experienced by trans people in Iran.
Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted between 2014 and 2017 with trans people, surgeons, lawyers, activists and an Islamic jurist in Iran, I show how trans people who undergo sex-change surgery in Iran define and understand their gender by reflecting on the soul/body definition. Furthermore, I shed light on how trans people’s lives are shaped through interactions with medical, legal, judicial, family and the Islamic systems. Moreover, I elaborate on how trans activism functions in Iran in relation to feminist politics. In my analysis, I explain how various forms of social and legal status-misrecognition of trans people at macro, meso and micro levels creates challenging social and individual lives. I also explain how trans people’s struggle in Iran revolves around their demands for citizenship needs and status rather than human rights.
The seminar presentation will be concluded by an academic commentary by Prof Sima Shakhsari and then opened for a joint discussion! Sima Shakhsari will also give a lecture on their current research project on May 19th, 2021, 16.00 at the Centre for Gender Studies, Karlstad University.
Biographies
Dr. Zara Saeidzadeh (Örebro University) has completed her PhD in gender studies at Örebro University (2020) where she currently works as a lecturer. She is also a research associate at Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University in Canada and serves as a coordinator of GEXcel International Collegium. Zara’s work concentrates on trans* and social justice from a socio-legal perspective. As part of her doctoral project, she has carried out extensive fieldwork on trans* in Iran and has conducted semi-structured interviews with trans*people in Sweden through her participation in ERC project on TransRights in Europe. Among others, she has published in Feminist Legal Studies, Transgender Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Journal of Gender Studie, and Politics and Governance.
Prof. Sima Shakhsari (University of Minnesota) is an associate professor in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexualities Studies, University of Minnesota. They earned their PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University and have held postdoctoral positions at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolf Humanities Center and the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Houston. Their most recent book is entitled Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan (Duke University Press, 2020). Shakhsari is currently working on their second book manuscript, tentatively titled Moving Queers & Queer Moves: Deterritorialization and Loaned Life.
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10 March, 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 March 8th!
Reasonable Resistance?
Why Diversity and Gender-Integration Policies Tend to Fail in Military Organizations
Beate Sløk-Andersen, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher
Why have Western military organizations for years and years been able to “dodge the bullet” when it comes to policies that aim to increase gender equality and diversity in the surrounding societies – and still to some degree seem to sidestep such political efforts? This paper examines how and not least why military organizations resist diversity and gender-integration policies by examining the rationales behind such resistance, hereby suggesting why such initiatives tend to fail in military settings.
It is widely documented that political and organizational initiatives to increase diversity and gender equality – in any sector or profession – do not necessarily lead to change. This article argues, however, that it is precisely the extraordinary nature of military work that is invoked as the argument against such initiatives through the mobilization of a narrative of exceptionalism. Building on interviews, observations, and document analysis, the article unboxes this narrative that works to shield military organizations from requirements and expectations put on “civilian” organizations. So while it may be difficult to find agreement that there is a problem to be solved in the first place, militaries are qua the narrative of exceptionalism assumed to be in their full right not to solve it.
Taking as its point of departure the Danish Defence’s diversity policy adopted in 2011 – a policy that earned the organization an award for its efforts to promote diversity – this paper illuminates how diversity policies can be resisted as political ambitions of inclusion and equality are translated into practice. The paper unfolds how arguments about the armed forces’ core task ends up making the diversity policy into a nonperformative (Ahmed, 2006) as its success lies in how ‘it fails to bring about what it names.’
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7 April, kl.15.00-17.00 (postponed from 17 February)
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 April 6th!
“Cake is not an attack on democracy”: Building queer coalitions and moving beyond carceral Pride in post-22/7 Norway
Prof. 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.
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19 May, 16.00-17.30 (Swedish time)
GEXcel Lecture Series
hosted by Centre for Gender Studies, Karlstad University, Sweden
This seminar will take place on Zoom. If you wish to attend please contact Jennie Särnmark at jennie.sarnmark@kau.se before May 17th! For questions, please contact Wibke Straube at wibke.straube@kau.se
“Virality, Sanctions, and Freedom: The Racial Logic of Life and Death During the Coronavirus Pandemic”
Prof. Sima Shakhsari, University of Minnesota
This talk focuses on virality to explore the racial logic of death and the “crisis of our time” during the Coronavirus pandemic. By examining the “war on the Coronavirus,” the sanctions on Iran, and the rise of white supremacy in the U.S., I argue that the optimistic post-humanist analyses of virus and virality are predicated upon the abstraction of the human, thus overlooking race and geopolitics.
The uneven distribution of resources in a transnational context debilitates some populations, while subjecting others to the politics of rightful killing during the pandemic. By exploring “viral freedom,” I highlight the irony of the U.S. democratization projects, wherein the liberal notions of choice and control over one’s body are deployed to lay claim on human-ness.
Biography
Prof. Sima Shakhsari (University of Minnesota) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Gender, Women & Sexualities Studies, University of Minnesota. They earned their PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University and have held postdoctoral positions at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolf Humanities Center and the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Houston.
Their most recently published monograph is entitled Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan (Duke University Press, 2020). Shakhsari is currently working on their second book manuscript, tentatively titled Moving Queers & Queer Moves: Deterritorialization and Loaned Life.
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15 September, kl.15.00-16.30
This GEXcel seminar will take place on Zoom. If you wish to attend please contact Jennie Särnmark at jennie.sarnmark@kau.se. Please remember to register the latest by September 13th! The link will then be sent out the day before the seminar to the registered e-mail.
Wild swimming methodologies: some thoughts from South African contexts
Prof. Tammy Shefer, University of the Western Cape
In this paper I focus on ocean swimming as one form of wild methodology and Slow scholarship that draws on hauntology, to think about the possibilities of such post-qualitative methodologies for reconceptualising scholarship. My thinking is located in the (post)apartheid space of South African higher education, which continues to be shaped by colonial, patriarchal and neoliberal capitalist logics not withstanding a strong decolonial and transformation project over many years.
Propositions are made here about how a wild swimming methodology may inspire a critical consciousness and engagement as part of the larger project of re-imagining the university as a space of and for justice and flourishing. Sharing some experimental engagements in this context, I explore the ways in which embodied, affective methodologies in or near the ocean/s may be deployed to subvert and reconfigure, to make and stay with trouble (Haraway, 2016) and to open up new imaginaries of scholarship that makes a difference.
Tamara Shefer is professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of the Western Cape. Her work primarily addresses youth, gender and sexualities. She is also engaged in a critical project of reconceptualising higher education, thinking about and experimenting with critical, feminist, social justice scholarly practices, both pedagogies and research.
Most recent books include: The International Handbook of Masculinity Studies (2019, Routledge, with L. Gottzén & U. Mellström); Engaging Youth in Activist Research and Pedagogical Praxis: Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives on Gender, Sex, and Race (2018, Routledge, with J. Hearn, K. Ratele & F. Boonzaier) and Socially Just Pedagogies in Higher Education: Critical posthumanist and new feminist materialist perspectives (2018, Bloomsbury, with V. Bozalek, R. Braidotti & M. Zembylas).
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29 September, kl.16.00-17.00
This GEXcel seminar will take place on Zoom. If you wish to attend please contact Jennie Särnmark at jennie.sarnmark@kau.se. Please remember to register the latest by September 27th! The link will then be sent out the day before the seminar to the registered e-mail.
Naming the Moment: Five Lenses for Anti-Oppressive Education and Movement Building
Kevin Kumashiro, Center for Anti-Oppressive Education
This presentation explores five lenses or conceptual tools for advancing democracy, equity, and justice in and through education: naming the moment and our intervention, diving into contradiction, learning through discomfort and resistance, addressing legacies and levels, and using social movements as a frame.
Dr. Kevin Kumashiro (https://www.kevinkumashiro.com) is an internationally recognized expert on educational policy, school reform, teacher preparation, and educational equity and social justice, with a wide-ranging list of accomplishments and awards as a scholar, educator, leader, and advocate.
He is the former Dean of the School of Education at the University of San Francisco, and is the award-winning author or editor of ten books, including Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning toward Social Justice, and most recently, Surrendered: Why Progressives are Losing the Biggest Battles in Education. His recent awards include the 2016 Social Justice in Education Award from the American Educational Research Association, and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters.
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27 October, kl.15.00-16.30
This GEXcel seminar will take place on Zoom. If you wish to attend please contact Jennie Särnmark at jennie.sarnmark@kau.se. Please remember to register the latest by October 25th! The link will then be sent out the day before the seminar to the registered e-mail.
Gender and/as Border Work
Prof. Dr. Sabine Hess, University of Göttingen
Against the backdrop of recent ethnographic research projects on border and asylum policies, this talk critically interrogates dominant approaches to gender in the field of border and migration studies focusing on the gendered nature of migratory experiences and practices.
Even though these studies are a vital contribution to migration and border studies, they nevertheless fall short of understanding gender as an central category structuring the policies themselves. This talk shows how gender-narratives time and again play strategically vital roles for the specific orientation/articulation of the EU border and European migration regimes.
Sabine Hess has been a full professor of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology at the University of Göttingen since 2011. She specializes in migration and border studies with a specific interest in the external border region in South-Eastern Europe and gender related perspectives. She is a founding member of the European interdisciplinary “Network on critical migration and border studies” (kritnet) and directs the interdisciplinary “Laboratory on migration and border regime studies” at the University of Goettingen that provides space for regular discussions on theories and research in the respective fields for 18 PhD students and Postdocs.
Hess successfully conducted several third-party funded projects and graduate programs such as “Transit Migration”, funded in 2001-2005 by the national cultural foundation of Germany, “De- and Restabilisation of the European Border Regime”, funded by the Fritz-Thyssen Foundation in 2016, “Migrational societies and Border regime constructions”, funded by the state of Lower Saxony in 2016, as well as “RESPOND: Multilevel Governance of Mass Migration in Europe and Beyond“ funded in the range of HORIZON 2020 starting in 2017.
She is author and co-author of several volumes and is founding member of the editorial board of “movements. Journal on Critical Border and Migration Regime Studies”
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3 November, kl.15.00-16.30 (Zoom)
Dis/connections: Quarantine humor and queer longing
Prof. Jenny Sundén, Karlstad University
This presentation zooms in on transformations of intimacy and relational spaces in a time of a viral, global crisis. Set against the backdrop of “social distancing” practices, it opens with a discussion of digital intimacy, focusing on the layering of anxiety and anticipation within networked connectivity.
Secondly, it moves on to discuss how such anticipatory anxiety may become punctuated by humor and laughter. Considering the dynamics between physical disconnection and digital intensity within pandemic hookup practices, it explores in particular instances of quarantine humor in queer hookup cultures.
This humor stems from impossibly contradictory spaces of self-isolation, desire, and longing, in relation to which the swiftness of the swipe is transformed into a disconnect in the shape of a delay. The presentation ends with an example of Swedish, queer quarantine humor and a discussion of partial disconnections, or selective connectivity in difficult times in the interest of self-care.
Jenny Sundén is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Karlstad University, as well as Professor of Gender Studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm. Her work is situated in the intersection of digital media and technology studies, gender and sexuality studies, feminist and queer theory, and affect theory.
She is currently working on queerness and digital intimacy, disconnection, and delay; feminist social media tactics that use humor to counter sexism by rewiring the dynamics of shame and shamelessness; and the geopolitics of digital sexual cultures across Nordic, Baltic, and Anglo-American contexts. She is the author of Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media (MIT Press, 2020, with Susanna Paasonen), and Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures: Passionate Play (Routledge, 2012, with Malin Sveningsson).
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17 November, kl.09.00-10.30
This GEXcel seminar will take place on Zoom. If you wish to attend please contact Jennie Särnmark at jennie.sarnmark@kau.se. Please remember to register the latest by November 15th! The link will then be sent out the day before the seminar to the registered e-mail.
Reproductive biosensing and self-tracking in the Capitolocene
Prof. Celia Roberts, Australian National University
It is a core feature of our times (which I here, following Donna Haraway, call the Capitolocene) that many wealthy countries are beginning to experience low fertility. Increasing numbers of people are limiting their family size or choosing not to have children, and many find themselves unable to reproduce.
Rising concern around fertility – felt by individuals, fostered through capitalist media and production, and articulated by government policies – coincides with a notable uptake of self-tracking and biosensing practices to monitor ovulation and to time intercourse or insemination. (These practices can, of course, also help avoid pregnancy.) At the same time, environmental and public health concerns are also reshaping reproductive lives and politics, often in confusing and contradictory ways.
Some environmentalists organise campaigns about the negative impact of toxins on fertility, for example, whilst others present arguments about over-population, encouraging would-be parents to consider babies’ carbon footprints. Deciding and/or trying to have children in this fraught space can be a tough process.
In this paper I will present new data from a study of people who had babies during the Australian bushfires of 2019-20 and the Covid-19 pandemic to explore these contemporary dilemmas and to make tentative suggestions about ways forward.
Celia Roberts is Professor in the School of Sociology, Australian National University, Canberra. She is the author (with Adrian Mackenzie and Maggie Mort) of Living Data: Making sense of health biosensing (Bristol University Press, 2019) and Puberty in Crisis: The sociology of sexual development (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and has worked on issues relating to reproduction, health technologies and sex for several decades.
She is currently writing a book on reproduction in climate crisis with Mary Lou Rasmussen, Rebecca Williamson and Louisa Allen.
You can find more information on our Facebook page!
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8 December, kl.15.00-16.30 (Zoom)
Service with a Smile? The Diffusion of Consumer Violence through Mundane Service Consumption
Ass. Prof. Anna Fyrberg Yngfalk, Karlstad University
The present study analyses the occurrence of consumer violence towards retail service workers uncovered by the #metoo movement through the notion of consumer sovereignty. We critically analyse how mundane retail service interactions are framed by a consumer sovereignty discourse, that is a central tenet of contemporary neoliberal marketing, and how this generate power and gender imbalances through a reinforcement of the consumer and a reduction of the service worker.
Moreover, we illustrate how neoliberal market(ing) ideals create a conformable service worker subjectivity that upholds consumer supremacy even in destructive situations and how this arranges for a normalisation of consumer violence. We also highlight how the hegemonic nature of the customer discourse leads to an insensitivity to alternative, more equally orientated world views that could be drawn on for resistance and change.
Anna Fyrberg Yngfalk is an Associate Professor in Business Administration at CTF and Karlstad Business School, Karlstad University and affiliated researcher at Centre for Gender Studies at Karlstad University. Her research is in the area of critical marketing and she is interested in the politics of marketing, and most recently she is working with a project on consumer violence in the service/retail setting.