CGF events 2023
2023
January 18
15.15 – 16.45
Room: 4A301A (on Campus)
Josephine Baird
”Playing with Gender: Exploring, Expressing and Embodying (Trans) Gender in Games”
In the cutesy life-simulator game, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you get to create your own character, who you can dress up and style any way you want, and can wander around an idyllic little island, which you can also invite your online friends to. Despite not intentionally being designed for it, this game became a hub for queer social connections, creative expression, and even political organisation during the pandemic. This was because the game provided a safer space to meet and be ourselves, when so many of us were isolated from our usual queer venues – and some of us had to move (back) into home environments in which we could not be out.
Even in the most restrictive places, games can provide the alibi to play with or express a non-normative way of being – because, after all, “it’s only a game,” Drawing from gender, queer, and game design theory – and with plenty of fun examples – this seminar will show why games can provide a safer container of play for exploring, expressing, and embodying (trans) gender in a way that might not be as possible anywhere else. I will also present the game, Euphoria, that we intentionally designed based on theory and game design practice for just such a purpose and forms part of my PhD research.
Josephine Baird is a Lecturer at the Uppsala University Department of Game Design and a Ph.D. student at the University of Vienna. Her work spans the intersection of games, identity, trans, gender, and sexualities. She is a game designer/consultant, digital artist, writer, actor, public-speaker, and co-host of the podcast It Is Complicated. More information can be found at josephinebaird.com and she can be contacted at josephine.baird@speldesign.uu.se
No registration needed.
May 24
15.15 – 16.45
Room: 3A340 and Zoom
Tamara Shefer
Cgf higher seminar &b Gexcel gender talk series
This seminar works with hydrofeminist ecosophy (Neimanis, 2013, 2017a, 2017b), within the larger context of new feminist materialist, posthumanist and decoloninal feminist, queer scholarships in South Africa and globally to explore the productive possibilities of thinking with ocean and bodies of water. Drawing on a volume on hydrofeminist engagements in South Africa, currently in press, as well as a range of other initiatives in this context, I think with such transdisciplinary research, pedagogies, activism, and artistic works that are working towards challenging global inequalities and environmental damages towards justice for humans, more-than-humans and the planet. In South Africa, seas and beaches are particularly haunted sites where histories of colonisation, transatlantic slavery and more recently apartheid, characterised by segregation, exclusions and violence, bleed into the present, shaping the current and future. Mirroring larger planetary conditions, the ominous effects of capitalist exploitation, including extractivist oceanic mining, over-fishing, sewage spillage into oceans, and other invasive practices devastate the ocean/s and all life on earth. There is currently an inspiring emergence of ethico-political thinking, practices, arts and activisms in contemporary South Africa and many of these are working with and through oceans. This seminar draws on such thinking and praxis, sharing a wild sea swimming methodology practice as well as other scholarly and activist engagements and research-creations in, with, through ocean and oceanic imaginaries.
Tamara Shefer is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town. Her scholarship has been directed at intersectional gender and sexual justice, with particular emphasis on young people. She is currently engaged with re-conceptualising academic knowledge with emphasis on embodied, affective, feminist, decolonial pedagogies and research, and thinking with art and activism. Most recent books include: Knowledge, Power and Young Sexualities: A Transnational Feminist Engagement (co-authoured with J. Hearn, 2022, Routledge) and Routledge International Handbook of Masculinity Studies (co-edited with L. Gottzén & U. Mellström, 2020). She is also co-editor (with V. Bozalek & N. Romano) on a volume in press entitled Hydrofeminist thinking with ocean/s: Political and pedagogical possibilities (Routledge).
June 7
15.15 – 16.45
Room: 3A340 and Zoom
Ling Han
Cyber-Misogyny, Cyber-Nationalism, and Shades of Pink: The Promise and Peril of Feminism in the Chinese Digital Arena
In recent years, we have witnessed a heightened discussion about gender and, more broadly defined, feminism on Chinese digital platforms where online conversations often revolve around nationalist, reactionary, and misogynistic discourses. With the COVID-19 pandemic, physical interactions have been restricted, and most social activities are forced to move online, which further constrains the voices of already-confined feminist activism. Under the backdrop of capricious socio-political circumstances, the relationship between nationalist, misogynistic, and feminist discursive forces have never been clear-cut, though few empirical studies have examined how these forces intersect. Based on a yearlong digital ethnography of online gendered debates in 2021-2022, this talk focuses on the shifting dynamics between misogynistic, nationalist, and feminist discourses on Chinese digital platforms. These events include news media coverage of gender-based violence and entertainment celebrity sex scandals that draw extensive attention and propel online discussion regarding women’s predicament. The analysis also shows that systems of intersectional oppression often collide in the digital arena. As feminist online discursive spaces have shrunk, I discuss the emergence of pink feminism that features the creative appropriation of official discourse to lend credibility and legitimization to feminist rhetoric as its strategies to express dissent. This study reveals the complexity and the precariousness of online feminist spaces and contributes to the growing field of digital feminism.
Ling Han is an Assistant Professor in the Gender Studies Programme at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is a sociologist researching the intersection of gender, technology, and design in social innovation projects and the entrepreneurship process in Asia. She has published on topics about digital feminism and queer activism in China.
Her work explores topics of gender, non-profits and philanthropy, passion, and the meaning of work in contemporary Chinese society. She co-leads the research project on Civic Life of Cities Lab-Singapore with Stanford University and INSEAD Singapore to understand how non-profit organizations navigate the cultural, geopolitical, and technological forces they face. She served as the academic advisor for Stanford Social Innovation Review China and co-founded the Asia Academic Social Innovators Forum.
GEXcel Gender Talk: HAN LING: Cyber-Misogyny, Cyber-Nationalism, and Shades of Pink | Facebook
November 1,
15.15 – 16.45
Room: 4A 301A (on Campus)
Mattie Walker
Community-Based Recommendations from Canada for Improving Trauma-Related Mental Health Care for Trans and Gender-Diverse Young People
A disproportionate number of trans and gender-diverse individuals experience abuse and trauma in their lifetime as compared with cisgender populations. Within systems and societies that are heteronormative and cis-normative, trans and gender-diverse people face conditions that are chronically stressful and often traumatic. Trans and gender-diverse young people need safe, accessible, and helpful support from the mental health practitioners and services they reach out to. Many trans and gender-diverse people find that available mental health services do not feel helpful, safe, or accessible and can sometimes even be retraumatizing. While there is ample research stating the prevalence of traumatic experiences and need for mental health care for trans and gender-diverse people, there is a scarcity of literature addressing the gaps in care and knowledge regarding appropriate support for trans and gender-diverse communities.
Transforming Supports is a community-based qualitative research project, based in Victoria, Canada, that aims to bridge this research gap by engaging directly with trans and gender-diverse communities in order to improve services that provide trauma and mental health support. In March 2023, the project held community consultations with participants aged 19-30 years old where trans and gender-diverse young people shared their experiences and perspectives on mental health care through facilitated discussion and small group activities. In July 2023, the project held a 4 session arts-based research group with participants aged 10-17 years old where youth were asked what they thought adults needed to know about supporting trans and gender-diverse youth in their communities. This presentation synthesizes results from all these community-engagement methods to provide recommendations directly from trans and gender-diverse young people on how to improve mental health services and care, including recommendations for future research directions.
Mattie Walker (they/them) is a PhD candidate in the Social Dimensions of Health Program at the University of Victoria in Victoria, Canada. Their research focuses on trauma-related mental health services for trans and gender-diverse people. As a researcher, they seek to understand better the experience of trans and gender-diverse people accessing trauma support in order to improve services and to make mental health services more useful and safer for gender-diverse people. Mattie comes to this work with a background in the anti-violence sector and currently practices as a clinical counselor specializing in working with trauma and violence, and with queer and gender-diverse individuals. Their scholarship is funded by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council Canada Graduate Scholarship, a Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement, the Centre for Youth and Society, and Vancouver Foundation.
November 8,
15.15 – 16.45
Room: 4A 301A
Maja Bodin (Department of Health Studies, Karlstad University)
Reproductive decision-making in times of climate change
The presentation is based on 23 focus group discussions with people aged 17-90 years, who talked about their reproductive plans and how their decisions were impacted by various social factors, such as the economy and climate change. I will discuss my empirical findings from an intersectional perspective, touching upon for example ideas and discourses around “climate anxiety” and “overpopulation”.
Maja Bodin holds a PhD in Medical Sciences (Uppsala University), MSC in Global Health (Karolinska Institute) as well as is a registered nurse and midwife. She recently started working as an associate senior lecturer (biträdande lektor) at the Department of Health Studies (unit Nursing Sciences) at Karlstad University. She defended her thesis on men’s fertility and reproductive planning in 2018 and has since then continued her work on reproductive decision-making as a postdoc at Malmö University (2019-2021) and at the Centre for Medical Humanities, Uppsala University (2021-2023). In her research, Bodin combines perspectives from various disciplines, such as medicine, nursing, public health, gender studies, sociology, and history of ideas. Her most recent work has been on parents who regret having children. Among others, she has published in Social Science & Medicine, Journal of Family Studies, and Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online
https://fb.me/e/70s4n3kVs
November 29th,
15.15 - 16.45
Room: 4A 301A
Ekaterina Zhukova (Intercultural Studies, Karlstad University)
Global South perspectives on Feminist Foreign Policies of the Global North
Introduced first by Sweden 2014, Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) has soon been adopted by other countries. FFP aims to mainstream gender equality in all of its levers of influence such as aid, trade, defence, and diplomacy. Since the majority of FFP countries represent the Global North, where liberal feminism is dominant, and a number of them explicitly focus on development cooperation this presentation looks at how countries in the Global South understand what FFP is and whether and how it is of relevance to their own contexts.
Based on 40 interviews conducted with diplomats, practitioners, and academics from 19 countries of the Global South (primarily small postcolonial states, not regional powers, on different continents - 9 in Latin America, 6 in Africa, 3 in Europe/Eurasia, 3 in the Middle East, and 5 in Asia) and from 6 Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) countries of the Global North, the presentation explores FFP’s challenges and possibilities of practicing cultural humility, respecting local agency, giving room to local feminisms, engaging the state in feminism, going beyond projectification in aid and foreign policy, and other aspects of cross-border engagement. It argues that by including the voices and knowledge of the Global South in the process of drafting and implementing the foreign policies of the Global North in a participatory manner might carry a potential to build a more just world.
Bio:
Ekatherina Zhukova is Senior Lecturer in Intercultural Studies at Karlstad University. She is a member of CGF and KuFo at KAU. She is working on a RJ-funded project on external perceptions of Feminist Foreign Policy and on Formas-funded project on the influence of renewable energy on gender equality in Yemen’s conflict.
https://fb.me/e/1gFDGbbl5