Organized by Sofia Varino

Alyosxa Tudor is Reader (Associate Professor) in Gender Studies at SOAS, University of London. Their main research interest lies in analysing (knowledge productions on) migrations, diasporas and borders in relation to critiques of Eurocentrism and to processes of gendering and racialisation. They have coined the terms migratization/migratism (2010, 2014) and have been arguing for a critical differentiation migratization/migratism and racialization/racism for more than a decade. Alyosxa has published on these topics with Feminist Review, Feminist Theory, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Ethnic and Racial Studies and Gender, Place and Culture etc.At the moment, they are working on their new monograph project The Endurance of the Mare on histories of resilience and (sexual and state) violence in the Eastern borderlands of gender and Europe.

Abstract: At UK universities, a mostly student led movement has started to emerge that fights for decolonizing Higher Education. This movement is inspired by transnational student movements like Rhodes/Fees Must Fall in South Africa and calls for challenging racist, colonialist, nationalist, and neoliberal paradigms in knowledge production by addressing both issues of epistemology and access to higher education. Discussing central political claims of the “decolonising the curriculum” movement and with gender studies/transgender studies as example but keeping broader Humanities and Social Sciences in the framework, we will explore potentials and challenges of the task of decolonizing Higher Education and research in Europe and the global North.

Suggested Readings:

David, Emmanuel. 2018. ‘Transgender Archipelagos’. TSQ 5 (3): 332–354.

Dutta, Aniruddha and Roy, Raina. 2014. ‘Decolonizing Transgender in India: Some Reflections’. TSQ 1:3.

Okech, Awino. 2018. ‘Cite African Feminists: Some Readings.’ Medium, October 4. medium.com/uawinopokech/reading-list-bddc1e71f6fd.

Okech. Awino. 2020. ‘African feminist epistemic communities and decoloniality’. Critical African Studies, 12:3, 313-329.

Olufemi, Lola. 2015. ‘Our Curricula Are White, and They Shouldn’t Be.’ Varsity, October 24. www.varsity.co.uk/comment/9064.

Rao, Rahul. 2020. 'Neoliberal antiracism and the British university', Radical Philosophy 208, 47–54.

Tudor, Alyosxa. 2021. ‘Decolonising Trans/Gender Studies? Teaching Gender, Race and Sexuality in Times of the Rise of the Global Right’. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 8.2. Special Issue: ‘The Europa Issue’: 158-176.

Xaba, Wanelisa. 2017. ‘Challenging Fanon: A Black Radical Feminist Perspective on Violence and the Fees Must Fall Movement.’ Agenda 31, nos. 3–4: 96–104.

Organized by Sofia Varino

Ute Kalender is deputy professor for Media, Algorithms and Society in the media studies department at the University of Paderborn during the winter term 2022/23. Her research and teaching focuses on disability studies, digitality and artificial intelligence from an intersectional perspective. She is also a part-time researcher at the Charité in a participatory research project on health care for intersex children and adolescents as well as children and adolescents with AGS, Turner and Klinefelter Syndrome. She also worked as a practitioner in the BMBF project Digital Academy Care 4.0. Website: utekalender.de

Abstract: Ableism is a “trajectory of perfection” (Campbell 2020). Heterogeneous norms permeate epistemologies, architectures, educational systems, cultural products, economies and law, often suggesting an ideal of a healthy, fit and non-disabled body. The aim of this workshop is to critically engage with such ableisms on different levels of knowledge – on the level of higher education, on the level of academic research, and on the level of scientific narrations. That comprises the “prestige economy of a university” (Blackmore 2016) and its “rigid regimes of productivity, effectiveness and excellence geared towards tangible outcomes and outputs” and its standard of a “normative, fully able and abled being“ (Brown 2020). Ableism in academia also points to the involvement of the universities in the disturbing history of eugenics, the development of the medical model of disability, architectural barriers, and elitist educational institutions in which academic selection is viewed as a quality criterion. Finally, ableism also becomes visible when Donna Haraway’s figure of the cyborg is critically reread. For the last four decades the cyborg has enjoyed huge popularity in feminist intersectional approaches to technologies. By referring to the embodied queer knowledge of people with disabilities, this workshop reminds us that people with disabilities are indeed cyborgs when they use prostheses. At the same time, the very bodily process of merging with prostheses is by no means easy per se. It can be painful. And it can be simply at the service of meeting the normative expectations of any given environment or social setting.

Suggested Readings:

Brown, Nicole (2020).Introduction: Theorising ableism in academia. In: Brown, N. & Leigh, J. (Eds.). Ableism in Academia. Theorising Experiences of Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses in Higher Education. London: UCL Press, 1-10.https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10110703/1/Ableism-in-Academia.pdf

Weise, Jillian(2018). “Common Cyborg,” Granta. September 24, 2018. https://granta.com/common-cyborg/

Co-organized by Zeynep Turkyilmaz and Sofia Varino

Mehmet Sinan Birdal is Ernst Reuter fellow at the Freie Universitaet, Berlin. He received a PhD in International Relations from the University of Southern California. He is the author of The Holy Roman Empire and the Ottomans: From Global Imperial Power to Absolutist States (2011, I.B. Tauris). He has written about queer historiography of the Turkish Republic, the conservative discourses on queers, the role of queers in the 2013 Gezi uprising and the strategic choices facing the LGBTI+ movement in its aftermath, and the post-2016 repression targeting queers. He writes a weekly column for the daily newspaper, Evrensel.

Abstract: Culture wars are raging in local, national, regional, transnational and international politics. Sexuality and gender are central to these conflicts. When, why and how do dissident sexualities become targets of securitization and criminalization? Presenting Turkey as a case study, the talk surveys the theory of international norms, the political sociology of violence, the history of sexuality, and the political economy of sexuality. It identifies opportunities and challenges for interdisciplinary collaboration and queer strategies of survival.

Suggested readings:

Altman, D. and Symons, J. 2015. “International Norm Polarization: Sexuality as a Subject of Human Rights Protection.” International Theory 7(1): 61-95.

Ayoub, P.M. and K. Kollman. 2021. “(Same)-sex in the city: Urbanisation and LGBTI rights expansion.” European Journal of Political Research 60: 603–624.

Birdal, M.S. “The State of the LGBTs in the Age of Reaction: Post-2011 Visibility and Repression,” Oxford Handbook on Global LGBT and Sexual Minority Politics (2020, Oxford University Press).  DOI:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190673741.013.16

Bosia, M. 2014. “Strange Fruit: Homophobia, the State, and the Politics of LGBT Rights and Capabilities.” Journal of Human Rights 13(3): 256-273.

Edenborg, E. 2021. “Anti-Gender Politics as Discourse Coalitions: Russia’s Domestic and International Promotion of “Traditional Values.” Problems of Post-Communism, DOI: 10.1080/10758216.2021.1987269