Reimaginarea justitiei sociale de jos in sus: Includerea femeilor rome

O traducere integrala a lucrarii “Re-envisioning Social Justice from the Ground Up: Including the Experiences of Romani Women” de Alexandra Oprea (link la fisier PDF) – cu multumiri Crinei pentru editari

Lucrarea de fata se concentreaza pe excluderea femeilor rome din discursurile feministe si anti-rasiste dominante (in mainstream) in Europa. Aceasta excludere este atribuita intersectionalitatii si politicilor de identitate problematice. Lucrarea discuta invizibilitatea femeilor rome perpetuata de programe si rapoarte ale organizatiilor ne-guvernamentale (ONG-uri) si explica absenta femeilor rome din discursuri rome si feministe, privirea ne-critica asupra culturii rome si vulnerabilitatea femeilor rome din Romania la violenta domestica. Textul pune accentul pe faptul ca analiza problemelor sociale trebuie facuta de jos in sus, luand in considerare experientele celor care intampina greutati multiple, cum ar fi femeile rome sarace. In concluzie, lucrarea discuta importanta recunoasterii privilegiilor ca fundatie a unor discursuri si a unei cercetari atotcuprinzatoare.

CfP for fellows and affiliated scholars on gender at University of California

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS FOR THE 2008-2009 ACADEMIC YEAR

BEATRICE BAIN RESEARCH GROUP (BBRG) – UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-BERKELEY

SCHOLARS IN RESIDENCE PROGRAM and AFFILIATED SCHOLARS PROGRAM

The Beatrice Bain Research Group (BBRG) is the University of California at Berkeley’s center for research on gender and women. This announcement concerns two of its programs:
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call for papers: GENDER & BORDERS/BOUNDARIES

Call for papers:
Please distribute widely

GENDER AND BORDERS/BOUNDARIES
Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference
At Manchester University
June 27, 2008

In association with Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies/ University of Leeds Migration and Diaspora Cultural Studies Network
Department of Theology and Religious Studies/University of Leeds Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies/University of Manchester

This one day postgraduate conference seeks to examine issues of gender and borders/boundaries across a range of critical perspectives. We want to encourage innovative and interdisciplinary dialogues and welcome postgraduate students from a variety of disciplines, such as anthropology, cultural studies, gender studies, religion, sociology, psychology, politics, geography and social
work.
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Five Colleges Women’s Studies Research Center

FELLOWSHIP OPPORTUNITIES

FIVE COLLEGE WOMEN’S STUDIES RESEARCH CENTER
A collaborative project of Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The Center invites applications for its RESEARCH ASSOCIATESHIPS for 2008-2009 from scholars and teachers at all levels of the educational system, as well as from artists, community organizers and political activists, both local and international. Associates are provided with offices in our spacious facility, library privileges, and the collegiality of a diverse community of feminists. Research Associate applications are accepted for either a semester or the academic year. The Center supports projects in all disciplines so long as they focus centrally on women or gender. Regular Research Associateships are non-stipendiary. We accept about 15-18 Research Associates per year.
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anti-gipsy racism and the symbolism of the female body

Enikő Magyari-Vincze

[“Rasism antitiganesc si simbolistica trupului feminin”]

The attitudes and discourses of politicians, journalists, people from the street or internet users towards the recent act of violence and crime in Italy perpetrated – seemingly – by a Romanian citizen brings to the fore many (re)sentiments and ideas about “who we are”, or about “our” position in relation to those we think are superior/inferior compared to “us”, or about what we think “others” expect from “us” and what expectations “we” may have regarding “them”. Beyond the crime, these reactions symbolically express processes of cultural (self)positioning of people who are perceived and defined as “Romanians in Europe”. These processes take place after the political blessing of Romania’s accession to EU, and they obviously have material and existential consequences for those concerned. One realizes that the interpretation and explanation of a crime carried out in a given place and at a given time by an individual against another is not accidentally framed in particular terms. This is why we need to wonder what all these recounts, narratives and debates are about, what they do represent while also producing the events due to their interpretive power of attributing them certain meanings.
Below I will show that the all too politicized scandal denotes first of all that social exclusion, underlied/justified by the racialization of the excluded individuals or groups, is responsible for the recent anti-gipsy hysteria from Italy and Romania (which on its turn has well-defined political aims). The events also illustrate the way anti-gipsy racism – in order to legitimate and make more popular its actions or to increase its power for mobilization – appropriates and manipulates the female body, which has became on this stage a symbol of the Italian nation jeopardized by intruders perceived through their supposedly inferior (or even criminal) “race”.

In this case, too, trying to figure out what it is happening people make use of the classification systems they have acquired during their socialization as individuals and collectivities. Among them the ethnicized/racialized and the gendered classifications are prominent. The dichotomy between “Europeans” and “Romanians”, “westerners” and “easterners”, “Romanians” and “Roma”, or between “Italian woman” and “Roma man”, as any cultural distinction is produced through everyday social relations, but also in the context of particular political and economic interests. This distinction has well-defined social functions that point beyond the organization of the interpersonal relations on which it is used in a direct way and which it tends to interpret here and now. Because it is a distinction that superficially generalizes personal traits and actions attributing them a presumably universal or group-like character. Traits are not only allocated to groups, but the latter are automatically compared and organized in hierarchies (on different value scales ranging from ‘good’ to ‘bad’, from ‘civilized’ to ‘primitive’ and so on). As a result, certain groups are collectively excluded from the pool of “acceptable” or “normal” people, or even from “humans”. From the perspective of those who have the power to control classifications, but also for those who do not have means for self-representation, the stake of these symbolic games is to establish who is the winner and looser in this messy business and implicitly who deserves access to resources, rights or even life.
In a society that favors the individuals and collectivities belonging to ones own ethnic group and in which people try to explain differences and inequalities resorting to biology, we can expect that in critical situations ethnocracy and racism are going to become more visible and to manifest very intensively. In such cases they will mark social relations as racial by placing all the individuals assumed to belong to a certain category into one (inferior or superior) “race”. Moreover, they will initiate reactions against the “inferior races” (solutions similar to that of Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, or of Antonescu’s) borrowed from a past that suddenly becomes relevant for the present. In addition, racism and ethnocracy racialize traits, activities, phenomena and social problems, consequently anyone who or anything that is seen as inferior, unacceptable, not wanted or outsider, becomes “gipsy” or “gipsy-like”.
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Call for Ideas: Students Conference in European Feminist and Gender Studies

Call for Ideas : Students Conference in European Feminist and Gender Studies; Utrecht, the 3rd June 2009

WeAVE (a Network for European gender studies students, postgraduate students, PhDs, post-doc researchers, junior teachers or anyone else interested in this field of study) is planning to organise a one day Student Conference, the 3 rd June 2009, in the frame of the 7th European Feminist Research Conference “Gendered Cultures at the Crossroads of Imagination, Knowledge and Politics” organised by the Thematic Network for European Women’s Studies, ATHENA3, the 4-7 June 2009 in Utrecht (the Netherlands).

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Call – LOVA International Conference: Ethnographies of Gender and Globalization

LOVA
International Conference
3 – 4 July 2008, Amsterdam

Ethnographies of Gender and Globalization

Call for panels and papers

Globalization is the result of the rapid exchange of ideas, peoples, goods, capital, information and technologies, and the general compression of distances and time. Globalization processes have a large impact on people’s everyday lives. Even in the most remote parts of the world, people and locations are being connected to each other. This interconnectedness can be seen as the core feature of globalization. In turn, people respond to new challenges and opportunities offered by globalization. Their daily actions produce, transform and determine the specific directions that globalization processes may take.

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GEXcel Conference of Workshops – Örebro University 22-25 May 2008

Supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council Centre, Örebro University and Linköpings University launched a project to establish a European Center of Gender Excellence based in Sweden– Gendering Excellence (GEXcel): Towards a European Centre of Excellence in Transnational and Transdisciplinary Studies of Changing Gender Relations, Intersectionalities and Embodiment . In 2007-08, the theme of research sponsored by GEXcel has been “Gender, Sexuality, and Global Change,” directed by Anna G. Jónasdóttir, Professor of Gender Studies at Örebro University. (For a full description of the theme, go to http://www.genderexcel.org)

We invite applications for this conference of workshops from junior and senior scholars whose research directly addresses one of the following three sub-themes: 1) Sexuality, Love and Social Theory; 2) Power and Politics: A Feminist View; and 3) Common and Conflicted: Rethinking Interest, Solidarity, and Action.

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women and tech stuff

because unfortunately the tech-related discussions planned for ladyfest were all cancelled in one way or another, i’m listing here the materials i’d prepared for some of it, in case someone finds them useful as resources: