Category Archives: cee

EFF June conference in Poland cancelled

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The European Feminist Forum, which was planned for 13-15 June 2008 in Warsaw, will not take place.

The European networks that have been cooperating since 2006 on the platform for debate and sharing entitled European Feminist Forum have decided, due to financial reasons, that the culmination of the process with the conference will not take place. This is the face-to-face meeting of European feminists, which we had scheduled to take place from 13-15 June 2008. Instead, the process will be concluded with a comprehensive publication.

The other parts of the European Feminist Forum process have taken place and we are very proud of the achievements. The process has set up a vivid field of knowledge creation, knowledge sharing, movement building and agenda setting in Europe. 21 Affinity Groups have debated urgent issues, and shared their information and knowledge through the European Feminist Forum website. Our process of visioning a feminist Europe was driven by many feminist-inspired voices, from young, migrant, male, minority and marginalized voices. The European Feminist Forum was constructed and has been an inclusive and joint platform of all of these groups from the start. For a preliminary overview of results so far, follow this link.
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eu-wide study on domestic duties and jobs

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Childcare locks women into lower-paid jobs

· Europe-wide study reveals entrenched lifestyle divide
· Domestic duties prevent females pursuing top jobs

December 6, 2007
The Guardian

British women are working in lower paid and lower status jobs than their male counterparts because they still shoulder the responsibility for housework and childcare, a Cambridge University study reveals today.

A “lifestyle divide”, in which women take on the burden of domestic duties, creates a vicious circle as they are then less able to work the long hours needed to win top jobs. They then earn less and are reinforced as responsible for household tasks, says the Europe-wide research.

The divide also leaves women with a longer working day, despite earning less, according to the study. The average working week for a woman in Europe is 68 hours, including paid and domestic work – longer than the average of 55 hours for a man in full-time employment.

The study, the first of its kind since EU members joined from the former eastern bloc, suggests efforts to reduce the workplace gender gap in the UK and the rest of Europe have made little progress since the early 1990s. It reinforces the warnings of several British studies that part-time working, now more accessible in the UK thanks to a right to ask to work flexibly, can lock women into low-paid jobs. more

About the study – University of Cambridge

down the global feminist wire

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zine symposium in warsaw

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– announcement via chaosXgrrlz zine –

Grrrlz and boyz!
On 19th of May we organize first zine symposium in Warsaw, and we wanna invite you for that event.

Basically, a zine (pronounced “zeen”) is a publication that is created by someone – or a group of like-minded people – who wants to express themselves in a cheap, personal, DIY format. As a zine editor (or “zinester”), you have complete control over the production, design, and content of your zine. It’s pretty fun. It may surprise you, but in Poland zine culture is quite strong, and the symposium will be a great chance to get know about it a little bit more.

On the whole world there are regular meetings of zine makers and zine lovers. Our zine symposium will be a party by which we wanna present the zine culture, independent book and comic publishings, distributions and zine makers and other paper-art creators. Also it which be a chance to get to know lots of independent initiatives and political, non commercial ideas.

We plan a whole day, free entrance party, during which there will be some workshops, lectures, presentations, as well as exhibitions, film presentations, freeshop, zine reading room and, last but maybe most important, zine and book fair
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call for submissions : women’s lives & gender relations in Eastern Europe

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Collected Volume on Women’s Lives, Gender Relations and State Policy in Central and Eastern Europe under State Socialism

Deadline: June 15, 2007

Scholars working on gender and socialism in Central and Eastern Europe are invited to submit a 500-word abstract of an essay for a collected volume examining post-89 approaches to the study, research and analysis of women’s lives and issues of gender under state socialism.

The wealth of human and archival sources that have become available since the collapse of communism, combined with the increased use of cultural, social, gender, and oral history in studies of socialism, have provided crucial insight into gender in socialist societies — both as it was discursively represented and lived on an everyday level. This in turn has facilitated a more nuanced and complex understanding of women under socialism that challenges the bleak and homogenized portraits of women that were produced — in both feminist and non-feminist scholarship–prior to and immediately after 1989.

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campanie/info anti-trafic

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anunt pentru o actiune in londra – este o idee buna:

Go on the town on Saturday, May 19, 11am – and help the fight against sex trafficking

These days more and more lads’ nights out end up at lap-dancing clubs, ‘massage parlours’ and brothels. But how many of those lads know what’s really going on in these places?

Thousands of women in the UK are manipulated and coerced into prostitution every year. Women like Ellen, who was abducted in Albania and sold to a brothel in London’s West End, where she was forced to have sex with up to 40 men every day. If she tried to refuse, she was beaten, raped and threatened with death. She was 15 years old.

The Truth Isn’t Sexy is a campaign highlighting this brutal reality, using posters and beer mats, which we need to get into as many pubs and bars as we can. …

We’d love you to join us on Saturday May 19, when our teams will be blitzing the watering holes of central London, to see if they’ll put up our posters and/or have our beermats on their tables. It’ll be a great way to spend a Saturday, and should get our message out all over central London. …

www.thetruthisntsexy.com

foarte util si informativ: articol despre miscarea anti-violenta si anti-trafic in bulgaria, probleme general valabile in europa de est [en]

recent: “Autoritatile romane: Victimele traficului o duc bine!”

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lista lf-ro de resurse anti-trafic

reading on feminism(s) and rroma women

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“Re-envisioning Social Justice from the Ground Up: Including the Experiences of Romani Women” by Alexandra Oprea, a paper that:

… centres on the exclusion of Romani women from mainstream feminist and antiracist discourses in Europe. This exclusion is explained through the lens of intersectionalism and problematic identity politics. It discusses their invisibility as perpetuated by programmes and reports from non-governmental organizations (NGOs). It explains the absence of Romani women from Romani and feminist discourses, the uncritical view of Romani culture, and the vulnerability of Romanian Romani women to domestic violence. It emphasizes that analyses of social problems must be performed from the bottom up, looking at the experiences of those who are multi-burdened, such as poor Romani women. The paper concludes by discussing the value of recognizing privilege as the foundation for inclusive scholarship and discourse.

Several other analyses in addition to the sources here:

“The Erasure of Romani Women in Statistical Data: Limits of the Race-versus-Gender Approach” by Alexandra Oprea

“Child Marriage a Cultural Problem, Educational Access a Race Issue? Deconstructing Uni-Dimensional Understanding of Romani Oppression” by Alexandra Oprea

“Double Discrimination Faced by Romani Women in Europe” by Angela Kocze

“Breaking the Barriers – Romani Women and Access to Public Health Care”: European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia report

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Also discussing mainstream bias and reactionaryism to anti-discrimination work, the fact that “anti-Gypsyism is often combined with other types of discriminatory practices such as xenophobia, sexism and homophobia”…:

“Fourth arm of the state. Romania’s press becomes a willing partner in prejudice” by Valeriu Nicolae

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update sept. 2008; a few other good materials:

“Economic Aspects of the Condition of Roma Women”, Berliner Institut für Vergleichende Sozialforschung, 2006 [PDF]

“A Place at the Policy Table: Report on the Roma Women’s Forum”, OSI, 2004

“Broadening the Agenda: The Status of Romani Women in Romania”, OSI, Laura Surdu and Mihai Surdu, 2006

“Romani Women: Between Two Cultures” in Bending the Bow. Targeting Women’s Human Rights and Opportunities. OSI, Network Women’s Program, 2003 (thanks c.)

“The Situation of Roma/Gypsy Women in Europe”, Nicoleta Bitu, 1999 (thanks c.)

more: Roma Women Association, Romania: Reports

Call for papers: Roma and Gadje

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CALL FOR PAPERS: For a special issue of the Anthropology of East Europe Review on Roma and Gadje, scheduled for Fall 2007.
We are seeking papers that consider the ways Romani individuals and communities negotiate, resist and reproduce the places Roma occupy in the social and political contexts of non-Romani spheres, as well as sociological analyses of the lifeworlds and counterpublics of Roma.

As a liberal order consolidates throughout the Eastern European region, Roma everywhere are taken up either as (to borrow a term from Saidiya Hartman) the “imaginative surface” of the woes of postsocialism or as a romanticized remnant of a bygone past. Roma seem to exist in the shadow of culture – timeless, errant and enchantingly Other – while the social worlds they inhabit are circumscribed by their intensifying economic and spatial marginalization and the continued pathologization of their behavior as inadaptable and often criminal. The historical roots of such stereotyping run deep and resonate powerfully in our particular moment: the Zigeuner/Tigani/Cikán/Cigany Other continues to function within discussions of transnational European identities, even as these discourses claim a complete break with the ethnonational identities of the past. Gadje, in turn, are rarely, if ever, explicitly implicated in the public figurations of difference through which Romani and Gadje identities are mutually constituted and that set the terms of much of the scholarly and activist engagement with Romani lives.

We seek contributions that situate their analysis within this specular constitution of otherness in specific historical, political and social milieux. How are individual Roma and Gadje interpolated by the dynamic and shifting boundaries that inform the dialectics of identity? What are the micro-physics of the negotiations along this border, and how do they sustain the production of difference? How are the ambiguities and indeterminacies encountered along these borders stabilized and made commensurate in acts of recognition (or rejection) of otherness? And how does the figuration of Zigeuner/Tigani/Cikán/Cigany difference symbolically secure the emergent political orders in the eastward progression of “Europeanization?”
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Postgraduate Course in Dubrovnik: Feminist Critical Analysis: Race, Discourse, Biopolitics

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Postgraduate Course in Dubrovnik
Feminist Critical Analysis: Race, Discourse, Biopolitics

INTER-UNIVERSITY CENTER
DUBROVNIK, CROATIA

May , 21st – 25th 2007

Call for Proposals

Rutgers (State University of New Jersey) Women’s and Gender Studies
Department and Belgrade Women’s Studies and Gender Research Center,
Belgrade University are pleased to announce the 8th annual postgraduate course in Feminist Critical Analysis: Race, Discourse, Biopolitics. The course will be held at the Inter-University Centre, Dubrovnik (http://www.hr/iuc/) on May 21st – 25th, 2007. The course will be co-directed by Dasa Duhacek of the Belgrade Women´s Studies, Belgrade Universirty and Ethel Brooks of the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Rutgers University.

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