Date: 31.5.2021

Time: 10-17:00 CET 

Online on Zoom 

Registration: free, the registration period has ended

The workshop will explore Central and Eastern European feminist perspectives on the hierarchising and necropolitical character of the European East-West divide as well as visions for just futures. 

In contemporary global terms, the ‘Eastern European’ region is perceived as part of Europe. After 1989, the neoliberalisation of the market, Westernisation of culture and social values, and subsequent entry into the European Union made the countries that used to be part of the so-called Eastern Block ‘finally’ European. Yet, being from ‘Eastern Europe’ carries certain devaluing connotations that lead to social hierarchisation in everyday and institutional encounters. In the West, individuals from Eastern and parts of Central Europe (CEE) - and women in particular - have long been othered, structurally marginalised and utilised as cheap labour. In the current COVID-19 pandemic, the devaluation of CEE workers obtained a literal necropolitical character when several West-European countries protected the lives of their residents through social pandemic measures, such as ‘lockdown,’ while at the same time imported, with minimal health protections, poor working conditions and low wages, a CEE migrant labour force to harvest seasonal crops and provide care work. 

This workshop will bring together CEE feminist scholars, who are academically located within both CEE and Western Europe, to discuss what it means to be equal-but-not-quite as CEE subjects, feminists, activists, workers and academics, in the context of being part of Europe and the world more globally. Speakers will be invited to reflect on where CEE is in intersectional theory and how CEE experiences contribute to the analysis of power relations in Europe. By relating old and new CEE scholarship with a broad range of anti-racist and decolonial feminist theories, the workshop will inform international feminist and decolonial debates, which commonly fail to include CEE voices and scholarship. Incorporating CEE perspectives is crucial for an in-depth analysis of the nuances of oppression, the broadening and deepening of intersectional debates on gender and race as social categories of power and for identifying ways to foster intersectional justice in Europe and beyond. 

The workshop is dedicated to the memory of feminist scholars Hana Havelková and Marina Blagojević Hughson. 

Programme

All talks will involve 20 mins for presentations and 10 mins for Q&A

10:00-10:15  Welcome: Tereza Hendl (University of Augsburg/Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich) and Magdalena Górska (Utrecht University)

10:15-10:45  Madina Tlostanova (Linköping University) - Equality Revisited: a Decolonial View on the Perpetual Construction of Internal European Others 

10:45-11:00  break 

11:00-11:30  Petra Ezzeddine (Charles University) and Zuzana Uhde (Czech Academy of Sciences) - Essential, Exploited and Unequal: Borderscapes of the Political Economy of Social Reproduction in Europe

11:30-12:00  Angéla Kóczé (Central European University) - Configuration of "Coloniality of Power" through the Gendered Racialization of Roma in Post-Socialist Europe

12:00-13:00  lunch break 

13:00-13:30  Tereza Hendl (University of Augsburg/Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich) - Examining Western Dimensions of White ‘Privilege’ and Supremacy: On the Need for an Intersectional Critique of Whiteness 

13:30-14:00  Adriana Qubaiova (independent scholar) - Between the Easts: What Can We Gain from an Inter-regional Perspective Between the Middle East and Eastern Europe? 

14:00-14:15  break 

14:15-14:45  Kateřina Kolářová (Charles University) - The Cruel Optimism of Rehabilitative Postsocialism: Imagining the Crip Critique from the ‘East’  

14:45-15:15  Ewa Majewska (independent scholar) - Weak Resistance in the Former East: Feminist and Queer Struggles 

15:15-15:30  break

15:30-16:00  Čarna Brković (University of Göttingen) - (South)East Europe and Geopolitics of Surprise in Anthropological Epistemology 

16:00-16:45  Discussion Panel: Visions for Decolonial Feminist Futures, chaired by Věra Sokolová

16:45-17:00  Closing remarks: Magdalena Górska 

Speaker biographies

Čarna Brković is Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at the University of Goettingen. Her work combines a focus on inequalities and power with an eye for social complexity and ambiguity. After her PhD at the University of Manchester, she started developing two projects. One explores what happens with humanitarian affect and practices in Eastern European semiperiphery and how the fall of socialism transformed humanitarianism in former Yugoslavia. Another looks at the experiences and practices of sexuality and freedom among gay men in Montenegro. Čarna’s most recent publications include the article “Minority sexualities, kinship, and non-autological freedom in Montenegro” in the Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale and the special issue on the “Anthropology of Gender in Montenegro” in Comparative Southeast European Studies. 

Petra Ezzeddine, PhD is the co-founder of EUROCare Network. She is a social anthropologist and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague. Her research focuses on anthropology of migration, transnational care practices, globalization of care for children and seniors, ageing and migration. She is a research fellow in the research program Global Conflicts and Local Interactions at the Czech Academy of Sciences. She held a visiting research fellowship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Sasakawa Scholarship for Young Leaders at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main and the Erste Fellowship for Social Scientists (Erste Foundation, Vienna). She has participated in a few EU founded applied research projects related to care and migration. She closely cooperates with the Association for Integration and Migration, Prague (SIMI Praha) as their experts on gender related projects.

Magdalena Górska is Assistant Professor at the Graduate Gender Program, Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She obtained a doctorate at the Department of Thematic Studies – Gender Studies at Linköping University in Sweden, and cultivated her passion for feminist theory and politics during her undergraduate and graduate education at the Faculty of Humanities, and at the Department of Gender Studies at Charles University in the Czech Republic. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz in the US. Magdalena’s research develops a non-universalizing and politicized understanding of embodiment where human bodies are conceptualized as agential actors of intersectional politics. Her work offers anthropo-situated while posthumanist discussions of human embodiment and agency and focuses on the quotidian corpomaterial and corpo-affective practices as political matters. She is an author of the book Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability and a founder of the Breathing Matters Network.

Tereza Hendl is a philosopher and bioethicist. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She currently works as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich and the University of Augsburg, where she is Co-Lead on the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) funded project “META - mHealth: ethical, legal and societal aspects in the technological age,” which interrogates the implications of digital health transformation on individual, population and global levels. Her research interests include the epistemology and ethics of emerging technologies, ethical aspects of sex selection and philosophical - particularly decolonial feminist - conceptualisations of justice, vulnerability and solidarity. She was awarded the 2015 Max Charlesworth Prize in Bioethics by the Australasian Association of Bioethics and Health Law (AABHL) and held the Caroline Miles Visiting Scholarship at the Oxford University Ethox Centre in the UK, the Brocher Foundation Residency in Switzerland and was a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Institute at the Australian National University and the Hastings Center, USA. 

Angéla Kóczé is an Assistant Professor, Chair of Romani Studies, and Academic Director of the Roma Graduate Preparation Program at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. In 2013–2017, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, NC, USA. She has published several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters with various international presses, including Palgrave Macmillan, Ashgate, Routledge and CEU Press, as well as several thematic policy papers related to social inclusion, gender equality, social justice and civil society. In 2013, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, honored Kóczé with the Ion Ratiu Democracy Award for her interdisciplinary research approach, which combines community engagement and policymaking with in-depth participatory research about the Roma. She is a co-editor of The Romani Women’s Movement: Struggles and Debates in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2019, with Violetta Zentai, Jelena Jovanović and Enikő Vincze) and The Roma and their Struggle for Identity in Contemporary Europe (Oxford: Berghahn, 2020, with Huub van Baar). 

Kateřina Kolářová teaches at the Department of Sociology in the Gender Studies program, Charles University, Prague and is a member of the research team at Centre for Gender & Science at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. She is also a board member of ATGENDER (The European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation). Her work engages intersections of disability, crip, queer and race theories. Most recently, her manuscript Rehabilitative Postsocialism: Disability, Race, Gender and Sexuality and the Limits of National Belonging won the 2019 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in Humanities (forthcoming with Michigan University Press). She is also co-editing a book mapping disability politics under state socialism across Eastern Europe. Together with Martina Winkler she co-edited Re/Imaginations of Disability in State Socialism: Visions, Promises, Frustrations (forthcoming with Campus Verlag in 2021).

Ewa Majewska is a feminist philosopher and activist, living in Warsaw. She taught at the University of Warsaw and the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, she was also a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley; ICI Berlin and IWM in Vienna. She published four books and 50 articles and essays, in journals, magazines and collected volumes, including: e-flux, Signs, Third Text, Journal of Utopian Studies and Jacobin. Her current research is in Hegel's philosophy, focusing on the dialectics and the weak; feminist critical theory and antifascist cultures. Her next book, Feminist Antifascism. Counterpublics of the Common, will be published in 2021, with Verso. 

Adriana Qubaiova Adriana Qubaiova holds a PhD in Comparative Gender Studies from the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. Placing herself between the fields of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Queer Ethnography, she has been building a new conceptual framework for the study
of sexuality in Lebanon. Most recently, she was a Global Teaching Fellow at Arizona State University, a Visiting Scholar at the American University of Beirut, and will be a Visiting Instructor at the University of Vienna next
fall. She is currently writing her book, tentatively titled *Hedging Sexualities in Beirut*. Her newest research project is exploring race and sexuality from the perspective of regional interaction between the Middle East (West Asia) and Eastern Europe.

Madina Tlostanova is a decolonial thinker and writer, Professor of Postcolonial Feminisms at Linköping University (Sweden). She has authored over 180 articles and book chapters, 11 monographs and three novels translated into many languages. Her interests focus on decolonial thought, particularly in its aesthetic, existential and epistemic manifestations, indigenous feminisms and feminisms of the Global South, the postsoviet colonial human condition, fiction and art. Her most recent books include What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (Duke University Press, 2018), A New Political Imagination, Making the Case (co-authored with Tony Fry, Routledge, 2020) and a forthcoming collection Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues, Intersections, Opacities, co-edited with Redi Koobak and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert (Routledge, 2021).

Zuzana Uhde specializes in critical social theory, feminist theory and research of global interactions. Her current research revolves around interdisciplinary analyses of transnational migration, bordering processes and structural injustice, transnational social reproduction and commodification of care, with a regional expertise focused on Central Europe and Eastern Africa. She works as a researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. She is editor-in-chief of the academic journal Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research (www.genderonline.cz) and a research fellow in the research program Global Conflicts and Local Interactions (Strategy AV21). She held a Fulbright fellowship at the UC Berkeley, USA, a visiting research fellowship at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and other fellowships in Brasil, Hungary, Slovakia, Lithuania and France.