Description
The title of this year’s NOG Research Day takes its inspiration from Sara Ahmed’s monograph Living a Feminist Life. Ahmed reminds us that as feminists, we experience the devastating effects of racism, genderism, ableism, ageism, homo- and transphobia on a daily basis. In addition to these challenges, we are faced with the ongoing neoliberalization of academia, with its emphasis on the marketing of knowledge, and on surveillance and control. This market model of academia has been incorporated into the universities, for example through the emphasis on ‘earning power’, the bureaucratization of student-teacher relationships, and an increasingly internalized ‘audit culture’ that seeks to reduce everyone and everything to quantifiable data or measurable ‘output’. Therefore, the main question of the NOG Research Day is: “Is it still possible to lead a feminist life in neoliberal academia?”Living a feminist life means being constantly aware of interlocking socio-political hierarchies, structural injustices, and many forms of exploitation. It is a life that tries to understand how these practices of domination work in order to question and then overcome them, whether they are structured around gender, race, religion, age, ability, or sexual orientation. At the same time, living a feminist life is a practice of freedom, a way of enabling and empowering ourselves and others, a collective effort to build feminist, queer, decolonial and sustainable worlds. How can we foster these modes of critical and creative thinking, making, and doing within an academic climate where the gap between our everyday work and a shared feminist commitment to progressive social change seems to be growing?
| Period | 14 Jun 2019 |
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| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Utrecht, NetherlandsShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | National |