Spaces of Resistance. A Study of Gender and Sexualities in Times of Transformation

Project description

Bringing together multi-sited ethnography, ditigal ethnography and comparative analysis, this project is dedicated at exploring the ways in which struggles for women’s and sexual rights enable spaces of resistance that are open for new futures, as they engage with and negotiate multiple power hierarchies. The project conducts regional case studies in Russia, Turkey and Scandinavia. In each of these, contextual histories, present conditions and transnational exchanges are explored and comparative analysis is carried out, as we go deep in to but also move out from the single sites of exploration.

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Situated in feminist post-/decolonial and postsocialist theory, this project challenges contemporary understandings of modernity and tradition as stable and fixed cultural values, and emphasize the ambivalent and contradictory character of both the modern and the traditional. We move beyond dichotomous understandings of religion and secularism, and explore the heterogeneous and shifting expressions of secularism and religion by focusing on the multiple and changing manifestations of both the secular and the religious. Guided by the notion politics of belonging, we examine how political projects can construct belonging to particular collectives that themselves are construed by these projects. As a result, our goal is to develop new insights into how encounters between transnational NGOs and local women’s and sexual rights movements enable new meanings, new political subjectivities and new collective identities in an emergent global civil society.

The Spaces of Resistance project is hosted by the Department of Cultural Sciences at the University of Gothenburg. It is funded by Knut and Alice Wallenberg’s Foundation in collaboration with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the University of Gothenburg.
To get in touch with us, please send an email to spacesofresistance [at] gmail [.] com.