The GenderHub presents: What is gender studies?

About the panel

The panel ’What is Gender Studies?’ brings together PhD-students from across disciplines to explore the foundations, evolution, and contemporary relevance of gender studies as a field of inquiry. 

The panel will examine how gender operates as a category of analysis, a lived experience, and a site of political struggle. Panellists will discuss how gender studies challenges dominant norms, expands understandings of power and identity, and offers tools for interpreting social, cultural, and political life. 

Whether you are new to the field or deeply engaged in its debates, this session provides an accessible and thought provoking introduction to gender studies and its relevance today.

The panel is organized by GenderHub.

Programme

• 10.15 Welcome by Helle Rydström and Birke J. Friedländer
• 10.20 Presentation of the panel by the chair Xin Liu-Toivanen
• 10.30 Panel discussion with Yvonne Jila, Bibi Imre-Millei, Isi de Paula, and Birke J. Friedländer
• 11.30 Open discussion

Chair

Xin Liu-Toivanen (she/her) is docent and senior lecturer in Gender Studies. Her research interests range from wealth, population to environment, gaming and digitalisation.

Panellists

Yvonne Jila

Yvonne Jila is a doctoral student at Lund University (Department of Sociology). Her research focuses on women’s movements in authoritarian and patriarchal contexts, with particular attention to how activists in Zimbabwe practice self-care and collective care under conditions of repression, surveillance, and political constraint. She draws on feminist, (post)colonial, decolonial, and social movement theories to center activists’ lived experiences and explore care as both an everyday and a political practice. This research builds on her earlier work on mobilization for gender equality among women activists in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Bibi Imre-Millei

Bibi Imre-Millei is a PhD student at the department of Political Science. Her thesis is about how military drone operators narrate their military identities, and she undertakes this research from an empathetically critical, skeptically curious approach, utilizing feminist methods. Bibi also has experience researching underrepresented communities in state militaries and military sexual violence.  

Isi de Paula

Isi de Paula, doctoral student at Lund University (Division of Comparative Literature). In my research, I have focused on contemporary literary works that challenge Western scientific rationality by deconstructing established binaries such as culture/nature and human/non-human. Situating my research in the context of the Anthropocene, I approach the critique of Western scientific rationality through intersections between non-Western knowledges and modern interpretations of non-human subjectivity offered by posthumanism and new/feminist materialisms.

Birke J. Friedländer

Birke J. Friedländer (they/them) is a PhD student in Gender Studies at the department of Sociology. In their research they use ethnography to explore public reactions and emotions to the coup-attempt trial against the former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. Their project is situated in feminist Marxist and feminist abolitionist discussions of how the justice system reproduces and produces gender, race, and class in society.

Coordinators

• Birke J. Friedländer, Ph.D. Candidate, Gender Studies.
• Helle Rydström, Professor, Gender Studies.
• Aster Tommasini, Educational Administrator, Gender Studies

What is The Genderhub?

GenderHub brings together researchers interested in gender research across the Faculty of Social Sciences. Its aim is to foster collaboration, exchange and networking among gender researchers across disciplines and departments.

GenderHub organises seminars and other activities for researchers and others interested in gender research at the Faculty of Social Sciences and across Lund University. 

Read more about GenderHub on the Faculty of Social Sciences' internal website: Affiliation to the Gender Hub.