Activism at a Time of Backslide: Feminist and LGBTQ Responses to Opposition to Gender and Sexual Equality

Type: 
Workshop
Audience: 
Private
Building: 
Nador u. 15
Room: 
Quantum
Thursday, May 10, 2018 - 1:00pm
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Date: 
Thursday, May 10, 2018 - 1:00pm to Friday, May 11, 2018 - 6:00pm

The event is co-organized with the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology.

Gender and sexual equality norms are currently under attack across Europe and beyond. This new phenomenon demands targeted empirical and theoretical attention. While scholarship devotes some attention to activism and mobilization in the context of backsliding, more systematic and conceptually solid attention is needed to understand how backsliding is affecting social movements and feminist and LGBTQ activism.  

New movements have emerged that oppose gender equality, such as men’s or father’s rights movements, groups connected to radical right populist agendas, or to conservative religious groups. On the other side, feminist and LGBTQ responses and resilience to this wave of opposition to gender and sexual equality also deserve more systematic attention. Many women’s and LGBTQ rights movements which once operated in environments favorable to institutionalization and cooperation with governments now find themselves marginalized, excluded, de-funded and persecuted by states, and demonized by hostile publics and conservative civil society actors. Their responses vary, from turning to disruptive and grassroots-based strategies, to coalition-building with pro-democracy groups, or turning to the university as a site of resistance, while in other cases, some face abeyance, and even collapse.

This workshop aims to analyze these new patterns of mobilization and activism, and interactions between them. We ask how, when and where they reinforce each other, where and why one or the other prevails and dominates in the political arena?  

Agenda

Thursday, May 10
13:00 – 13:30 Coffee and welcome

13:30 – 14:00

Opening remarks
Eva Fodor, CEU Pro-Rector for the Social Sciences and Humanities
and Associate professor of Gender Studies
Dorit Geva, Head of Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology
Andrea Krizsan, Research Fellow at Center for Policy Studies
14:00 – 16:00 Panel 1: The war on gender and LGBTQ rights – an interactive approach
16:00 – 16:30 Coffee
16:30 – 18:30 Panel 2: Patterns of mobilization opposing gender equality and LGBT rights
Friday, May 11
  9:30 – 10:00 Coffee
10:00 – 12:00 Panel 3: Feminist responses/ Situating feminism
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch
13:00 – 15:00 Panel 4: Movements and states in interaction
15:00 – 15:15 Closing remarks

Detailed agenda (Download)
Workshop participants (Download)