Lunch Seminars 2021

  • Mon
    15
    Mar
    2021

    Instagrammable Femininities

    12:00- 13:00Zoom

    Instagrammable Femininities: exploring the gender politics of self-representations on Instagram and women’s magazines

    In this brown bag seminar, Sofia P. Caldeira will present her research. She recently successfully defended her PhD thesis in Communication Sciences (Ghent University) with the title ‘Instagrammable Femininities: exploring the gender politics of self-representations on Instagram and women’s magazines’.

    Sofia is a member of the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies (CIMS) at Ghent University, Belgium. Her research focuses primarily on social media, self-representation practices, politics of gender representation, and feminist media studies.

    Facebook: https://fb.me/e/5pJq5NP9Q

  • Mon
    12
    Apr
    2021

    Gender, relationships and sexuality. An empirical study of the lived experiences of young catholic women; by Eline Huygens

    12:00 - 13:00Zoom

     

    In this brown bag seminar, Eline Huygens will present her current work in progress as part of her PhD project entitled ‘Gender, relationships, and sexuality. An empirical study on the lived experiences of young Catholic women’. In particular she will talk about the entanglement of relationships and religiosity in Catholic women’s lives.
    Eline is a doctoral researcher and teaching assistant at Ghent University, involved in the linking course and master programme Gender and Diversity, and member of the Centre for Research on Culture and Gender. In her doctoral research, she investigates how religion shapes the experiences and practices of Roman Catholic women pertaining to relationships and sexuality.
  • Mon
    10
    May
    2021

    Gender, Sexuality and Young People’s Social Media Practices; by Burcu Korkmazer

    Zoom

    Burcu is a doctoral scholar at the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies at Ghent University. Her research focuses on how social media such as Instagram and Snapchat are affecting the discourses, media practices and identity politics of young people. Powerful identity axes such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality and religiosity are discussed and studied in relation to sensitive topics as sexual morality, diversity and gendered visibility within digital youth cultures.

  • Thu
    27
    May
    2021

    Family planning and the 'global political economy of fertility': The case of Italy (1945-1975); by Maud Bracke

    Zoom

    he seminar investigates the Italian 'family planning' movement - its ideologies, programmes and impacts - as a case study illustrating the global interconnectedness of discourses of sexual modernisation in the early Cold War era. While the Italian FP movement was highly impactful in campaigning for the legalisation of birth control (1971), its ideology, strongly influenced by transnational networks advocating population control in the Global South, was marked by a consistent social hierarchisation of reproductive bodies. The case study forms part of a AHRC Leadership Fellowship project on the emergence of notions of reproductive rights in Europe in the global context (1945-1995).

    Maud is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and specialises in social, political and gender history of Europe after 1945. She holds a PhD from the EUI Florence and has published on European second-wave feminism, 1968, women and work, West European communism in the Cold War. She leads Glasgow's Centre for Gender History.

  • Wed
    16
    Jun
    2021

    Confronting the unspoken in black women’s sexuality in contemporary South Africa by Memory Mphaphuli

    12:00:00- 13:00:00Zoom

    Within the context of black families, candid talks about women’s sexuality continue to be restricted, with the exception of pithy exhortations that aim to scare young women from experimenting sexually. Many other aspects of sexuality are supressed through various discursive strategies. By drawing upon the narratives of the lived experiences of two generational cohorts of black women (between the ages of 20-30 and 40-62), this study identified some of the discourses that black mothers and their daughters use to shape their understanding of sexuality in contemporary South Africa. Findings show that silence and restrictions characterise the way knowledge about sexuality is communicated to women in different age groups. Importantly, insights from these black women show that female sexuality continues to be heavily influenced by traditional ideas about respect, marriage, safe sex and diseases. Collectively, the narratives revealed that mothers and their daughters simply do not have the words to encourage a positive expression of sexuality, that is, a language to talk affirmatively about sexuality. Young women especially end up holding evasive and ambivalent views about their sexuality, with a decreased sense of sexual self-awareness and agency.

    Memory is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Ghent University. She identifies herself as a feminist sociologist who is intrigued by different forms of social inequalities that are linked with gender and (hetero)sexuality specifically. She is most interested in studying how gender and sexuality intersect with other social phenomena such as race and class.