In this lunch seminar, Sara Nyssen will talk about her ethnographic research in one of the trainings of non-Dutch speaking care workers.In order to address unemployment among migrant job seekers as well as shortages in the care sector, the Flemish employment service organizes language trainings to prepare non-Dutch speaking job seekers for an education and subsequent employment as a nurse or caregiver. My ethnographic research in one of these trainings shows that knowledge of Dutch was by no means the sole criterion for selection and evaluation: assessment of job seekers was (partly) based on whether they were seen as good (future) care workers. As such, there was a lot of attention for job seekers’ selves in the course, specifically through the use of psychological terminology. In this lunch seminar I will argue that this concern for care workers’ selves cannot be separated from a concern for the people they have to take care of. I will explore what kind of patient emerges from the image of the ideal care worker, and what this reveals about how care work is imagined, and about who is (and isn’t) seen as suitable for care work.
About the speaker
Sara Nyssen holds a master’s degree in social and cultural anthropology and is currently a PhD researcher in sociolinguistics at Ghent University. Her research is an ethnography of a language training for the care sector aimed at migrant job seekers, with a focus on language, labor and personhood.
This lunch seminar will be on-campus only and it will take place at the faculty room of Blandijn (Faculteitszaal, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent). You can register sending an email at carla.besorabarti@ugent.be
Cover of The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula (Acker’s pseudonym)
Tessel Veneboeris a PhD student in English Literature at Ghent University. She specializes in queer theory and experimental literature and is a founding member of the Sex Negativity research collective at ASCA. She is currently working on a dissertation on Kathy Acker (supported by FWO).
Kathy Acker’s pseudo-autobiographical writing of sex work challenges the sex-positive politics of écriture féminine as well as a queer politics of embodied writing. Acker’s literary work is often read as sex-positive due to her experiments with masturbatory writing, depiction of graphic sex scenes and interest in s/m relations. My dissertation argues that the avant-garde convictions of Acker’s formal innovation are closer to “sex negativity” as they reveal the structural negativity and the nonsovereignty of the subject, “exemplified in the sexual encounter” (Edelman and Berlant 2013). If sex-positive feminism asks how sexuality can be expressed and affirmed, Kathy Acker’s sex negativity lies in a distrust of knowledge of the self. The radical pessimism of Acker’s work is not directed against sex itself, but refuses to treat sex as a moral issue and instead questions the conditions and implications of self-knowledge and the autobiographical subject.
This lunch seminar will be on-campus only and it will take place at the faculty room of Blandijn (Faculteitszaal, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent). You can register sending an email at carla.besorabarti@ugent.be
During this lunch seminar, Sigrid Wallaert will present her research on feminist anger. In the last few years, after the peak of the #MeToo movement especially, angry women are everywhere. From women’s marches to women’s strikes, women are taking to the streets with their anger and refusing to quiet down. In my research, I take this trend as a starting point to develop the concept of an anger turn (in partial parallel with Sara Ahmed’s happiness turn). This anger turn is characterised by a sudden prominence of anger in the public eye on four main fronts: publishing, media, academia, and politics. However, there is something special about this anger. I outline the concept of feminist anger as a type of activist anger with feminist goals and purposes. This anger is forward-looking, collective, and potentially apt, and should therefore be seriously considered for its communicative value.
Sigrid Wallaert is a PhD researcher in philosophy at Ghent University and FWO Flanders. She holds a master’s and research master’s degree in philosophy. In her PhD project, she is delineating feminist anger as a potentially productive concept, and examining what its value can be through the framework of epistemic injustice. Get to know more about the speaker on her website: www.sigridwallaert.com
In this talk, Katrien Jacobs will discuss a polarization in social media discourses and sexual politics in the field of online activism. Political activists across the political spectrum are using online visual cultures as “extreme speech” to target each other and as a mechanism of emotional release and social cohesion. The talk will zoom in on the role of sex-focused visuals used during the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition movement of 2019 and coinciding with “a highly radicalized “laam chau” doctrine. (“If we burn, you will burn with us”). It will outline the wider techno-political contexts of these visuals and also make a plea for archiving and studying them despite their highly contentious and “rubbish-like” nature. It will discuss research methods of “historicizing” and “humanizing” this imagery by positioning them as catalysts for radicalized movements, geopolitical transformations and sexual well-being. At the same time, it will ponder a shift in a researcher’s methods of online ethnography from open and affective encounters or observations towards a cautious handling of highly polarized and politicized materials.
About the speaker:
Katrien Jacobs is adjunct associate professor and research associate at Chinese University of Hong Kong and Ghent University. She is leading scholar of sexuality and gender studies alongside emerging digital cultures and social movements. Her book “Tit-for-Tat Media: The Contentious Bodies and Sex Imagery of Political Activism” was published by Routledge in June 2022. Her work can be found at www.katrienjacobs.com
Invited speakers: Prof. Amanda Lucia (University of California-Riverside), Dr. Kavita Maya (University College London) and Dr. Cassandra Ellerbe (Bard College Berlin)
The Wisdom of the Universe by Christi Belcourt, 2014
In this lunch seminar, An Van Raemdonck will present her research on experiences of racism and Islamophobia among Muslim minorities in Belgium. While phenomena of discrimination have been widely documented, in-depth qualitative research remains scarce. Findings are based on forty semi-structured interviews conducted between 2020-2021 with Belgian Muslims who are second and third-generation immigrants. Education appears as a prime domain where interviewees experience discrimination and racism, resulting in the restriction of life aspirations. The problematization of Muslim subjectivity is discussed through women’s understandings of job acceptance on the condition of hijab removal as a rejection of the (Muslim) self. Respondents’ prospects of the future are therefore afflicted and some express the desire to leave Belgium in search of better life conditions. This analysis refines our understanding of the two main rationales of Islamophobia as governmentality – assimilation and separation – with the intertwined dimensions of governance of Muslim subjectivity and restriction of life aspirations.
An Van Raemdonck is postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Research on Culture and Gender. Her current research project focuses on Islamic ethics, Islamic conviviality and the ethics of living together in diversity.
The seminar is hybrid. You can follow on campus or online. Please register here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In this talk, Katrien Jacobs will discuss a polarization in social media discourses and sexual politics in the field of online activism. Political activists across the political spectrum are using online visual cultures as “extreme speech” to target each other and as a mechanism of emotional release and social cohesion. The talk will zoom in on the role of sex-focused visuals used during the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition movement of 2019 and coinciding with “a highly radicalized “laam chau” doctrine. (“If we burn, you will burn with us”). It will outline the wider techno-political contexts of these visuals and also make a plea for archiving and studying them despite their highly contentious and “rubbish-like” nature. It will discuss research methods of “historicizing” and “humanizing” this imagery by positioning them as catalysts for radicalized movements, geopolitical transformations and sexual well-being. At the same time, it will ponder a shift in a researcher’s methods of online ethnography from open and affective encounters or observations towards a cautious handling of highly polarized and politicized materials.
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.