Actualités

The Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG) hosts the annual National Research Day, held this year at the Centre for Gender and Diversity at Maastricht University. The NOG Research Day is a dedicated platform for sharing the work of junior and senior researchers of Dutch universities in the fields of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, Sexuality and Diversity Studies.

The title of this year’s NOG Research Day takes its inspiration from Sara Ahmed’s monograph Living a Feminist Life. Ahmed reminds us that as feminists, we experience the devastating effects of racism, genderism, ableism, ageism, homo- and transphobia on a daily basis. In addition to these challenges, we are faced with the ongoing neoliberalization of academia, with its emphasis on the marketing of knowledge, and on surveillance and control. This market model of academia has been incorporated into the universities, for example through the emphasis on ‘earning power’, the bureaucratization of student-teacher relationships, and an increasingly internalized ‘audit culture’ that seeks to reduce everyone and everything to quantifiable data or measurable ‘output’. Therefore, the main question of the NOG Research Day is: “Is it still possible to lead a feminist life in neoliberal academia?”The day will start with a welcome speech by Lies Wesseling, Chair of the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies and also Director of the Centre for Gender and Diversity at Maastricht University. Professor Philomena Essed (Antioch University and affiliated researcher of the UU Graduate Gender Programme) will then open the thematic programme of the day. Afterwards, the second part of the morning as well as the afternoon will be dedicated to parallel sessions with paper presentations.

The thematic parallel sessions will run in 90-minute slots. Presenters should prepare a 15 minute presentation based on their full paper, and 5 minutes of feedback for fellow presenters, for instance linking to their research approach(es), method(s) and concept(s). Full papers will be distributed in advance among the panel participants and the moderator. Each session will have a moderator who will respond to the panel presentations and facilitate discussion.

The Research day will be concluded with a plenary roundtable discussion, followed by drinks and the opportunity to continue the conversation in the company of the NOG community.