Decolonizing Transgender in the North

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4th Nordic Transgender Studies Symposium
The Centre for Gender Studies (CGF), Karlstad University
October 11 – 13, 2016.

The conference will be devoted to questions of decoloniality and its meaning for Trans Studies and trans politics. The conference will addresses a range of topics in relation to decolonisation among others, inner-nordic colonialisation of Sámi and Inuit, reflections on transgender terminologies, anglocentricity and cultural dissonances with the Scandinavian context. Furthermore intersections between transgender politics, ecology, race, nationalism and religion, mobility, border politics, migration and many more important discussions will feed into the debates and the presentations…

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LGBT Activism and Europeanisation in the Post-Yugoslav Space

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Bojan Bilić (ed.)
Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016

Europe and the European Union are unavoidable, if ambiguous, political references in the post-Yugoslav space. This volume interrogates the forms and implications of the increasingly potent symbolic nexus that has developed between non-heterosexual sexualities, LGBT activism(s) and Europeanisation(s) in all of the Yugoslav successor states.

Contributors to this book show how the long EU accession process disseminates discursive tools employed in LGBT activist struggles for human rights and equality. This creates a linkage between “Europeanness” and “gay emancipation” which elevates certain forms of gay activist engagement and perhaps also non-heterosexuality, more generally, to a measure of democracy, progress and modernity. At the same time, it relegates practices of intolerance to the LGBT community to the status of non-European primitivist Other who is inevitably positioned in the patriarchal past that should be left behind.

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Inside / Outside: Queer Networks in Transnational Perspective

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Leibniz University of Hannover
September 12 -16, 2016

This summer school aims to bring together scholars and activists from Central and Eastern Europe with peers from the United States and scholars of North American Studies. It reflects on the current cultural, legal, and political conditions of representation, articulation, and critique in Central and Eastern European societies, focusing on the very varied responses to sexual diversity, including the academic establishment of gender and queer studies…

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Toward a Non-Eurocentric Academia

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Conceptualizing a non-Eurocentric academia is about pushing for a radical change in academic system of interpretation and production of reality, revealing the constitutive underside of (post)modern reason. The transformation strives to be effected by breaking down the academic walls, by challenging the existing political economy of global Eurocentric academia, the established academic disciplines, methodologies, sets of theoretical references, conceptual vocabularies and colonial visual orders in order to shift the geography of reason through dissident interventions by un/learning, producing counter-genealogies of thought and decolonial transfeminist sense/ibility. What is crucial here is to continue opening, accessing, thinking and acting from multiple locations, alternative arrangements of the social, and different political and epistemic possibilities coming from the Global South and East, interrelated with the work of its critical diasporas.

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