The Ida Blom Conference

The Conference Venue

Radisson Blu Royal Hotel, Bergen

Bryggen 5
Bergen N-5835
Norway

Tel:+47 5554 3000
Fax:+47 5532 4808
E-mail:info.bgozh@radissonblu.com

The airport bus named "FLYBUSSEN"
runs from door to door every 15 minutes (duration 40 minutes). 

About the IDA BLOM CONFERENCE:

Gendered Citizenship: History, Politics and Democracy

Norway was a pioneer state in Europe introducing the general vote for both men and women in 1913. As part of the 100-year celebration, The University of Bergen and Uni Rokkan Centre will organize an international conference on gendered citizenship. The conference is named after Professor Emerita Ida Blom from the University of Bergen, recently appointed an honorary member of the American Historical Society. Her groundbreaking work on citizenship, women’s suffrage and women’s health issues has inspired academics in Norway and abroad and has also had great public impact.

As we have entered the new millennium, women's right to vote is almost taken for granted. Yet many issues is still  to be solved. The rights, privileges, and duties of citizens are not equally distributed – neither within nation states nor across the globe. The concept of citizenship is a way to reflect on that distribution, highlighting right’s claims, participation, entitlements and voice, as well as political, economic and cultural processes of inclusion and exclusion. The notion of citizenship also evokes questions of belonging, language, identity and the body, calling for a thorough rethinking of what it means to be a human being and a member of society in the world today.

We want to ask how gender issues both influence and challenge the meaning of citizenship. The conference embraces an interdisciplinary and broadly framed approach to historical and contemporary questions concerning gender equality and democracy, both in the political and in the cultural sphere. We aim to gather a diverse group of academics whose work on gendered citizenship address democratic possibilities, rights and political participation of past, present and future citizens. The conference will be global in scope and gendered citizenship will be problematized in a transnational perspective. The global focus is crucial to our conference, not the least because participation and democratic representation is unequally distributed around the world.