PhD course: Gender, sexuality and geopolitical divisions: Colonial formations, travelling concepts and politics of tolerance

The course will explore the debates on gender, sexuality and geopolitics within the context of European colonial formations and travelling concepts. Specific topics of the course will include politics of tolerance and homonationalism, European body and East/West divisions, geopolitics of knowledge production related to gender and sexuality, transnational travel and translation of concepts and frames.

The course will be taught for three full days from 09.10.2017 to 11.10.2017 at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK), University of Bergen, Norway. Active participation in this workshop entails reading the literature (to be distributed prior to the course) from the point of view of the workshop questions and the researcher’s own research. 3 ects will be given for active participation and a short presentation – made in relation to one’s own research project, the select workshop literature, and the workshop questions – and an additional 2 ects will be given for an essay submitted to the tutors no later than three months after the final day of the course. The essay should be around 10 pages (evaluated pass/fail) and must be related to the course and the course literature. 

The language of instruction is English. The course is open to interested PhD candidates and is free of charge.

Syllabus and detailed program will be distributed at a later stage.

Course lecturers:

Randi Gressgård is a professor of gender research in the social sciences at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK) and affiliated with the research unit International Migration and Ethnic Relations (IMER), University of Bergen, Norway. Her research interests are within the intersecting fields of gender & sexuality studies; migration & minority studies and urban studies.

Sara Edenheim is a senior Lecturer at Umeå Centre for Gender Studies, Umeå University, Sweden and Associate Professor of History at Lund University, Sweden. Her main areas of interest are feminist theory and critical philosophy of history. Currently she works on the philosophy of history and the relation between historical writing, social movements and legal changes with a focus on temporal claims, legitimizing ontologies and political subjectification.

Rafal Smoczynski is an assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland. His research interest revolves around social control studies, classic and late modern social theory, and political philosophy

Paweł Lewicki is an assistant Professor at the Chair for Comparative Central European Studies of the Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. His current research interests, besides "Europe" and Europeanization from postcolonial and (post)imperial perspective, involve migration-trajectories of people living with HIV and AIDS from Central and Eastern Europe to the "West"

Stephen Amico is an associate Professor of Music at the Grieg Academy, University of Bergen, Norway. He has authored and edited several publications on post-Soviet popular music and sexuality, including the book Roll Over, Tchaikovsky!: Russian Popular Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality (New Perspectives on Gender in Music) (University of Illinois Press), 2015.