Research projects
Here is an overview of the ongoing research projects the Centre for Women's and Gender Research (SKOK) is involved in.
Main content
In the overview, you'll find the name and funding source for each project. Click on the project to read more.
European and Norwegian funding sources
SKOK is involved in one project funded under the EU's framework programme Horizon 2020:
- The PROTECT project, which is led by Professor Hakan G. Sicakkan on behalf of the Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen.
SKOK participates in four on-going projects fully or partly financed by Norwegian funding sources:
- The Research Council of Norway works to promote research and innovation of high quality and relevance and to generate knowledge in priority areas to enable Norway to deal with key challenges to society and the business sector.
- Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study at UC Berkeley is a research centre whose primary mission is to strengthen ongoing research collaborations and foster the development of new research collaborations between faculty at the University of California, Berkeley and from the consortium of eight participating Norwegian academic institutions.
- Globale Challenges is one of the University’s three strategic areas. This builds on a long tradition of promoting excellent research and education in development-related research. This type of research has been of major societal importance, and has brought a critical scientific perspective to discussions of different global challenges in different arenas locally, nationally and internationally.
PROTECT | Horizon 2020 | Societal challenges - Inclusive Societies
Title: PROTECT -The Right to International Protection. A Pendulum between Globalization and Nativization?
Project manager: Professor Hakan G. Sicakkan, UiB
Researchers at SKOK: Guest researcher and professor Christine M. Jacobsen, researcher Marry-Anne Karlsen
Project period: 2020-2023
PROTECT is a research project studying international refugee protection that was officially launched on February 1st, 2020. The project is conducted by an international consortium of 11 universities in Europe, Canada, and South Africa and led by Professor Hakan G. Sicakkan on behalf of the Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen.
Researcher Marry-Anne Karlsen and guest researchers Christine M. Jacobsen and Pascaline Chappart at SKOK are part of the University of Bergen team. In PROTECT, Karlsen, Jacobsen and Chappart are involved in the work of WP4, which maps the ground level actors that are involved in the reception of migrants and asylum seekers in selected entry zones in France, Italy, Spain, and Greece, as well as South Africa and Canada. They apply their ethnographic experience and expertise in investigating if and how the compacts on refugees and migration influence ground-level actors’ understanding of ‘vulnerability’, particularly related to gender and legal status, and if and how it changes how they cooperate to meet special needs.
TemPro | Research Council of Norway | Researcher project VAM (Welfare, work and migration)
Title: Temporary protection as a durable solution? The 'return turn' in asylum policies in Europe (TemPro)
Project leader: Senior researcher Jessica Schultz, Chr. Michelsens Institute
Researchers at SKOK: Researcher Marry-Anne Karlsen and postdoctoral fellow Kari Anne Klovholt Drangsland
Project period: 2020-2024
TemPro is a collaboration between anthropologists, gender and legal scholars in Norway, UK and Denmark that explores the effects of temporary protection in the current asylum- and refugee systems. These measures, part of a ‘return turn’ in the practice of refugee law post-2015, include granting short-term protection permits to refugees from certain groups, stricter requirements for receiving permanent residence, and regular protection reviews to identify people whose need for asylum no longer exists.
The project draws on an intersectional perspective to explore the implications of increased legal fragmentation of refugee protection in and across refugee law, policy, and the lives of refugees. The project further builds on and extends recent advances within migration studies that approach the temporal dimensions of migration governance.
Native/Immigrant/Refugee | Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study, UC Berkeley | Peder Sather Grant Program
Title: Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Crossings and Divides and Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Immobility and Movement Across Contested Grounds
Project managers: Guest researcher and professor Christine M. Jacobsen, SKOK and Leti Volpp, Center for Race and Gender, UC Berkeley
Project co-workers: Beth Piatote, Native American Studies, UC Berkeley; Fantasia Painter, Native American Studies, UC Berkeley; Marry-Anne Karlsen, SKOK; Kari Anne Drangsland, SKOK; and Jessica Schultz, Faculty of Law, UiB.
Project duration: 2018-2019 and 2020-2022
This project has two phases: Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Crossings and Divides and Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Immobility and Movements Across Contested Grounds.
The first phase explores the interrelationships of the categories “native,” “immigrant,” and “refugee” at a time of tightening borders.
The second phase will make intellectual contributions to how we understand immobility. This present moment during the Covid-19 pandemic is one of unprecedented immobility; both across nation-states with bans to entry on all noncitizens or some noncitizens, and within local communities. This next step in the successful research collaboration between SKOK and UC Berkeley will in light of the Covid-19 crisis explore how categories like "native," "immigrant" and "refugee"are alternatively cast as aspersions or grounded as the basis of claims.
Securing the future: Resilient cities in the context of migration | Global Challenges, UiB
Title: Securing the future: Resilient cities in the context of migration
Researchers at SKOK: PhD candidate Anders Rubing and professor Randi Gressgård
Researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology, UiB: Professor Bjørn Inge Bertelsen
Project duration: 2019-2023
In what has been declared in political as well as academic debate to be an increasingly complex and insecure world, there is a growing demand for long-term resilience strategies that reach beyond the current state of affairs. For instance, the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel of Global Sustainability’s 2012 report, Resilient People, Resilient Planet, depicts resilience as a governance response to complex problems in a complex world, based on the assumption that the future is truly uncertain and hence unpredictable. The premise that the stakes of security politics are shifting as new configurations of the future and life itself are emerging – as life (both human and natural) come to be perceived as full of unpredictable and immanent dangers as well as possibilities.
To arrive at a more specific understanding of how resilience-informed security assemblages shape global challenges, the project sets out to examine the semantic production of urban security problematics in the context of migration. Empirically, it focuses on transnational networks where security challenges are shaped and circulated in terms of "best practices" and "smart" security technologies. The project is particularly concerned with possible reconfigurations of gendered and racialized challenges opened up by future-making practices in the present.
Speculative Urban Futures: Inequality and Migration | Global Challenges, UiB
Title: Speculative Urban Futures: Inequality and Migration
Project coordinator: Global Research Programme on Inequality (GRIP)
Researcher at SKOK: Guest researcher and professor Christine M. Jacobsen
Project duration: 2021-2022
This project will explore possible futures of cities. In order to disclose potential urban futures, the project will invite differently situated scholars, artists, activists and the general public to speculate about the possible futures.
The project is particularly concerned with looking into unequal experiences of time, relations between human and non-human worlds and the emergence of new forms of urban agency in relation to migration.
Exploring inequality and migration, the project weaves together the scholarly and artistic work of the three project partners – Brandon LaBelle, Christine M. Jacobsen and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen – in the fields of critical race studies, gender and queer studies, and anthropology.
