GRACE Gender & Cultures of Equality – two new Early Stage Researchers at UU

The GRACE (Gender and Cultures of Equality) research and training consortium has been awarded a European Commission grant of €3.7 million under the Horizon 2020 ‘Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks’ programme to fund the employment and training of fifteen Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) on 36 month fixed term posts (1 February 2016 until 31 January 2019). They will be employed across our consortium of academic and non-academic consortium partners:

• University of Hull, UK  – Project coordinator
• University of Bologna, Italy
• CEU – Central European University, Hungary
• University of Granada, Spain
• University of Lodz, Poland
• University of Oviedo, Spain
• Utrecht University, Netherlands
• Associazione Orlando, Italy

The aim of the GRACE – Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe project is to systematically investigate the cultural production of gender equalities within Europe.

Extending the success of GEMMA – the Erasmus Mundus ‘Masters of Excellence’ in Women’s and Gender Studies of which the Graduate Gender Programme (GGeP) of Utrecht University is one of the partners – the central objective of GRACE is to become the programme of reference for innovative interdisciplinary doctoral training for early career researchers.

GRACE draws on innovative and interdisciplinary methodologies to investigate an under-examined aspect of those processes, namely the production of cultures of equality that underpin, enable and constrain those changing policy and legislative frameworks.

Our methodological approach understands culture as neither normative frameworks nor ways of representing the world, but more fundamentally as the process through which people create the worlds they inhabit.

The GRACE project employs and provides advanced training for 15 ESRs which have recently been recruited, who will research the production of cultures of gender equality across five specific sites where cultures of gender equalities are produced and contested by differently situated social agents.

In short, the GRACE project is:

• 1 innovative training network
• 15 early stage researchers
• 8 partners organisations in 6 eu countries
• 5 workpackages

Utrecht University’s recruited ESR’s are:

Sara Verderi
ESR 7 – Curating Cultures of Equality in Post Imperial European contexts
Verderi will explore how social categories such as gender and race intersect with art in moments of political transformation, and how memories and oral narratives create a space for critical imagining of sovereignty, citizenship, and rights? She will focus in particular on political imagination and myth in Europe, in the light of an engagement with the Syrian crisis.

Zerrin Cengiz
ESR 9 – Critics and the Cultural Politics of Equality
Cengiz will explore the production of cultures of equality by “Islamic Feminism” as an intellectual movement across and beyond Europe through academia, art, and media among other platforms. She will look beyond the existing body of work on gender equality discourses and sociological analyses in Europe and explore the embeddedness of gender(ed) codes in a variety of practices as well as the intersectionality of these codes with other phenomena which, through meaning making processes, constitute cultures.

More information on GRACE can be found here