Building Feminist Academia: Research Experiences from the Social Sciences

Even though feminist epistemologies have challenged how we understand knowledge production since the 1980s, the relationship between feminism and research is still a topic of debate. The worldwide growth of feminist social movements in recent years pushes social scientists to incorporate feminist approaches for analysing our research and how this contributes to reproducing or challenging gender inequalities and notions of knowledge and knowledge production.

This session seeks to gather social scientists in different stages of their careers to discuss their research and problematise current structures and practices in the field of social sciences under a feminist lens. The ultimate goal for this session is to constitute an international research network to critically and systematically explore the possibilities for building feminist academia. 20-minute oral presentations on the following topics are especially welcome:

• Institutional structures and mechanisms at a global/national/local level that perpetuate gender inequality in the social sciences.
• The contributions of feminism to problematise neoliberalism in knowledge production and academia.
• Women and the LGBTQ+ community in the production of knowledge in the social sciences.
• The uses of the knowledge produced by social scientists, under feminist lenses.
• The production of knowledge about women and the LGBTQ+ community.
• Feminist research practices and institutional mechanisms in the social sciences.
• Creation of spaces of support, collaboration, and visibility for women/LGBTQ+ community who work in the social sciences.