We kindly invite you to the book presentation of ‘Rainforest Capitalism’ (Duke University Press) by Dr. Thomas Hendriks (KULeuven), followed by panel discussion with Dr. Soraya El Kahlaoui (MENARG) and Prof. Maria Martin de Almagro (CRG) and Q&A, chaired by Dr. Siggie Vertommen (MENARG, CRGC).

Date: Wednesday 27th of APRIL 2022: 17:00 – 19:00

Location: Auditorium D – Campus UFO Technicum; Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, 9000, Gent

Congolese logging camps are places where mud, rain, fuel smugglers, and village roadblocks slow down multinational timber firms; where workers wage wars against trees while evading company surveillance deep in the forest; where labor compounds trigger disturbing colonial memories; and where blunt racism, logger machismo, and homoerotic desires reproduce violence. In Rainforest Capitalism Thomas Hendriks examines the rowdy world of industrial timber production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to theorize racialized and gendered power dynamics in capitalist extraction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Congolese workers and European company managers as well as traders, farmers, smugglers, and barkeepers, Hendriks shows how logging is deeply tied to feelings of existential vulnerability in the face of larger forces, structures, and histories. These feelings, Hendriks contends, reveal a precarious side of power in an environment where companies, workers, and local residents frequently find themselves out of control. An ethnography of complicity, ecstasis, and paranoia, Rainforest Capitalism queers assumptions of corporate strength and opens up new ways to understand the complexities and contradictions of capitalist extraction.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/rainforest-capitalism
https://www.ugent.be/ps/nl/campusplan-technicum
 
Thomas Hendriks is an FWO Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at KU Leuven (Belgium). He is the author of Rainforest Capitalism: Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Logging Concession (Duke University Press, 2022) and co-editor of Readings in Sexualities from Africa (Indiana University Press, 2022)

More info: https://www.facebook.com/events/556346328880343?ref=newsfeed

The summer school “Prejudice, Discrimination, and the Diversity Challenge” which will take place at the University of Geneva from 20 to 24 June 2022.
This summer school brings together experts and students from different countries to examine the origins and the consequences of prejudice. Where does prejudice come from? How do prejudice and discrimination affect people’s achievements, performances, and well-being? How can organizations reduce prejudice? What are the advantages of the inclusion of different groups in the labor market?

This summer school will address these questions through lectures from keynote speakers in social psychology. It is a unique opportunity to meet practitioners from different organizations in Switzerland and to learn about the implementation of policies aiming to promote diversity in the workplace.

More information:

https://www.unige.ch/genevasummerschools/programme/courses/prejudice-discrimination-and-diversity

Ifeyinwa Ugochukwu is CEO of the Tony Elumelu Foundation, Africa’s leading philanthropy empowering young African entrepreneurs from the continent.

One of the biggest concerns about entrepreneurs – especially in Africa – is the probability of their business survival through time. In Africa, women make up 58% of the continent’s self-employed population. Yet they seldom get the recognition they deserve for their role in sustaining local economies/informal industries. They also do not receive the appropriate support they need to take their businesses to the next level. Some of the challenges faced by women in Africa and youth come from lack of access to networks, funding, and market linkages. Through TEFConnect, we are contributing to digital upskilling and capacity building around digital entrepreneurship. It is the largest online network of African entrepreneurs who are interested in connecting with investors and business leaders. The platform empowers young entrepreneurs to build investible businesses by training and mentoring, provides them with easy access to market, and connects them with other African Entrepreneurs.

More information: https://www.ugent.be/en/research/devcooperation/sdgsessions 

Research group Culture & Education presents

Hot Topic Lecture by Renzo Martens

Organized as part of the master course Culture Studies (MA Educational Sciences)
December 15th 19h-20h30 (FPPW – H. Dunantlaan 1 – Aud. 5)
Registration: https://webappsx.ugent.be/eventManager/events/guestlecturerenzomartens

Renzo Martens: from ‘Enjoy Poverty’ to ‘White Cube’.
Twelve years after his ground-breaking documentary Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008), artist Renzo Martens premieres a new film, White Cube. In this film, Congolese plantation workers build a museum on a former Unilever plantation and create art in order to create their own world. During this guest lecture, Martens will discuss his work, specifically, the responsibility the artist takes for the systems in which he operates.

Renzo Martens (1973) studied political science and art. He gained international recognition with the films Episode I, and Episode III: Enjoy Poverty, which was televised in more than 23 countries. In 2012, Martens established Human Activities and its “reverse gentrification program” in DR Congo. Together with the plantation workers of Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC), he employs artistic critique to build a new world — not symbolically, but in material terms. Together, they opened an OMA-designed White Cube on a former Unilever plantation in 2017. The work of CATPC has been shown in a solo exhibition in Sculpture Center, New York, which was hailed by the New York Times as ‘best art of the year’, Mori Art in Tokyo, KW Berlin and in the 21st Biennale of Sydney.

Welkom in de toekomst van seks!

Seks verandert niet. Hoe we naar seks kijken wel. Onze samenleving zal er over 25 jaar helemaal anders uitzien. Hoe zal dat onze kijk op seks veranderen?

Op 14 december 2021 zoekt Sensoa het antwoord, samen met seksuologen, filosofen, opiniemakers en andere experts uit binnen- en buitenland.

De toekomst van seks is een online inspiratiedag die volledig wordt gelivestreamd.

We zoeken antwoorden op drie grote vragen:

• Wat wordt de impact van technologie op seks?
• Hoe zullen relaties eruitzien?
• Hoe zullen seksuele oriëntatie en gender veranderen?

Benieuwd naar het antwoord hierop? Meer informatie: https://registreren.toekomstvanseks.be/.

Women’s rights and gender sensitivity have been quite prominent in the European Union’s agenda lately. In November 2020, the European Commission released its third Gender Action Plan, which focuses on the EU’s external actions. One of the most ambitious goals of the action plan, set for 2025, is the application of an intersectional gender perspective in the EU’s external actions, with a special focus on migrant women. However, the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, the European Commission’s proposal to reform the Common European Asylum System, does not mention intersectional approaches, neither in its text nor in related legislative proposals.

Feminist perspectives, approaches and actions are at the core of the work of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, the German Green Political Foundation. We strongly support the mainstreaming of intersectional perspectives into (European) policy making and policies. Against this background, the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union commissioned the study “Intersectionality and refugee women – The shortcomings of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum from an intersectional prism”, which analyses the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum and its related proposal for a Screening Regulation from an intersectional perspective.

More information and registration: https://calendar.boell.de/en/intersectionality-refugee-women

Register here to receive the link to the Zoom webinar: https://eventmanager.ugent.be/PublicLectureDecolonialandMaterialistFeminisms

This public lecture intends to shed light on the materialities of decolonial feminisms and their variegated historically situated infrastructures and scales: from bodies to territories, from the flesh to the soil, from biologies to minerals and land, and from property to labour.

In relation to transnational discussions we understand decolonial feminisms in their broadest sense to address and resist the gendered ongoing histories of colonialism, white eurocentrism and US centrism. Thus, in various contexts, decolonial feminisms may include anti-colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial theory, and epistemologies of the global south(s). We understand materialist feminisms as feminisms that insist on examining the material conditions under which gendered and sexual power relations take shape under racial and patriarchal capitalism, through i.a. gendered and sexual divisions of labour and property.

Paola Bacchetta, PJ Di Pietro and Lena Meari will discuss how decolonial and materialist feminisms inspire their work, what might be gained from cross-fertilizing insights and questions from these two feminist traditions and what this entails both methodologically and politically. The panel will be moderated by Prof. Maria Martin de Almagro Iniesta (Ghent University).

Paola Bacchetta is Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s at University of California, Berkeley, Co-founder and first Director of the Berkeley Gender Consortium and current (transnational) Co-Coordinator of the Decolonizing Sexualities Network. She is author and co-editor of numerous books, articles and book chapters on: feminist decolonial, transnational and queer of color theories and praxis; global racialities; politics of spatialities; and Hindu nationalism and other right-wing movements.

PJ DiPietro works at the intersection of decolonial feminism, Latinx Studies, and trans* of color praxis. They are a faculty member in the department of women’s and gender studies at Syracuse University (unceded Haudenosaunee land, New York).

Lena Meari is an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Institute of Women’s Studies at Birzeit University, Palestine. She has special interest in the geopolitics of knowledge production; subject formation in colonial contexts; decolonizing methodologies; critical feminist theory; and revolutionary movements.

Website: https://www.globalstudies.ugent.be/bridging-decolonial-and-materialist-feminisms/2/

Facebook: https://fb.me/e/PmPiAsWC

LEVL, ella, Furia, ENAIP-Limburg en de Nederlandstalige Vrouwenraad slaan de handen in elkaar. Samen organiseren we op 2 december 2021 van 9.30 tot 12.30 uur een online studiedag over “Vrouwen met een migratieachtergrond op de arbeidsmarkt”.

De online studiedag is gratis en richt zich op iedereen met interesse in dit thema.

Tijdens de studiedag gaan we dieper in op de verschillende drempels die vrouwen met een migratieachtergrond ervaren op de arbeidsmarkt. Ook verkennen we hoe de arbeidsmarktpositie van vrouwen met migratieachtergrond verbeterd kan worden.

Meer informatie hier.

Op woensdag 6 oktober organiseert VC Het Geuzenhuis een nuchter debat rond gender met Piet Hoebeke en Griet Vandermassen.

Volgens uroloog Piet Hoebeke is ons klassieke beeld van mannen en vrouwen dringend aan een update toe. Er bevindt zich tussen de stereotiepe man en vrouw immers een heel spectrum van seksuele identiteiten. Alle aspecten van onze seksuele identiteit kan je volgens Hoebeke zien als de regelaars op een mengpaneel. Die staan ook niet altijd volledig open of dicht, maar ergens tussenin.

Griet Vandermassen gaat een heel eind mee met die visie. Ook zij plaatst de acceptatie van ieders seksuele identiteit voorop – eveneens die van transpersonen – maar zet wel vraagtekens bij het idee van sekse en gender als een eindeloos gevarieerd mengpaneel. De verschillen tussen de seksen zijn volgens haar substantiëler dan Piet Hoebeke denkt.

Hierop aansluitend bespreken beiden hun meningsverschillen en hoe die zich vertalen in een andere visie op enkele ethische issues. Bijvoorbeeld of we aparte toiletruimtes voor de verschillende seksen moeten afschaffen, wat met mogelijk onomkeerbare behandelingen voor minderjarige transgenders? Wat met transpersonen in de sport?

Inschrijven en meer informatie: http://www.geuzenhuis.be/we-need-to-talk-about-gender