Since the 1970’s, feminist research has struggled to make its way into mainstream academia by showing the relevance of gender as a crucial category of analysis. Today, concerns about how gender shapes politics and society – understood in a very broad sense – are now addressed in a variety of disciplines, becoming mainstream. And yet, many feel that, due to the crisis and consequent shrinking of academic opportunities, gendered approaches risk to be dismissed once again.

With this in mind, GRaSe and COSMOS would like to invite scholars who are (or have been) based at the EUI to exchange their views on the relevance of gender for their own research. The aim is indeed to consolidate the importance of gender in academia and build a broad platform for future discussions which includes EUI professors, fellows and researchers as well as the network of alumni and alumnae.

Women and men attach all kinds of values to the range of activities which they refer to as work. Such subjective evaluations of work are shaped by and exist in tension with cultural representations of work, and the value of work as defined in economic terms and academic and public debate. This workshop focuses on the tensions between individual and public valuations of work, and explores the ways in which the gendered construction of work sheds light on these tensions.

The idea that certain sexual acts were ‘unnatural’ goes back to Antiquity and by the Middle Ages had been formalised in the European world through Christian doctrine and canon law. It was absorbed into the laws of a number of modern European states, and exported legislatively to much of the world through colonial expansion. Looking back from 2014, the shift from severe punitive measures for sex ‘against nature’ to the recent introduction of same-sex marriage laws in close to twenty nations across five continents must rank as one of the fullest revolutions of official attitudes in modern history. It is a revolution that begs many broad questions. This conference seeks to develop fresh, historically-informed, international perspectives on coupling – broadly understood – as a phenomenon poised between ‘nature’ and state regulation, from the late eighteenth century to the present. […]