News

NOVEMBER 2009 EUROPEAN ASSOSIATION FOR GENDER RESEARCH, EDUCATION AND

DOCUMENTATION

In this newsletter:

• ATGENDER’s present status

• Invitation to ATGENDER’s upcoming activities (Febr. 2010):

-Tuning Accreditation conference (closed)

- European Gender Studies Conference and General Assembly

- Open call for suggestions for the Board

• News from Athena

• News from AOIFE

• ATGENDER in the news

Welcome to the first issue of the ATGENDER newsletter.

Message from the presidents

We are delighted to present to you the first newsletter of ATGENDER, the European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation. Sending out regular newsletters is but one of the good practices of ATHENA that ATGENDER will continue. The newsletters are meant to be a source of information exchange, from the ATGENDER Board to its members, and amongst members. We invite you all to submit news for the newsletter via our new email address: info@atgender.eu. The newsletters are for ATGENDER members, but in the next couple of months, we will also send them out to Athena members in order for our European networking to continue in this transitional phase. Athena members are warmly welcomed to subscribe to ATGENDER via our email address: info@atgender.eu. More information will but put on the website www.atgender.eu which will be up and running in the next few weeks.

ATGENDER has become a legal body on September 30, 2009. The last day of Athena – for now at least – was thus the first day of ATGENDER. This means that there is continuity in our networking also on an institutional level. On September 30, Berteke Waaldijk and Iris van der Tuin signed the Statutes at a notary’s office in Utrecht. Waaldijk and Van der Tuin represented the founding Board of ATGENDER, which has been working on our Statutes and Standing Orders. The Statutes, written along the lines of our wishes and Dutch Law, will be published on our website. The Standing Orders will have to be agreed upon by the General Assembly. This newsletter contains, among other things, information on our first GA.

ATGENDER Central

Coordination

P.O. Box 164 3500 AD Utrecht The Netherlands tel: +31-(0)30-253 6013/6322 fax: +31-30-253 6695

E-mail

info@atgender.eu

Visit our website!

www.atgender.org

Waaldijk and Van der Tuin signing ATGENDER’s Statutes

We would like to thank Jeannette van der Sanden, managing director of AOIFE, for helping us prepare the legal issues. Without her, ATGENDER would not have been founded on September 30!

This newsletter consists of several sections, many of which will come back in our next newsletters. First, we will provide you with more extensive information on ATGENDER’s present status, including legal issues, the Board, and our office and contact details. Next, we will inform you about present and future projects of ATGENDER. There will be an invitation to ATGENDER’s upcoming activity: a conference about the future of European Gender Studies, back-to-back with our first GA, in Brussels in February 2010. We also include a section with news from ATHENA. And lastly, we have sections on ATGENDER in the news, and other announcements relevant to our members.

We hope that you will enjoy this first newsletter and want to invite you to contact us in case of questions and ideas!

Iris van der Tuin and Harriet Silius, presidents of ATGENDER

I.vanderTuin@uu.nl

Harriet.Silius@abo.fi

ATGENDER’s present status

ATGENDER, the European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation was founded officially on September 30, 2009. Its legal residency is in the Netherlands. We are a ‘vereniging’, which means that we are an independent association with full legal rights that consists of members. Our Statutes are now in the process of being translated, and will be uploaded to the website for your information.

ATGENDER being a legal body means that we can start the procedure of official membership. ATGENDER has individual members and institutional members. We will send out information on becoming official members as soon as possible, and hopefully, those who have pledged support - 109 individuals and 39 Institutional members so far – will be the first to become official members. Via ATHENA and other mailing lists and networks the Board will try to find more members; for now, membership fees are essential for making the organization financially sustainable. Being legal, however, means that the Board can start a fundraising campaign. Current other financial sources come from AOIFE, ATHENA, and Wise, the organizations that have merged, and founded ATGENDER. We are grateful for the faith that they have in us.

Apart from the fundraising campaign, one of ATGENDER’s current activities is supporting the next ATHENA application. For more information, we refer to the ‘News from Athena’ section of this newsletter.

The Board consists of the following members:

Dr. Iris van der Tuin (the Netherlands) and Prof. Harriet Silius (Finland) – presidents

Prof. Barbara Bagilhole (the U.K.) – treasurer

Prof. Nicky Le Feuvre (Switzerland) – secretary

The Board consists of the following other members:

Dr. Daniela Gronold (Austria)

Mia Liinason, MA (Sweden)

Prof. Nina Lykke (Sweden)

Susana Elisa Pavlou (Cyprus)

Prof. Kirsi Saarikangas (Finland)

Prof. Dr. Berteke Waaldijk (the Netherlands)

ATGENDER’s Board is being assisted by Mariëtte Pesman (secretary of ATHENA) and Charliene van der Werf (intern at Utrecht University). They will be the ones answering your e-mails, and managing the ATGENDER office.

ATGENDER

P.O. box 164

3500 AD Utrecht

The Netherlands

Telephone: 0031-30-253 6013/6322

Email: info@atgender.eu

www.atgender.org

Invitation to ATGENDER’s upcoming activities

Networking is ATGENDER’s main project. The setting up of ATGENDER itself, including newsletters such as these, are important in this early phase of the organization. We will continue the good practices of ATHENA, AOIFE and Wise as well. This means that (spreading) the ATHENA volumes and other publications are for now in ATGENDER’s hands, as well as the products of Wise (esp. the mailinglists) and AOIFE. ATGENDER has accepted ATHENA’s offer to take over the Teaching with ATHENA series. The ATHENA section of this newsletter provides the latest news on this valuable project. Apart from this, ATGENDER will take the lead in the Tuning project, which was set up under Athena3.

The Tuning project

The Tuning-committee established at the Utrecht Plenary meeting of ATHENA3 (June 2009) is busy preparing a draft for the Tuning brochure, containing 'Reference points for design and delivery of programs in Gender Studies'. This brochure will be a crucial element in future applications for funding for education (summer schools, Marie Curie or Erasmus Mundus to mention only a few), since it will allow gender studies specialists to refer to reference point for quality from our own field. The brochure will be based on the results of the questionnaire that enough ATHENA-members have filled in, and contain 'best practices' as reported by ATHENA working groups about teaching in the past years. The Tuning Committee expects that by the beginning of November a draft version will be available for comments by all ATHENA3-partners. Partners will hear

about this via the ATHENA-newsletter. Your input will be highly appreciated. The next phase will be finalizing the text and inviting a selected group of scholars and stakeholders from outside our own circle to comment. This will happen at a so-called 'validation-conference'. ATGENDER will sponsor this conference. The validation conference, which Amazone and Sophia have kindly offered to host, will take place on February 18, 2010 in Brussels. Our distinguished external examiner will be professor Hyekyung. Although the validation-conference itself will be closed to a larger audience, ATHENA now works on plans to combine it with a public ATGENDER event where ATHENA3 disseminates its results. If ATHENA can find the resources, we will try to get as many ATHENA-partners to attend. You will hear more about these plans soon via the ATHENA newsletter.

ATGENDER Conference ‘Beyond European Gender Studies’ and

General Assembly

The Tuning accreditation conference will be ATGENDER’s first activity. This will take place back-to-back with the conference ‘Beyond European Gender Studies’ and ATGENDER’s first General Assembly (GA) on February 19, 2010. We ask you to reserve the dates in your agenda and to await the latest news, which we will spread as soon as possible.

Below you can find the call for papers for the European Gender Studies conference on February 19, which closes with our first General Assembly. We especially invite ATHENA working groups to organize panel sessions. For these meetings working groups unfortunately have to raise their own funds. The conferences, will be open for self-paying participants, albeit that lunches and a dinner will be offered by ATGENDER.

Call for Papers

BEYOND EUROPEAN GENDER STUDIES – TRANSVERSAL CONNECTIONS, Brussels, February 19, 2010.

What is the State of the Art of Gender Studies in your country, region, Europe or beyond Europe? How do we vision future connections for European Gender Studies? What do we mean with transversal? Which kind of connections will be important for Gender Studies to uphold and develop geographically, thematically and with actors outside academia? How do we foresee intensified links to information and documentation centres as well as to the providers of dissemination of educational and research results to be elaborated? ATGENDER calls for papers on any of these issues for the conference ‘Beyond European Gender Studies – Transversal Connections’. Please, send an abstract of 150 words to info@atgender.eu before December 15th, 2009.

Self-paying participants with or without a paper, as well as ATHENA working groups, are kindly invited to register at the same address, as soon as possible, however at the latest on January 11th, 2010.

Apart from several panel sessions taking place in the afternoon, ATGENDER will arrange a plenary morning session with key note speakers and responses. The themes of the key note addresses will be the transversal connections between European and Asian Gender Studies, and between European Gender Studies, feminist activism, and society at large.

Confirmed key note speakers are:

Professor Chang Pil Wha the President of Asian Association of Women's Studies, and as the first professor of women's studies in Korea and Asia.

Dr Malin Rönnblom is lecturer at Umeå University Sweden. She is also in charge of internalisation and marketing of Gender Studies programmes and head of research in the European research project called QUING, dealing with Quality in Gender and Equality Policies. In addition she is editor of NORA, Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research and chair of the Swedish Federation of Gender Scholars. Her talk will be about the transversal connections between European and Asian Gender Studies, and between European Gender Studies, feminist activism, and society at large.

Open call for suggestions for the Board

Apart from Tuning, the conference and our GA, we warmly invite suggestions for projects that could be undertaken by ATGENDER as an umbrella for activities in the area of Gender Research, Education and Documentation. Once the Statutes have been translated, you will see that we envision to keep up the good practice of working in smaller working groups on concrete projects, both practical regarding research, educational and documentation policies and theoretical regarding the content of our field. ATGENDER is also the perfect tool for applying for (E.U.-) funding for these projects. Not only is it a network through which partners can be found (part of the website will be designed for this purpose), but also can we provide the legal and institutional framework for applying for money. The Board is open to suggestions pertaining to this, and we welcome suggestions. We are happy that some of you have already found your way to the Board – we appreciate your comments and ideas very much.

News from Athena

The ATHENA-network has officially closed its third cycle (ATHENA3) on September. At this moment the Utrecht coordination team is preparing the final report. As all ATHENA3-partners will have noticed, this is a complicated process, the EU requires detailed reports and all the info has to fit the work plans we have submitted in the first years of ATHENA3. It is crucial that as much information about the use of ATHENA-expertise in different contexts can be reported. Please report about every thing you are doing with ATHENA - the Utrecht team tries to put everything on the ATHENA-website as well. The Utrecht-coordination team is grateful for the crucial cooperation in this final phase. On behalf of the ATHENA-network, I express the hope that ATHENA-working groups use the opportunity to organize a panel at the conference BEYOND EUROPEAN GENDER STUDIES – TRANSVERSAL CONNECTIONS, in Brussels, on February 19th, 2010. (See elsewhere in this newsletter). Although funding will be more difficult and more limited then it was for ATHENA-meetings, it will be a good opportunity to present and explore the gender expertise developed by ATHENA. If you do so, please include it in the ATHENA3-reporting forms.

ATHENA3-partners will be informed about the reporting via the ATHENA3-Newsletters.

The ATHENA3-book series Teaching with Gender is a series of books that reflect on teaching gender studies in different contexts: transnational classrooms, universities, professional training, and women’s centers. At this moment six titles have been printed:

• Teaching Gender in Social Work. Teaching with Gender. European Women's

Studies in International and Interdisciplinary Classrooms

• Teaching with memories, Gender and Transnational Citizenship in Europe

• Teaching with the Third Wave. New Feminists' Explorations of Teaching and

Institutional Contexts

• Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist Pedagogy

• Teaching Gender, Diversity and Urban Space. An Intersectional Approach

between Gender Studies and Spatial Disciplines

• Teaching with Memories. European Women's Histories in International and

Interdisciplinary Classrooms

Two more volumes (on Teaching Gender and Visual Culture and on Teaching Intersectionality) are at this very moment being produced. All volumes have been written by ATHENA3 working groups. All ATHENA3-partners will receive a complete set of these publications. ATGENDER-members can buy these books at a reduced price. More information about this will be available in the next ATGENDER-Newsletter. The books will also be available online. At the conference in Brussels, the book series will be festively launched.

With kind greetings on behalf of the Utrecht Coordination Team, Berteke Waaldijk, academic coordinator of ATHENA3

News from AOIFE

AOIFE is happy that after several years of joint hard work with ATHENA and WISE the new association ATGENDER has come into existence. The AOIFE Council is convinced that ATGENDER will represent the interests of the field of feminist education and research in Europe and the AOIFE General Assembly decided that AOIFE would be dissolved when ATGENDER is formally founded. The start of ATGENDER thus means the end of AOIFE. The AOIFE Council is grateful for the support of all AOIFE members ever since the Association of Institutions for Feminist Education and Research in Europe started in 1996 and encourages all AOIFE members to become a member of ATGENDER. The AOIFE Secretariat will remain operational until the end of 2009 to conclude all AOIFE affairs. AOIFE has handed over the organisation of the European Feminist Research Conferences to ATGENDER. We look back on a successful series of conferences and look forward to the upcoming conferences. Exchange and cooperation between institutions will also continue via existing and prospective research projects and research training projects and hopefully via a new cycle of ATHENA. We anticipate that all AOIFE members become a member of ATGENDER. Since the majority of AOIFE institutions already affirmed joining ATGENDER, we will ensure that all AOIFE members will be informed about the membership procedure in due time. On behalf of the AOIFE Council, Jeannette van der Sanden, AOIFE managing director.

ATGENDER in the news

Kilden has published an article about ATGENDER on their website:

http://kilden.forskningsradet.no/c16880/artikkel/vis.html?tid=62717

Other announcements

The Website will be available soon, until than, any questions, responses, ideas, membership issues etc. can be send to:

info@atgender.eu

To help ATGENDER grow we would want to ask you to forward this email to whomever you think that might be interested, to spread around the message that now there exists a newsletter for ATGENDER and all those who want to take part of the news are invited to register by sending an email to

info@atgender.eu