EIGER · Embodied Institutionalism: A New Model for Gender Equity Reform
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-09-01 → 2024-01-01
- EU contribution
- €162,806
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Embodied Institutionalism: A New Model for Gender Equity Reform
The importance of gender equity for enhancing the quality of scientific, legal, economic, and social policy research is well-documented. ‘Embodied Institutionalism: A New Model for Gender Equity Reform’ (‘EIGER’) investigates the following question: Why are particular reforms targeting gendered discrimination effective in one institutional context, yet non-effective in another? What accounts for this difference? EIGER argues that accounting for the success or failure of particular reforms requires close consideration of how affect and imagination operate in institutional spaces. My project considers how institutions shape particular imaginings and affects among gendered actors, and the impact of this dynamic on attempts to address gender inequity. This is a novel approach that goes beyond the existing literature, which tends to focus on affect, imagination, and material structures in isolation from one another, rather than seeing how these things interrelate. EIGER focuses on gender inequity in the university, insofar as the university remains a central site of knowledge creation and dissemination and plays a formative role in the career trajectories of many young adults. Higher education institutions formally prohibit all forms of discrimination, yet women and other minorities continue to confront discriminatory practices and outcomes. EIGER has the following key objectives: first, to map out the relationship between imagination, affect, social identity, and institutional structures; and second, to show how this theoretical framework can be used to guide more effective reform efforts within the space of the university. Thirdly, it aims to widely disseminate its findings to academic as well as non-academic audiences.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The proposed interdisciplinary project,‘Embodied Institutionalism: A New Model for Gender Equity Reform’ (EIGER), will investigate how the value and limitations of emerging and existing reforms in higher education settings can be linked in part to their ability to constructively engage the embodied and affective capacities of institutional actors. EIGER examines how the embodiment (e.g., gender, ethnicity, race, nationality) of institutional actors, and the lived experience of these actors in tertiary settings, significantly bears on the success of any given institutional intervention to advance gender equity goals. This integrated focus on affect, embodiment, and institutions represents an innovative theoretical approach, which I call embodied institutionalism (EI). My embodied institutionalist (EI) framework recognizes the importance of attending to localized ecologies of affect that influence gender-based outcomes. Higher education contexts in Australia and in Europe exhibit marked differences. Engaging in a comparative analysis of how the affective and embodied norms particular to these contexts affect the success of institutional reforms and assist to sustain gendered inequalities promises to illuminate creative, local solutions to issues of gender inequity, and to have significant value for theorists and practitioners working in the non-academic as well as academic sector.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- FREIE UNIVERSITAET BERLIN · BerlinCoordinatorGermany
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union