Sense AGENDa · How Ordinary People Make Sense of Anti-Gender Messages
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-07-05 → 2024-12-22
- EU contribution
- €239,196
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
How Ordinary People Make Sense of Anti-Gender Messages
In many European countries today, topics such as sexuality education, abortion, same-sex marriage and parenting, or transgender rights create divisions and conflicting perspectives. The project Sense AGENDa asks why different citizens have diverse opinions, and sometimes very strong feelings, about the issues of gender and sexuality? These questions are of crucial societal relevance in the context of the pushbacks or the contractions of gender and sexual rights, resulting from new types of campaigns – anti-gender mobilizations – that couch their opposition in pseudo-democratic and pseudo-scientific language. As a result, gender and sexuality have assumed a central role in the public sphere in many countries, oftentimes also dismantling the old assumptions about the inevitability of gender and sexual equality progress, and creating new societal divisions. The project Sense AGENDa explores the problem of these new divisions by examining how citizens in Croatia and Belgium - two cases contrasted in anti-gender movements' success and institutionalization of gender and sexuality rights - talk about gender and sexuality. By comparing how different citizens discuss gender and sexuality in the two countries, and how Croatian citizens of different ages evaluate these issues, the project's objectives are to understand how ordinary people evaluate publicly available ideas about gender and sexuality; how their characteristics and identifications shape these evaluations; and how are these evaluations and interpretations situated into different socio-cultural and institutional-legal frameworks. The conclusions highlight in particular the differences in the context of institutional (dis)trust into which the Croatian and Belgian citizens situate their evaluations and the importance of perceived climates of opinion.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
This project explores why ordinary people continue to oppose and, in some European democracies, increasingly push back against gender and sexual equality. In face of anti-gender mobilizations, i.e. the campaigns against gender and LGBT rights that have been growing in strength and influence since the mid-2000s, we urgently need to understand how individuals make sense of anti-gender messages, what makes these messages resonant to different audiences, and how and why they succeed or fail in different contexts. In examining these questions, this study will adopt a cross-cultural qualitative research design, comparing the strategically selected cases of Croatia and Belgium (Flanders). By a unique combination of democratic forums, pre-acquainted focus groups and individual interviews, this study aims to understand how ordinary people evaluate publicly available ideas about gender and sexuality; how the individuals' personal and social characteristics and identifications shape their evaluations at both the individual and collective level; and how are these gender and sexuality evaluations and interpretations situated into contexts with different climates of opinions and institutional-legal frameworks. Based on this, the study aims to build a theoretical model of cultural reception that connects individual and group perspectives and socio-cultural contexts. The project's insights will contribute to various disciplines studying the interactions of institutions, values and individual meanings in general, and the anti-gender mobilizations more specifically, ranging from sociology and political sciences to social movements, public opinion and gender and sexuality studies. The study's results are also intended to generate wider social impact by highlighting the concerns the policymakers and the stakeholders need more strongly address if they desire to open a constructive public dialogue with citizens struggling how to best make sense of difficult issues in an uncertain world.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- SVEUCILISTE U ZAGREBU FILOZOFSKI FAKULTET · ZagrebCoordinatorCroatia
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union