Located within the Department of Education in the School of Education and Social Work, the research centre CHEER has been established to consolidate higher education research and scholarship at the University of Sussex.
CHEER's director is Professor Louise Morley.
Join the CHEER Facebook group
Don't miss...
Date: Wednesday 3 February, 2021
Time: 2-3.30pm
Speaker: Alyosxa Tudor, Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies, Centre for Gender Studies, SOAS, University of London
Title: Decolonizing Trans/Gender Studies? Teaching gender, race and sexuality in times of the rise of the global right
Register: For security reasons, participation in this event will be via (free) registration only.
Please register at eventbrite.
Alyosxa will argue that a decolonial perspective on ‘gender’ means conceptualizing it as always already trans. Their object of investigation is ‘gender’ as a category and ‘gender studies’ as a field of knowledge. In order to discuss what decolonizing trans/gender studies in Europe could mean, Alyosxa aims to bring different strands together that have been held apart so far: resistance against global attacks on gender studies, resistance against transphobic feminism, and the ‘decolonising the curriculum’ movement in the UK.
A critical focus on Eurocentric knowledge and truth claims means to define ‘Europe’ as a complex set of geopolitical, historical and epistemological processes and not just as a neutral location. At British universities, a mostly student-led movement has started to emerge that fights for decolonizing higher education. This movement is inspired by transnational student activism like Rhodes/Fees must fall in South Africa and calls for challenging racist, colonialist, nationalist and neoliberal paradigms in knowledge production by addressing both issues of epistemology and access to higher education.
Applying central political claims of the ‘decolonising the curriculum’ movement, Alyosxa explores potentials and challenges of the task of ‘decolonizing’ trans/gender studies in Europe/the Global North. With this, their intervention opens up a discussion on how to conceptualize knowledge on ‘transgender’ with a central focus on decolonial and transnational perspectives.