Nordic Research School in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (Funded by NorFA/NordForsk: Nordic Academy for Advanced Study). The School is a joint venture between NIKK (Nordic Institute for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, Oslo) and Dept. of Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden, and 36 Gender Studies units at universities in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and North-West Russia.
PhD course FEMINIST METHODOLOGIES: SITUATED KNOWLEDGE PRACTICES
Date: December 8-10, 2009
Deadline for application: October 23, 2009
Venue: University of Umeå, Umeå, Sweden
Teachers:

• Dr. Katie King, Associate professor of women’s studies, University of Maryland, USA,
• Dr. Ulrika Dahl, Assistant professor of gender studies, Södertörn University College, Sweden
• Dr. Malin Rönnblom, assistent professor of gender studies, Umeå University, Sweden.

Course description:
Feminist methodologies are all about critical, reflexive and visionary ideas about knowledges being made, shared, used, demonstrated, patterned and organized. This course attends to some themes related to how, in a global era, feminists/gender scholars labor to participate in a universe in which we are only some of the objects, devices, things, processes and trial and error reassemblages in self-organizing „learning“.
We begin by considering some methodological dilemmas connected to understanding global academic restructuring, networking knowledge economies, and transdisciplinarity. Next we hone in on reconsiderations of two „classic“ methods: ethnography and policy analysis. In gender studies a wide range of scholars employ ethnographic methods and/or what Donna Haraway (1996) has called an ‘ethnographic attitude’ whilst studying a wide range of objects, phenomena, fields and actors.
What are the gains and dilemmas of such approaches? In particular, we consider questions of authority, representation and truth claims at the intersection of the bio/ethnographic in writing and research. What is the relationship between fiction, biography and ethnography and how do we translate, tell, and interpret stories? How are subjects constituted in feminist ethnography and how are understandings of relations of representation accounted for? Last, we consider the field of feminist policy analysis. Here we focus on three important aspects in the field of constructive studies of politics; how to do comparative analysis, how to ‘turn away’ from a ‘gender/women’-only power analysis into creating an intersectional, feminist policy analysis and the need for reflexivity in the studies of politics. Moving between scales and modes of analysis, this course revisits old themes and considers new methodological challenges for gender studies in the 21st century.
Programme and literature (programme forthcoming).
Grants
16 PhD students can be funded by NorFA/NordForsk. 4 more PhD students are welcome to participate on a self-paying basis. If the number of applicants, qualifying for the NorFA grants exceeds 16, a selection will be made to ensure a spread of nationalities, institutions and disciplines.
Applications
Applications (in English) should be mailed no later than October 23, 2009, to academic coordinator Mette Bryld: mbry@galnet.dk
See http://www.norsgender.org for information on application.