Tuesday 26 April 2011

Themanummer Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies over schadelijke culturele praktijken

Sinds de opkomst van het populisme in Vlaanderen en Nederland staan zaken als gedwongen huwelijken, kindhuwelijken en besnijdenis van meisjes en jongens ter discussie. Feministische groeperingen houden zich hiermee al langer bezig. Ook de Verenigde Naties, in het bijzonder de Commissie voor de uitbanning van discriminatie van vrouwen, richten zich op de vraag hoe zulke ‘Schadelijke Culturele Praktijken’ voor vrouwen en kinderen kunnen worden bestreden. In het Vrouwenverdrag uit 1979 werd al gesproken over de kwalijke werking van ‘sociale en culturele patronen’ en in 1995 is dit verder aangescherpt. Intussen is echter vanuit feministen in niet-westerse landen kritiek gekomen op het concept. Waarom worden bijvoorbeeld weinig ingrijpende vormen van meisjesbesnijdenis wel tot de ‘Schadelijke Culturele Praktijken’ gerekend en westerse cosmetische “vaginacorrecties” niet? Het Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies wijdt twee themanummers aan deze problematiek. Het eerste daarvan is onlangs verschenen, met daarin artikels over de aanpak van gedwongen huwelijken, eergerelateerd geweld en cultureel burgersschap.


Thursday 14 April 2011

GWO International Workshop Series `Gender Renewals', June 23-24th, 2011 VU University, Amsterdam

The international workshop 'Gender Renewals' sponsored by the journal Gender, Work & Organization will be held at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam June 23-24, 2011. Many renowned gender scholars will be attending.
Patrizia Zanoni, Elke Valgaeren and Lieve Lembrechts will present a paper on women's experience of pregnancy-related discrimination at work drawing on psychological contract theory and analyzing recent Belgian qualitative data. 
Patrizia Zanoni will also participate in a panel discussion organized by Yvonne Benschop and Marieke van den Brink on the future of gender and diversity research in contemporary universities. Are ways to move forward tied to linking up with other, broader themes in management and organization? Or should we look for other ways to renew gender perspectives? The panel will address the do's and don'ts of institutionalizing gender research in academia. A key question for the panel pertains to how do researchers and research groups ensure resources in competition with other researchers that may be perceived as more mainstream in the management and organization field.  

More info on registering for the event can be found on http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1468-0432

The 7th international Critical Management Studies conference hosts cutting-edge research on identity and diversity @ work

The 2011 CMS conference which will take place in Napoli, July 11-13, hosts a great number of streams related to identity and diversity in organizations. It will be the place to be this summer for organizational scholars working on these themes from critical perspectives.

Patrizia Zanoni will convene a stream on diversity and control together with colleagues Hans Siebers (Tilburg University), Vincenza Esposito (Università del Sannio) and Mario Pezzillo Jacono (Università di Napoli II) http://www.organizzazione.unina.it/streams/4.pdf

Annelies Thoelen and Patrizia Zanoni will present a paper in the stream on critical perspectives on entrepreneurship and entreprise development convened by Deirdre Tedmanson, Caroline Essers, Karen Verduyn and Attila Bruni http://www.organizzazione.unina.it/streams/34.pdf 

Have a look at the program!
http://www.organizzazione.unina.it/cms7/

UNESCO erkent Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui als “Young Artist for Intercultural Dialogue between Arab and Western Worlds”

De Marokkaans/Vlaamse Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui werd gisteren door de UNESCO samen met twintig andere jonge artiesten erkend als promotor van de interculturele dialoog tussen de Arabische en Westerse wereld. Cherkaoui is choreograaf en richtte vorig jaar zijn eigen dansgezelschap Eastman op. Hij neemt deel aan het onderzoek van SEIN rond ethnic entrepreneurs in the creative industies, en is nog tot en met zaterdag te zien met zijn nieuwe voorstelling IT 3.0 in Toneelhuis in Antwerpen.


Discriminatie en identiteit. Identiteitsgebonden werkgevers in het Belgisch en Europees arbeidsrecht


Op woensdagnamiddag 4 mei 2011 van 14.00 u tot 16.30 u organiseren het Vlaams Secretariaat van het Katholiek Onderwijs (VSKO) en het Vlaams Verbond van Katholieke Hogescholen (VVKHO) een studienamiddag over de recent verschenen publicatie Discriminatie en identiteit. Identiteitsgebonden werkgevers in het Belgisch en Europees arbeidsrecht, van de hand van Yves Stox. Yves Stox is consultant bij Ernst&Young. Hij is licentiaat in de Rechten (K.U.Leuven), licentiaat in het Kerkelijk recht (K.U.Leuven) en master na master in het Sociaal recht (Vrije Universiteit Brussel).

Yves Stox werd bereid gevonden om zijn publicatie toe te lichten voor een breder publiek. Zijn studie geeft op basis van recente ontwikkelingen in wetgeving en rechtspraak inzake discriminatie in België en in de buurlanden op een pragmatische manier aan hoe een werkgever zijn ideologische identiteit kan laten doorwerken in de arbeidsrelatie.

Na een korte introductie door Mieke Van Hecke (directeur-generaal VSKO) zal Yves Stox gedurende iets meer dan een uur zijn belangrijkste bevindingen uit de doeken doen. Vervolgens zal een korte koffie- en theepauze worden ingelast. Daarna volgt een repliek door Maurice van Stiphout en hebben de deelnemers de mogelijkheid tot het stellen van vragen.

De kosten voor deze studiedag worden gedragen door de organisatoren. Wel wordt gevraagd om uw aanwezigheid door te geven aan Marina Begyn (marina.begyn@vsko.be).
De studiedag vindt plaats in Brussel (Guimardstraat 1 - Orangerie). De locatie is goed bereikbaar met het openbaar vervoer en is op loopafstand van Brussel Centraal gelegen.

International conference: Work-Life: Cross-national Conversations

Numerous appeals for the greater consideration of context in management research have been made. Work-life researchers are well aware of the need to account for national context in particular. National context can be understood from an institutional perspective and/or a cultural perspective. National context notably translates into values and attitudes towards work and life and into public provisions. These values and public provisions may influence individuals’ experiences of work-life fit as well as their expectations towards employers and the State, lay the ground for supervisors’ varying degrees of supportiveness, promote or discourage employers’ work-life initiatives and inform social policy. Additionally, national context matters from an epistemic point of view, since it often influences work-life researchers’ choices of research questions, theoretical frameworks and research designs.

However, little research has thought to use or build frameworks able to “context theorize” work-life issues. Drawing on examples from our research, how can we contribute to narrow the micro-macro gap in work-life research and beyond?

In France, work-family and work-life issues are rapidly picking up. In the past five to ten years, employers, policy makers and scholars have been actively experimenting and learning about making work and life work, in a social and institutional context that is both unique and globalized. The most recent token of this interest is the recruitment by French business schools of several work-life scholars, adding to an already vibrant French community of scholars.

Rouen Business School research group Contemporary P@thways of Career, Life and Learning, in association with the Special Interest Group Diversity and equal opportunity of the French-speaking Academic Association of HRM, will be holding an international conference in Paris, with two primary objectives:

1. To bridge academic communities researching work-life in different countries and from different disciplines such as organizational behavior and management, industrial psychology, industrial relations and sociology, so as to broaden our perspectives and hopefully facilitate future collaborations.

2. To reflect on the role that national context plays in work-life research, both for the production of research itself (influence of national context on researchers’ approaches) and on the phenomena we are studying (at the individual, organizational and social policy levels).

Date: 17/05/2011

Location: Paris


Monday 4 April 2011

Interdisciplinary conference "Migration, Ethnicisation and the Challenge of Diversity: The "Others" in Europe and Beyond"

In contemporary Europe, the social tensions and political debates produced by immigration are increasingly linked to issues of belonging and identity. The representation of the foreigner is no longer solely defined by his or her place on the labour market or in the social hierarchy. In light of EU enlargement and due to immigration flows, European societies are increasingly questioning their “cultural and ethnic identity”. As a consequence, boundaries between “insiders” and “outsiders” are being redefined. The “others” in Europe are no longer merely those who do not have state citizenship of one of the member states of the Union. In the new European migration context, “otherness” increasingly refers to ethno-cultural minority groups, regardless of their EU citizenship status.
This conference aims to address the construction of identity classifications underlying new forms of inclusion and exclusion that are to be found in contemporary Europe, and beyond. Its scope covers practices of categorization and of resistance, both by majority and minority groups. Anthropologists, social psychologists, sociologists, political scientists and law scholars will meet to discuss the categorization of identity groups through legal and social norms, public policies, institutional practices, social interactions and representations, as well as actors’ mobilizations.

Date: 28/04/2011 - 29/04/2011
Location: Brussels

Friday 1 April 2011

Film Silent stories

Silent Stories is a poetical portrait of two men and two women whose sexual identity forced them to leave Dakar, Algiers, Conakry and Baghdad. No mere film about pain and sorrow but rather one that is filled with hope and oxygen and that explores the unknown colour of tomorrow.
In Silent Stories Hanne Phlypo and Catherine Vuylsteke follow two men and two women from Algeria, Senegal, Iraq and Guinea whose sexual orientation forced them to leave their country – whether they were bisexual, homosexual, lesbian or transsexual. Three of them are rebuilding their lives in Belgium, for the fourth, the Iraqi transsexual Sarah, long years of waiting have finally resulted in political asylum and the prospect of a gender operation. Different as the four characters might be in terms of age, social and educational background and country of origin, what binds them is their emotional struggle, their
grief for what they lost and their hope for what the future might bring.

The directors chose not to treat their characters in a serial way but preferred a kaleidoscopic approach, which is both poetic and intimate. They don’t want to convince, inform or educate the spectators, their mere aim is to move them profoundly, and thus transform the hard lives of these protagonists into those of the
viewers, at least for an instant.