Now accepting applications from postdoctoral students within the Midlands4Cities consortium :
Beyond Binaries: A Study Day on New Frameworks in Gender Studies
10 May 2022, University of Birmingham (with online option)
Dr Mo Moulton (Birmingham), Dr Onni Gust (Nottingham) and Dr Jaya Jacobo (Coventry) are pleased to invite postgraduate researchers at any of the eight Midlands4Cities universities to apply to take part in our dialogue day.
This intensive study day will bring together postgraduate researchers and academics in order to facilitate engagement with important new interdisciplinary work in transgender, intersex, and non-binary studies. Emphasizing the co-constitution of gender, race, class and disability as categories of difference that structure the possibilities for human life in the modern world, it will allow researchers working on a range of topics to apply this new work to their own projects.
Doctoral researchers will gain a broad understanding of key concepts, theoretical and methodological frameworks relating to queer, intersex and trans studies. Through in-depth guided discussion sessions, you will gain facility with a field that is often seen as imposingly theoretical. You will be challenged to think across categories of difference, broadening their understandings of how their research might speak to wider concerns within and beyond the academy. You will benefit from the expertise of the three organizers, who have a shared grounding in queer and trans studies and pedagogies as well as interdisciplinary research interests ranging from eighteenth-century imperialism to present-day Brazil and South-east Asia.
Key questions will include
- How might thinking beyond a binary (male/female) gender framework complicate and enrich your research?
- What challenges do recent interventions in queer, intersex and trans studies pose to your research questions and methodologies?
- How do recent understandings of gender intersect with other frameworks and discourses of difference, including race, class and disability? How do these intersections inform your own research?
Small-group facilitated workshops based on a short reflective piece written in advance will allow doctoral researchers to apply these ideas in the context of your own research, asking new questions about their methodologies and modes of interpretation and receiving feedback from a wide range of other researchers. Finally, you will become part of an emerging community of researchers who are working on this new and dynamic field of enquiry within the M4C network.
If you are interested, please send a short (300-500 word) paragraph explaining your current research project and why you would like to be involved in the Dialogue Day by 31 January 2022 to Dr Moulton (m.moulton@bham.ac.uk), Dr Gust (onni.gust@nottingham.ac.uk), and Dr Jacobo (jaya.jacobo@coventry.ac.uk). Please feel free to email any of us with informal enquiries as well. Reasonable travel costs will be covered for students whose home university is not Birmingham. We anticipate that this will be an in-person event, with scope for synchronous online participation for those who cannot travel. We will be in touch to confirm participation and circulate readings in early-mid February.
Modern British Studies Birmingham 