The IWM is proud to have hosted the 2022 Emma Goldman Awards ceremony. The Emma Goldman Awards and Emma Goldman Snowball Awards are being awarded by the FLAX Foundation to talented and engaged scholars working on feminist and inequality issues in Europe since 2020.
The FLAX Foundation generates and supports innovative research and knowledge on feminist and inequality issues in Europe, in order to contribute to a society with more social justice, equality and solidarity. By providing researchers with the space and time to immerse themselves in their work, and by helping to showcase that work, the FLAX Foundation seeks to stimulate the development of social sciences and the humanities when it comes to inequalities and social justice.
IWM Rector Misha Glenny opened the evening with a welcome address. Then Sara Garbagnoli spoke on Feminists as Givers of Oxygen. Monique Wittig, a Remarkable Example. This was followed by Asli Vatansever's speech titled “This Is the Closest I’ll Ever Get To Being the Next Marx!”, or How Exile Makes You Funnier. Afterwards the awardees were announced.
Sara Garbagnoli is a feminist and sociologist, committed to research at the crossroads of feminist theory, discourse analysis and sociology of social movements, focusing on the historical process in the emergence of gender studies and the resistances raising against it. With a solid record of scholarly contributions, she is also implicated in civil society debates in Italy and France. For already many years, she has been involved in research on anti-gender campaigns, analysing the rhetoric of the Vatican, as well as activities and discourses of far rights parties and actors. In 2017, she published the book La Croisade Anti-Genre. Du Vatican aux Manif pour Tous, co-written with Massim Prearo (Paris: Textuel, 2017), also translated in Italian (Turin: Kaplan, 2018). Part of a network of scholars and activists that develops the understanding of the writings of Monique Wittig, Christine Delphy and Colette Guillaumin, she is playing a crucial role in spreading the research on lesbianism and materialist feminism.
Asli Vatansever is a sociologist of work and social stratification with a focus on precarious academic labor. After she was dismissed from her office as associate professor and got banned from public service in Turkey for her participation in the Academics for Peace campaign in 2016, she was hosted as a guest researcher at various institutions in Germany and Italy. Her ongoing project at Bard College Berlin investigates the varieties of academic labor activism in Europe. Her books include Ursprünge des Islamismus im Osmanischen Reich. Eine Weltsystemanalytische Perspektive (Hamburg: Dr. Kovač, 2010), Ne Ders Olsa Veririz. Akademisyenin Vasıfsız İşçiye Dönüşümü (Ready to Teach Anything. The Transformation of the Academic into Unskilled Worker, Istanbul: İletişim, 2015 – co-authored with Meral Gezici-Yalçın), and At the Margins of Academia. Exile, Precariousness, and Subjectivity (Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill, 2020).
A recording of the livestream is available here:
