Feminist Epistemic Justice in the EU and Beyond (FEJUST) is a Jean Monnet Chair supported by European Commission under Erasmus+ program. It is coordinated by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Rahime Süleymanoğlu-Kürüm, at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul.
FEJUST builds on a feminist agenda of EU politics and embraces epistemic diversity through its content, activities, and teaching pedagogies. This chair aims to address the epistemic injustice women are exposed to in the political discourse of EU politics and encompasses a feminist and epistemically pluralistic rationale towards researching, teaching, and discussing EU-related topics from main- and male-stream areas ranging from foreign policy to cultural policies.
FEJUST proposes meticulously designed four modules on Feminism, Gender, and EU politics both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels every year and further strengthens teaching through a series of seminars and workshops designed for early career researchers. The teaching adopts principles of flipped learning and is based on participatory and art-based activities to offer a more inclusive mode of teaching whereas the workshop and seminar series will offer democratic and safe political and participatory spaces to discuss the most concerning issues of EU politics, gender, and Turkey. Thus, this chair aims to disrupt the androcentric masculine discourse, spaces, and discussions through its principles of feminist epistemic diversity and place the productions of feminist, decolonial, and alternative epistemes at the centre of activities.
FEJUST will have three components:
1) teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses,
2) Early Career Researcher Workshops,
3) Gendering EU Politics Seminar Series to promote research on the EU from feminist lenses.
These three components are designed in a way to target different audiences from students to femocrats (feminist bureaucrats) and create an intellectually vibrant environment for discussing EU studies from the feminist and decolonial theories.
Teaching will be offered to undergraduate and postgraduate students. For undergraduate students, fall term will offer a course “Gender in International Development” to second and third year students to teach them different approaches to development from a feminist perspective to include gendering security, education, budgeting, violence, participation, accountability, and the most pressing issues concerning gender inequality. Spring semester will offer a more specialised course, entitled Gendering EU Politics to expose them in depth to the EU’s approaches and policies on the issues discussed in the first semester.
The postgraduate courses will be more research-based and intensive. In the fall semester, postgraduate students will be offered “Gender and Development” and spring semester, they will be offered “Gender Politics in the EU” and exposed to a broader and critical feminist perspective on the EU’s actual and potential contribution to development.
FEJUST teaching components seeks to integrate feminist perspectives into the interpretation of the EU policymaking and expands the horizons of the European studies beyond narrow parameters of foreign policy, customs union, common market that are taught primarily from a rationalist/realist perspective. The topics will involve the commodification of gender equality in the EU, matters of unconscious bias in the EU policymaking, and touch upon case studies such as reproductive rights and health as a social justice issue in the EU, finding space for Romani women within the EU, gendered outcomes of the Common European asylum and migration policy, feminist activism in Central and Eastern Europe, ecofeminist perspectives on the Green Deal, feminist concerns in the EU’s promotion of agricultural modernisation in Africa and beyond. Besides, it will bring academic perspectives on gendering security studies which have evolved significantly in European studies but not recognized in the mainstream literature sufficiently. Such an inclusive and diverse approach to EU studies better captures the true nature of the EU-Turkey relations evolving around 35 negotiating chapters, only a few of them are about foreign policy and political but often social and technical.
Gendering EU Politics Expert Seminar Series are designed for feminist experts and their up-to-date research on EU politics. Lecture series will take place four times a year (twice each semester). They will facilitate feminist perspectives to be heard in the EU policymaking and interpretation of the EU policy agendas through academic lenses.
Early Career Researcher Workshops are designed for MA and PhD students and early career researchers who are working on feminism, epistemic justice, development and the EU. Workshops will take place in April every year. Workshops will be designed face to face with a zoom option but when the pandemic conditions allow, face-to-face participation will be encouraged. Some sessions will be particularly held online to be able to invite different actors such as femocrats from EU bodies, Turkish institutions along with well-renowned researchers based in Europe and Africa to maximise the engagement of students.
Gendering EU Politics seminar series and early career researcher workshops will invite and involve participation of non-academic stakeholders such as policymakers, civil servants, civil society actors, representatives of different levels of education and of the media to foster dialogue between the academic word and the society.
FEJUST chair established close cooperation with CIFAL Istanbul which is the training centre of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) in Turkey and hosted at Bahçeşehir University (BAU). The centre aims at advancing and enhancing capacity UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for public and private sector leaders, non-governmental organisation representatives, academics, local authorities and students. Hence, FEJUST allows students, as next generation of these stakeholders, to be exposed to practitioner views and allow them to prepare their career taking into account feminist voices.
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