About Us

Feminist Epistemic Justice in and beyond the EU (FEJUST) is a Jean Monnet Chair supported by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ Programme. It is led by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Rahime Süleymanoğlu-Kürüm at the Department of Political Science and International Relations of Bahçeşehir University.

FEJUST is grounded in a feminist agenda in EU politics and aims to create a space for debate that embraces epistemic diversity through its content, activities and teaching pedagogies. While aiming to address the epistemic injustice women face in the political discourse of EU politics, the Chair scrutinizes many mainstream and male-dominated areas, from foreign policy to cultural policy, and adopts a feminist and epistemically pluralistic method for researching, teaching and discussing EU-related issues.

Every year, FEJUST offers four carefully designed modules at both undergraduate and graduate levels on feminism, gender and EU politics, and further strengthens teaching through a series of seminars and workshops designed for early-career researchers. Teaching follows the principles of the flipped classroom model and relies on participatory and arts-based activities to offer a more inclusive mode of teaching, while the workshop and seminar series provide democratic, safe and participatory political spaces in Türkiye for discussing the most relevant issues of EU politics and gender. In this way, the Chair aims to disrupt patriarchal masculine discourse, spaces and debates through the principles of feminist epistemic diversity, and to place feminist, decolonial and alternative forms of knowledge production at the center of its activities.

FEJUST has three components:

1) delivering undergraduate and graduate courses,
2) organizing early-career researcher workshops,
3) organizing a seminar series that blends EU Politics with Gender to promote research adopting a feminist perspective on the EU.

These three components are designed to target diverse audiences, from students to femocrats (feminist bureaucrats), and to create an intellectually vibrant environment for discussing EU studies through feminist and decolonial theories.

Courses are offered to undergraduate and graduate students. For undergraduate students, the fall semester offers a course titled "Gender in International Development" to teach different development approaches from a feminist perspective, such as gender-based security, education, budgeting, violence, participation, accountability and social responsibility. In the spring semester, a further course titled "EU Policies and Gender" is offered to explore in depth the EU's approaches and policies on the topics discussed in the first semester.

Graduate courses are more research-based and intensive. Graduate students take "Gender and Development" in the fall semester and "Gender Policies in the EU" in the spring semester, gaining a broader and more critical feminist perspective on the EU's actual and potential contribution to development.

The components of FEJUST aim to integrate feminist perspectives into the interpretation of EU policy-making and broaden the horizon of European studies beyond the narrow parameters of foreign policy, customs union and common market, which are mainly taught from a rationalist/realist perspective. Topics include the commodification of gender equality in the EU and biases in EU policy-making, and touch on case studies such as reproductive rights and health as a social justice issue in the EU, covering Roma women in the EU, the gendered consequences of the Common European asylum and migration policy, feminist activism in Central and Eastern Europe, ecofeminist perspectives on the Green Deal, and feminist concerns about the EU's promotion of agricultural modernization in Africa and beyond. The Chair will also bring academic perspectives to gendered security studies, which have developed considerably in European studies but remain insufficiently recognized in the mainstream literature. Such an inclusive and diverse approach to EU studies better captures the true nature of EU-Türkiye relations, which have evolved across some 35 negotiation chapters, only a few of which concern foreign policy and politics, while most are social and technical.

European Politics and Gender Expert Seminar Series: This seminar series is designed for feminist experts and their current research on EU politics. The seminar series is held four times a year (twice each semester). The seminars will help feminist perspectives be heard in EU policy-making and in the interpretation of EU policy agendas through academic lenses.

Early-Career Researchers Workshops are designed for master's and PhD students and early-career researchers working on feminism, epistemic justice, development and the EU. The workshops will be held every year in April. The workshops will be designed as in-person events with an online Zoom option, and in-person participation will be encouraged when pandemic conditions allow. To maximize student participation, some sessions will be held specifically online so that different actors, such as femocrats from EU institutions, Turkish institutions and renowned researchers from Europe and Africa, can be invited.

The European Politics and Gender Expert Seminar Series and the Early-Career Researchers Workshops encourage the participation of non-academic stakeholders such as policy-makers, bureaucrats, representatives of civil society organizations and the media in order to promote dialogue between academia and society.

The FEJUST Chair works in close cooperation with CIFAL Istanbul, the training center of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) in Türkiye, hosted by Bahçeşehir University. The Chair aims to build capacity on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for public and private sector leaders, representatives of civil society organizations, academics, local authorities and students. Therefore, FEJUST gives students, as the next generation of these stakeholders, the opportunity to be exposed to practitioner perspectives and to prepare for their careers by taking feminist voices into account.