The Gender Lab Una Europa seed-funded project welcomes academics, researchers and graduate students from across the Alliance to explore the new challenges gender research and researchers are facing today, exacerbated by the pandemic. Join us on 16 June to dream utopias together, to envision a new direction for European and cross-border gender research.

The Una Europa Gender Lab will bring together different actors across the different Una Europa universities to think and reflect in an innovative way about the new challenges, gender research(ers) are facing, but above all, we want to dream utopias together. What does European and cross-border gender research of the future look like? What issues and challenges do we face? How can we work on them together and overcome them in solidarity? What formats do we need for this and what projects have we always wanted to realize? The pandemic did not only highlight unequal gender relations, but gender research also came under particular, even critical, scrutiny. At the same time, many gender researchers and feminists have argued that "after the pandemic" should not mean going back to "before the pandemic".

The Una Europa Gender Lab will provide tools for an interactive debate: There is room for creative ideas and transnational dreams, as well as for strategies and arguments to get a little closer to utopia. The workshop will be open to the Una Europa academic community and will include external actors as stakeholders and policy makers. The first part of the workshop will open the space to the academic community with different perspectives and knowledge to explore and co-create solutions, policies, action strategies, etc. fostering collaboration and interaction. In a second part, we will create the space to bring the results of the first part into dialogue with stakeholders and policy makers.

The Gender Lab will take place in the form of explorative online workshops moderated by two expert facilitators on Design Thinking methodologies. Based on these methodologies, we will feature an agile process that enables participants to brainstorm ideas, quickly test solutions, and plan further steps.

Please note: Places for this workshop are limited. Selection will will favour the representation of all universities involved, as well as the participation of junior researchers.

About the organisers

The workshop is organised by the Margherita von Brentano Center for Gender Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and sponsored by the Una Europa Seed Funding initiative.