Center of Excellence

NORA Conference 2019 — Call for Abstracts: Border Regimes, Territorial Discourses and Feminist Politics

Gender and feminist researchers are invited to participate in the NORA 2019 Conference on critical feminist cross-disciplinary research and activities.

The conference is co-hosted by RIKK – Institute for Gender, Equality and Difference, the EDDA Research Center and the United Nations University Gender Studies and Training Programme at the University of Iceland.  The 2019 NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research – conference focuses on the theme of material and symbolic borders in a period of nationalist revival.

Read more »

Inequality in Iceland has just been published by the University of Iceland Press in cooperation with the EDDA center. The book will be launched at a public event at the Nordic House on 1 December 2017, 12:00-13.30.

The book is about inequality of income and wealth in Iceland, covering the period from 1927 to the present. It shows that inequality was quite pronounced before the Second World War. From the 1940s onward, the distribution of both income and wealth became much more equal. For about half a century, Iceland, along with the other Nordic countries, probably had the world’s highest level of equality. This age of equality was a period of extensive economic growth, rapid modernization of society and the economy, improved standards of living and the build-up of a Nordic-style welfare state. Read more »

EDDA hosted the final workshop in the NOS-HS funded exploratory workshop series “Democratic Experiments” in cooperation with Guðni Elísson’s Climate discourse project “Earth 101”, 19-21 October 2017. The project has earlier held workshops on Epistemic Democracy (Turku 16 October 2016) and on the Future of Democracy (Reykjavík 20-21 May 2016). The focus of this third and final workshop in the project was on two issues that have attracted public and scholarly attention to an ever greater extent in recent years:

1. How can/does democracy (today) deal with climate change? Can democratic publics or democratically elected leaders respond to climate change forcefully enough to avoid environmental catastrophe?
2. What are the political consequenses of a failure to respond forcefully to climate change? Is there a future for democracy if democratic governments are unable to respond to environmental disasters?

Read more »

Extended deadline for papers to 31 July 2017 – Updated call and further information here.

RINGS annual meeting and conference will be hosted by the EDDA Research Center at the University of Iceland in collaboration with the United Nations Gender Equality and Training Programme (UNU-GEST) and RIKK – Institute for Gender, Equality and Difference. The conference will be held October 4–6 2017 in Reykjavík. RINGS, the International Research Association of Institutions of Advanced Gender Studies is a global association of centres of advanced gender studies. The participating centres span Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, Europe and North America.

The conference will deal with various perspectives of feminism, nationalism, and populism. The recent revival of nationalist, populist right-wing politics poses a challenge to human rights, multicultural agendas, and the functioning of democratic systems. The electoral successes of populist parties and politicians owe much to their radical nationalist and anti-immigration stance, in particular, and political discontent, in general. Their varying degrees of xenophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia, and anti-establishment positions have not only set them apart from other rivals on the political Left and Right but also entered into the mainstream. This political condition raises questions about feminist resistance to new forms of political, cultural, social, and economic exclusion.
Read more »