Awardees
Emma Goldman Award 2023
Teresa Degenhardt
Teresa Degenhardt has a law degree from the University of Bologna, an MA in Criminology and Research Methods from Keele University, and a PhD from Ulster University, Northern Ireland. She has held visiting positions in Berkeley, Hamburg, and Turin, and, as a student, in New York, Rotterdam, and Utrecht. Based on her interest in investigating social and institutional reactions to behavior deemed to be criminal or harmful within a transnational and international context, she turned to studying state policies on migration, focusing on the use of detention through an abolitionist perspective. She also looked at the management of migrants in immigration detention in the UK during the first COVID-19 lockdown.
Her Routledge book War as Protection and Punishment: Armed Intervention at the ‘End of History’ provides an analysis of how penal discourses are used to legitimate post-Cold War military interventions through three main case studies: Kosovo, Iraq, and Libya. These cases reveal the operation of diverse modalities of punishment in extending the ambit of international liberal governance. This analysis shows the contradictions, tensions, and ambiguities that these military interventions created at the local level.
In the past, Teresa has worked on second-generation migrants and on prostitution, theoretically on some criminalising/victimizing feminist understandings of prostitution, and empirically on crimes committed against female migrants by criminal organizations, in the context of Italy's restrictive migration regimes. She is also part of the Leverhulme Interdisciplinary Network on Algorithmic Solutions (LINAS).
Eva Maria Fjellheim
Eva Maria Fjellheim is a southern Saami researcher, activist, and radio documentary producer working on decolonial struggles and solidarity across Indigenous geographies. A PhD research fellow at the Centre for Saami Studies at UiT, the Arctic University of Norway, she researches the dispossession of Saami reindeer herding lands by the wind energy industry in Norway as a form of green colonialism. Through courtroom ethnography, Eva has studied the Fosen case, where the Saami reindeer herding community Fovsen Njaarke won a historical ruling in the Supreme Court. In the Arctic Review on Law and Politics journal, she explores the epistemic controversies that emerged between Fovsen Njaarke and Fosen Vind. Considering the negative impacts from wind energy on Saami reindeer herding culture and rights, she concludes that beyond the onto-epistemological difference between the ‘Indigenous’ and the ‘Western,’ Fosen Vind and the Norwegian state strategically ignored all knowledges that threaten capitalist and colonial interests. In the Human Rights Review, she provides critical perspectives on ‘dialogues’ as a mechanism for conflict resolution and good governance in the Øyfjellet wind energy project, concluding that state- and corporate-led ‘dialogues’ displaced the root cause of the conflict, revealed epistemic miscommunication, and perpetuated relations of domination which limited emancipatory effects for Jillen Njaarke, the impacted reindeer herding community.
Eva also teaches, writes chronicles and essays, engages in public debates, and does journalistic work to build knowledge on Saami and Indigenous issues. Together with her collective Søstrene Suse and the feminist radio station Radiorakel, Eva produced the documentary I Elsa Laulas fotspor (In Elsa Laula’s footsteps) about Saami women and their struggle against racism, assimilation policies, extractive industries, and state regulation of Saami reindeer herding and fishing. Through the concept of ‘radio cinema’, Eva and her collective organized live listening sessions to stimulate further reflection on the issues raised in the documentary. Eva also works to strengthen networks, collaborations, and mutual solidarity between Saami and Indigenous struggles abroad, especially in Latin America.
Fjellheim, E. M. (2020). Through our stories we resist: decolonial perspectives on south Saami history, indigeneity and rights.
Ewa Majewska
Ewa Majewska is a feminist philosopher and critical theorist of culture. An associate professor of the SWPS University in Warsaw, she works on feminist antifascism, counterpublics, and the dialectics of the weak. She is PI in the queer studies/archive theory project ‘Public against their will: The production of subjects in the archives of Hiacynt actions’ (with NCN funding). She has published seven books, including the recent Feminist Antifascism: Counterpublics of the Common (Verso, 2021), and articles in many journals and collected volumes.
Her PhD in social philosophy (2007) and recent habilitation in cultural studies are from the University of Warsaw. She has held visiting /temporary positions in Berlin, Warsaw, Kraków, Berkeley, and was a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. In 2022, she co-curated the exhibition of Mariola Przyjemska's work at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. She is a committee member of the Utopian Studies Society, a European interdisciplinary association devoted to the study of utopianism in all its forms. For many years she was an activist in the alterglobalist, noborder, feminist, and LGBTQ+ movements.
In her work, she makes solid links with Chicana feminists, including Gloria Anzaldúa, to address the brutalism that has been made visible by the events on the Eastern border of Poland—since 2004 also the Eastern border of the European Union—with all its tragic repercussions and many deaths. The Polish–Belarusian border now is a zone that’s a state of exception, with dozens of deaths and hundreds of people missing, mainly non-European refugees trying to cross the border.
She has also published poetry, notably Coronafuga: Dating in Times of the Pandemic.
Eszter Varsa
Eszter Varsa is a social historian with a PhD in Comparative Gender Studies (CEU, Budapest), currently working as a postdoc in the ERC Advanced Grant project “ZARAH: Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Transnationally, From the Age of Empires to the Late 20th Century” at the CEU in Vienna. She studies women’s labour activism in the agrarian-socialist movements in Hungary and internationally between the late 19th century and the 1930s, discovering the hitherto completely unexplored role of (landless) peasant women in the women’s and labour movements, and the solidarity of (but also conflicts between) women across class and ethnic divides. She was Marie Sklodowska-Curie Intra-European (IEF) Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg (2014–2016) and a Romani Rose Fellow at the Research Centre on Antigypsyism at Heidelberg University (2020).
Eszter puts center stage the connection between gender analysis and the analysis of material inequality, and the study of the position of the Roma population. Aside from writing articles, she coedited a special issue (2021) on reproductive politics and sex education in Cold War Europe. Based on hundreds of children’s case files, and interviews with institution leaders, teachers, and people formerly in state care, her 2021 book Protected Children, Regulated Mothers: Gender and the ‘Gypsy Question’ in State Care in Postwar Hungary, 1949–1956 examines child protection in Stalinist Hungary as a part of 20th-century European history. Rather than being merely a tool of political repression and a further attempt to establish totalitarian control, state care in postwar Hungary was often shaped by the efforts of policy actors and educators to address the myriad problems engendered by the social and economic transformations that emerged after World War II. Thus child protection also focused on parents, particularly single mothers, regulating not only their entrance to paid work but also their sexuality. She found that child protection had a centuries-long common history with the ‘solution to the Gypsy question.’
Katarzyna Wojnicka
Katarzyna Wojnicka is Associate Professor of Sociology and works as a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Work Science at the University of Gothenburg. She is also Editor-in-chief for NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies. In the past, she has held postdoctoral positions at the Center for European Research at the University of Gothenburg, Leeds University, and Humboldt University of Berlin. She also worked as researcher at DeZIM (Deutsches Zentrum für Integrations- und Migrationsforschung) and at Dissens – Institut für Bildung und Forschung e.V. in Berlin. She studied sociology and gender studies in Poland, Germany, the US, and Spain.
While her interests are wide – sociology of gender, critical studies on men and masculinities, social movement studies, migration studies, and European studies –puzzles of masculinities are a big chunk of her scholarly work. Her PhD thesis, from Jagiellonian University in Kraków, was on men’s social movements in Poland. She founded the first course on the sociology of masculinities in Polish academia, and is co-editor of one of the few sociological books on men and masculinities in Poland, as well as of three special issues on men and masculinities research in Europe and beyond. She has worked on over a dozen research projects on gender and men and masculinities issues and published over 50 scientific papers. No surprise, then, that she has a website called Dr. K and the Men.
Currently, she continues working on puzzles of masculinities (currently in two research projects funded by the Swedish Research Council, one on European fathers' activism and one on transnational bachelors), but she has started new work on European queer memorials. ‘From Homomonument to HBTQI memorial in Gothenburg’ studies citizens' perceptions of the first Swedish queer monument, which will be installed in Gothenburg in 2023, and its connection to the broader European context.
More information about her current projects can be found here.
Akanksha Mehta
Akanksha Mehta is a queer feminist educator, researcher, writer, photographer, and community organiser based in Southeast London and India. She is a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Gender, Race and Cultural Studies and the Co-Director of the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her broader research uses narrative writing, ethnographic methods, visual practice, and feminist, queer, crip, postcolonial, and anti-caste theory to examine the gendered, sexed, and racialised workings of everyday political mobilisations, violence, settler colonialism, and nationalism. Her doctoral dissertation Right-Wing Sisterhood (SOAS, 2017), which examined the everyday and transnational mobilisations and violence of women in the Hindu nationalist movement in India and the Israeli Zionist settler project in Palestine, won the 2018 Best Dissertation Award by the European International Studies Association. She is currently finishing a monograph that expands on the project and will be published by Oxford University Press.
Akanksha’s teaching, within and beyond the university, examines critical knowledge productions on race and racism, gender and sexuality, caste, and disability, and it centers grassroots organising, protest, and resistance, and radical crip and community-oriented pedagogies. She has won Student-Led Teaching Awards for ‘Challenging and Inspiring Teaching’ in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2021, and has also written about pedagogy, care, institutional violence, higher education, research methods, and organising. She facilitates several community spaces of learning and education, including Insurgent Knowledges (co-plotted with Niharika Pandit), the Crip Theory Reading Group, a teach-out program on strike picket lines, and several other spaces of being together in joy, organising, politics, and education. She is a photographer and filmmaker, and in 2016 was awarded the Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize in Visual Sociology by the International Sociological Association. She is a member of the Feminist Review Editorial Collective and was awarded the Community Engagement Award by the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the International Studies Association in 2020. She tweets at @ajeebaurat.
Tamara Martsenyuk
Tamara Martsenyuk holds a PhD in Sociology and is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine. She studied and conducted research in the US, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, and Hungary. Tamara teaches Introduction to Gender Studies, Gender and Politics, Masculinity and Men’s Studies, Social Problems in Ukraine and the World, and more. After her evacuation from Kyiv due to the full-scale invasion in the spring of 2022, Tamara was hosted by Free University Berlin. Since July 2022, she is a visiting scholar at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, German.
Her research interests relate to gender and social structure, including women’s participation in protests and women’s access to the military. Between 2015–2023, Tamara (and her research team) conducted five sociological studies called Invisible Battalion, demonstrating the successes and challenges of gender equality implementation in the Ukrainian armed forces and military education, the status of female veterans, and the problem of sexual harassment in the military.
She authored more than 100 academic publications, chapters of books and textbooks, particularly in Ukrainian: Gender for All: Challenging Stereotypes (2017), Why Not Be Afraid of Feminism (2018), Defenders of the Galaxy: Power and Crisis in the Male World (2020). She authored chapters in Gender, Politics, and Society in Ukraine (2012), New Imaginaries: Youthful Reinvention of Ukraine’s Cultural Paradigm (2015), and more. Her papers have been published in the Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, Problems of Post-Communism, and others. Tamara is a member of the International Sociological Association (ISA) and the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN).
Tamara is engaged in educational activism and conducts training for a broad target audience: journalists, think tanks, civil servants, politicians, civic activists, and more. Tamara is the author of a popular online course on Prometheus titled Women and Men: Gender for All. As she believes in public sociology – science and research for social change – she is constantly involved in various international research or teaching projects.