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Project

Gender Mainstreaming in Tertiary Educational Environments from a Posthumanist Perspective : Making a difference for Trans and Gender Creative Youths through innovative place-based research. (POST-TRANSCREATE PILOT)

POST-TRANSCREATE PILOT is sponsored by the Global Mind Visiting Scholarship Program of KU Leuven. Beneficiary of the scholarship is Dr. Nico Canoy, The Philippines. It is conducted in the context of the Transdisciplinary Honours Program of the Institute of the Future that accepted our challenge 'inclusive cities and environments' as one of the core topics of the year 2019-2020.

The Anthropocene epoch had radically challenged the onto-epistemological rubric of humanism permeating across the natural and social sciences and the humanities. This epochal shift challenges our conventional understanding of how we affect to ‘others’ and vice-versa, be it humans, animals, objects or material dimensions of our living environments. It invites us into seeing difference, not from a denigrative political perspective, with mankind as the centre of the universe, but from an affirmative one. In this context, the surge of rich theoretical work by scholars from varied disciplines promotes creative vitality to fuel game-changing initiatives (e.g., new materialisms, deep ecology). Our POST-TRANSCREATE PILOT project is one such initiative, that is to pursue radically innovative and interdisciplinary ways in addressing the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDG 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls and SDG 11: Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable). Working through Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanist nomadic theory alongside scholarly work in Anthropocene feminisms, we approach these two related goals as a methodological challenge in our project, one that aims to recast current policies and practices of gender mainstreaming (GM) educational settings in Europe, with a particular focus on vulnerable populations such as trans and gender creative students and the mental health issues (i.e., defined as experiences of healing and hurting) they experience.

I pose two intertwined research objectives across methodologically innovative and empirical levels of research.  

Objective A. Methodological development process: To re-cast place-based research  from a posthumanist perspective. In place based research researchers change their focus from talking to people to moving with people on-site to make sense out of experiences.

Objective B. The empirical case studies : To re-consider current notions of when, how and where a healing/hurting experience becomes a signifier of gender (in)equality.

This project is part of a future comparative research excercise of spaces of healing and hurting in differen regions.

Notes:
Bennett, J., Cheah, P., Orlie, M. A., & Grosz, E. (2010). New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics. Duke University Press.
Fellows, A. (2019). Gaia, Psyche and Deep Ecology: Navigating Climate Change in the Anthropocene. Routledge.
UN General Assembly (2015). Transforming our world : The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Retrieved from https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/21252030%20Agenda%20for%20Sustainable%20Development%20web.pdf
Grusin, R. (Ed.). (2017). Anthropocene feminism. U of Minnesota Press.

Date:23 Sep 2019 →  23 Sep 2020
Keywords:urban development, gender mainstreaming, multi-sensory research methodology
Disciplines:Urban sociology and community studies