Looking Back, Looking Ahead

To welcome the new year, GENDER.ED’s former Associate Director, Hemangini Gupta, and undergraduate intern, Mouna Chatt, look back on all that GENDER.ED accomplished in 2024, sharing their favourite events from the past year and excitement for what lies ahead in 2025. 

When you look back on GENDER.ED’s work and programming in 2024, what stands out to you? 

Mouna: There are quite a few events from 2024 that stand out to me, so it is difficult to choose only one! But I think the event, “Beautiful Rebellion” that we hosted at the Edinburgh International Book Festival was a key highlight. The event featured a conversation between the authors Emma Dabiri, Jill Burke, and Moshtari Hilal about the politics of beauty and its relationship to colonialism, capitalism, and gender. I have followed both Emma Dabiri and Moshtari Hilal on social media for a while now, so it was nice to listen to them speak in person and get the opportunity to chat with some of the authors at the reception that followed the event.   

Hemangini: I was quite struck by the Annual Research Showcase as this allowed so many feminist scholars to showcase their work across media – we had film ,posters, archival material, posters from activist campaigns, books, excerpted text and art work! It also continually amazes me how many connections people can make at the event – often people across tables and schools will find they have very similar research questions or concerns and you’ll see them deep in a chat! 

What was your favorite GENDER.ED activity of 2024? 

Mouna: I really enjoyed the Welcome Reception we hosted in October 2024 to kick off the new academic year. It was great to start the year by marking the winners of the 2024 Undergraduate EUSA-GENDER.ED Feminist Trailblazer Awards and Queer Future Prizes and awarding them their certificates. I was also grateful to hear the award-winning poet, author, and storyteller, Nadine Aisha Jassat read aloud from her poetry and prose at the event. Her exploration of heritage, identity, and culture was potent – both in her writing that caters to children and that which caters to adults. It made me reflect on my own ‘diaspora experience’ and how it has developed and changed from childhood to adolescence and into adulthood.  

Hemangini: Selfishly, I would have say two – one was the Academic Writing for the Public Workshop for Early Career Researchers since that’s when I come together with ten or so scholars who are interested in presenting their work to public audiences. We have a very kind and generous space, acknowledging that it’s hard to talk about a PhD or scholarly project to an interdisciplinary audience and then to further imagine it for a nonspecialist “public” audience. This year, at a time of rising global fascism and severe backlash against reproductive freedoms, we also had some difficult conversations about whether all research needs to be public and the stakes of public scrutiny. We concluded that it is not always desirable to craft public scholarship – some work, especially in its early stages and for junior researchers, might be best off published for an academic audience. 

The second was a fun evening reception marking the end of GENDER.ED’s flagship course, Understanding Gender in the Contemporary World that I co-convene with Dr. Rebecca Hewer. We had a drinks and canape-filled gathering at the foyer of Chrystal Macmillan Building and some course lecturers attended, as did our tutors. It was relaxed and fun, which is not always the environment in which we interact with students, so I was glad for this gathering! It also marks the first time that UGCW was piloted as a Challenge Course, one of just a handful across the university. 

What are you looking forward to in the next year? 

Hemangini: I’m on sabbatical and stepping down from GENDER.ED, so I’m looking forward to working on the culmination of our multi-year, multi-partner blogathon that showcased artistic, scholarly and activist efforts to highlight activism against gender-based violence. We hope this will be an edited volume, and the GENDER.ED team is working hard to pull this ambitious project together. Also, since I'm on sabbatical, I’m hoping to spend more time reading and writing and very much looking forward to attending more sessions of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Reading Group that will be convened in Semester 2  by the new Associate Director from SPS, Kaveri Qureshi who’s starting us off with a very popular book right now: The Cunning of Gender Violence: Geopolitics and Feminism. I’m especially looking forward to reading the chapter by Rena Hammami, “Catastrophic Aid: GBV Humanitarianism in Gaza” as I know reading these pieces that critically engage the widely circulating interventionist discourses around gender-based violence (GBV) will compel a critical conversation with the blogathon project, so I want to spend time working through what that means for the shape and form of the blogathon book as well. 
 

Mouna: Whilst there are a host of activities and events being planned for this year, personally, I am looking forward to the Queering Research Methods Roundtable on 4th February, and the University’s International Women’s Day Lecture by Naeema Yaqoob Sajid taking place on 7th March – both of which GENDER.ED is co-organising with IASH. We will also be announcing at the IWD Lecture the Yuan Changying Awards to recognise outstanding gender observations on UGCW. I am also looking forward to the Mini Undergraduate Dissertation Showcase taking place as part of our Annual Research Showcase in May to recognise undergraduate students’ research on gender and sexualities studies. Readers can stay up to date with our events by keeping an eye on our ‘Upcoming Events’ page and signing up for our mailing list.