Wetenschappelijke publicaties

This article, Claudia Balan, Marieke van den Brink and Yvonne Benschop explore novel forms of proactive support for fathers in organizations and analyze how newly instituted organizational promoters of father-friendliness in Germany (organizational consultants, fathers' representatives, and fathers' networks) legitimize and strengthen organizational acceptance of fathers' use of family-friendly workplace arrangements. Bringing together the notions of organizational masculinity, the ideal worker norm, and postfeminism, the paper focuses on caring formations of postfeminist masculinity at work and how they contribute to gender change in organizations.

This article, by Dide van Eck, Laura Dobush and Marieke van den Brink, builds on a qualitative study of a Dutch aircraft cleaning company in order to assess the ‘inclusivity of inclusion approaches’ for less privileged groups of employees. By reconstructing how managers and cleaners draw/rework boundaries, we identify certain configurations of inclusion and exclusion that can unfold more or less ‘inclusive’ consequences for historically disadvantaged group members, and more or less exclusionary repercussions for particularly privileged and/or majority group members.

This article conceptualises the micro-politics of seniors’ sponsorship of ECRs based on 19 semi-structured interviews and two focus groups at a Danish university.  According to the interviewees, sponsorship relationships develop for academic reasons, such as shared research interests, but are also a matter of luck, personal chemistry, and ‘homophily’, leading to subtle processes of inclusion and exclusion in academia. Regardless, sponsorship is widely considered a taken-for-granted, legitimised practice.

In this, Ea Utoft and Marianne Kongerslev explore the lived experience of two cisgender women working across two universities and two different academic fields in Denmark, through five autoethnographic vignettes. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life (2017), they analyse narratives illustrating personal stories of ‘epistemic injustice’, that is instances of gender-specific silencing, exclusion and oppression of certain, marginalized knowledges that may be indicative of larger structural problematics.

In this paper, Suborna Camellia and Rahil Roodsaz analyse data gathered from ethnographic research conducted among 40 adolescent boys living in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and ask: how do middle-class adolescent boys in Dhaka construct different ideals of masculinity and negotiate those in their everyday life at home and among peers? They argue that this younger generation of men encounter unique gendered vulnerabilities in the contexts of fast urbanisation, an increasingly uncertain labour market and a lack of support in negotiating their emotional and social wellbeing.

In this blog post for the London School of Economics, PhD candidate Nik Linders summarises his article on gender in populist radical right parties (PRR). These parties are often classified as gender-conservative. But the role of gender and sexuality in their discourse is actually complex and varied. In our recently published research article, we compare the discourse of three relatively successful Dutch populist radical right leaders (Pim Fortuyn, Geert Wilders, and Thierry Baudet). We focus particularly on masculinity and sexuality. All three leaders explicitly contrast their visions for society to those of sitting political elites, and they all explicitly question the current gender/sexuality order. They do so, however, in very different ways—ranging from decidedly heteronormative and at times homophobic ones, to those genuinely in favor of some emancipatory rights

Researchers Lelia A. Erscoi, Annelies Kleinherenbrink, and Olivia Guest use the myth of Pygmalion as a lens to investigate and frame the relationship between women and artificial intelligence (AI).  Throughout history, the theme of women being replaced by inanimate objects (e.g. automata, algorithms) has been repeated, and continues to repeat in contemporary AI technologies. As they demonstrate herein, Pygmalion displacement prefigures heavily, but in an unacknowledged way, in the original Turing test, the imitation game: a central thought experiment, foundational to AI. With women, and the feminine generally, being both dislocated and erased from and by technology, AI is and has been (presented as) created mainly by privileged men, subserving capitalist patriarchal ends. This poses serious dangers to women and other marginalised people. By tracing the historical and ongoing entwinement of femininity (from a patriarchal perspective) and AI, we aim to understand, make visible, and start a dialogue on the ways in which AI harms women.

In this article, Francesco Cerchiaro aims to: (1) explore the relevant social dimensions where masculinity is central to identity formation; and (2) analyse the ways these men perform and construct their gender identities in the European context. The findings contribute to the study of Muslim masculinities in Western countries by demonstrating: (1) that masculinity in particular symbolic moments (e.g. marriage) needs to be validated by the family networks of both spouses; (2) that the men are required to constantly prove their loyalty to their family of origin and to their partners by performing different breadwinner masculinities; and (3) that the link between masculinity and religious affiliation is central in Muslim homosocial interactions. The missing transmission of Islam to their children is often perceived, by other Muslim men, as a sign of a ‘weakened masculinity’.

Drawing on both individual and couple interviews collected during three research projects focused on the life stories of mixed Christian-Muslim couples, this article by Francesco Cerchiaro presents an analytical three-pole scheme to organize the combined use of individual and couple interviews. It concludes that the central issue at stake is not which interview modes produce “richer data”, but what data the two types of interview generate and how the research design may benefit from its combined use. Finally, it is highlighted how different ethical problems may arise from each interview mode.

This article by Francesco Cerchiario disentangles the notion of stigma, showing how the experiences of these young women are characterized by a stratified mix of racial, ethnic, and religious discriminations that, together, exemplify how Morofobia takes place in Spain. Our findings highlight how these women are not only passively affected by this stigma, but have learned to cope with it, showing a high degree of reflexivity and acquired social skills that inform their agency.