Nationella lika villkorskonferensen

Zakia Essanhaji is an assistant professor of organizational change in the department of organization studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research focuses on diversity politics, the dynamics of whiteness, and institutional change within academic contexts, with a focus on the intersections of ethnic-racial and gender inequalities. She combines critical race, feminist and decolonial perspectives to understand the academy as a key site where ethnic-racial and gender inequalities are being (re)produced.

Titel: “Talking diversity, doing inequality: on intersectionality’s absence in diversity policy”

This talk interrogates what happens when diversity policies in academia are drawn up without an intersectional lens. Drawing on Zakia’s research on diversity as a recomposing rather than decomposing of the academy’s whiteness, she argue that contemporary diversity and equality policies and plans often reproduce the very inequalities they claim to address. By having followed diversity through the university, she demonstrate in this talk how institutional commitments to equality are shaped by what can be easily measured, managed, and accommodated in line with the academy’s masculine whiteness, leaving more complex, intersecting forms of marginalization unaddressed. Approaches structured along single axes, most prominently gender, stabilize a normative subject of diversity that remains implicitly white, secular, and institutionally legible.

Indeed, she shows how dominant temporal norms in diversity policy structure how calls for change and an academic future are institutionally recognized as urgent when made in the name of gender while the calls and futures of people of colour are deferred or rendered excessive. In this way, diversity work becomes a key site where inequalities are not undone but reorganized.

Rather than treating intersectionality as a checklist to be ticked off after the policy is written, this talk positions its absence as constitutive of how inequality persists in academic institutions. It invites a critical reconsideration of what counts as equality, and for whom it is made possible.

17 november kl. 10:15-11:00
Presentationen hålls på engelska.

Mathias Wullum Nielsen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen. Combining a wide variety of data and methods, his research examines how scientific institutions are organized and how their norms, incentives, and hierarchical structures reproduce social disparities and shape careers and knowledge creation.

Titel: “Gender, careers and scientific performance”

In this talk, Nielsen will integrate insights from published and ongoing research on the link between scientific performance, evaluative cultures, and gender disparities in scientific careers. Drawing on bibliometric data, qualitative interviews with recruiters and funding evaluators, and longitudinal career data, he will examine how research specializations, assessment practices, and career structures intersect to shape research production and advancement opportunities in potentially gendered ways.

17 november kl. 13:00-14:15
Presentationen hålls på engelska.