In this presentation Roberto and the RESIST project team will reflect on the meanders of the contemporary higher education and research sectors across Europe from the perspectives of queer-feminist researchers located in diverse geopolitical contexts.

Neoliberalization of the academia and the social research has led to the creation of numerous institutional orders, epistemic borders confining whose knowledge counts as legitimate, and other b/orders of (il)legitimacy often strikingly exemplified in the field of gender and sexuality research. We will draw on the experiences of coming together as a group of queer-feminist and anti-racist researchers, who were successful in securing a multi-million EU grant for the research on ‘anti-gender’ mobilizations and everyday resistances to them. Using this locus of enunciation, we want to consider, together with the audience, what and how do we produce knowledge, and how these practices are shaped by numerous, explicit and implicit, b/orders that are – as power structures often are – both enabling and stimulating in some respects, as well as disempowering and disabling in others.

“RESIST: Fostering Queer Feminist Intersectional Resistances against Transnational Anti-Gender Politics” is a research project that addresses ‘anti-gender’ politics that imperil equality, gender and sexual diversity, and legitimacy of critical knowledge in contemporary Europe. During the session we will consider how institutional b/orders have shaped our research practices in the past, and how they impact our collaboration at present. We will reflect on the role of cultural (national, historical) contexts in which we are located, and how b/orders between different academic cultures shape our perceptions and practices of co-working. We will also pay attention to the linguistic practices within and beyond larger, trans-national, research consortia such as ours, reflecting on sometimes tricky waters of multilingual alliances and the global role of the Academic English as a de facto dominant language of the global research and higher education.

Drawing on our empirical experiences as the newly formed consortium of queer-feminist anti-racist researchers, is the first step towards broader and theoretical reflection on the coloniality of knowledge (Quijano, Mignolo) structures and geopolitics that organise our everyday research practices.