While several social movements have contributed to social change in Europe during the last four decades, the goal of FEMCIT is to investigate the role of women’s movements in these transformative processes. FEMCIT will explore the relationship between the changing forms and practices of gendered citizenship in a multicultural Europe, and the demands and practices which have emerged from contemporary women’s movements. We will study how different and changing notions and practices of citizenship relate to gender issues in Europe’s multicultural context, and explores their implications for policies.
FEMCIT sees citizenship as rights and responsibilities, routes to political access, economic participation as well as feelings and practices of social and cultural belonging, and will address all of these aspects of citizenship. FEMCIT understand the promotion of full citizenship as involving both redistributive and recognitional policies and interventions. Women’s full citizenship requires policies and interventions which address both redistribution and recognition - the redistribution of material, economic and political resources, and the cultural and social transformation of gender itself (Fraser, 1997). Citizenship will be conceptualized and researched in this IP as encompassing the gender-relevant dimensions of the relations between individuals and the institutions of national and EU governance – political, social and economic - that may differentially interact with women’s and men’s participation and engagement in political and civil life. The concept of “citizenship” will be operationalised in terms of the following inter-related dimensions, integrating multicultural issues into all of them:
1) Political citizenship (democratic participation/representation)
2) Social citizenship (family policy, child care)
3) Economic citizenship (work, access to and equality in employment)
4) Ethnic and religious citizenship (minority/majority feminism & racism, gender equality and religion)
5) Bodily and sexual citizenship (control over the body (reproductive rights) and sexuality (sexual violence)
6) Intimate citizenship (new family formations and transformations of intimate life)
Main coordinator: Tone Hellesund, University of Bergen
