Post-Doctoral Researcher (17 Month Contract) Department of Media Studies

The Role

Maynooth University is committed to a strategy in which the primary University goals of excellent research and scholarship and outstanding education are interlinked and equally valued.

We are seeking a Postdoctoral Researcher to work in the Horizon Europe project RESIST: Fostering Queer Feminist Intersectional Resistances against Transnational Anti-Gender Politics.

The successful applicant will work in the first phase of the RESIST project, which addresses the ‘anti-gender’ politics that imperil equality, gender and sexual diversity in contemporary Europe. These politics represent a serious threat to modern democratic formations and people’s everyday survival, bodily integrity, and self-determination. They misrepresent the social order, inverting hierarchies that continue to structure democratic societies, by constructing the nation as under threat from ‘imported’ and ‘destructive’ ‘gender ideologies’. As they gain ground across and beyond Europe, anti-gender mobilisations seek to narrow the space of feminist resistance and to claw back any hard-fought achievements of gender equality and inclusion of sexual diversity, which makes a reflective and coalitional feminist response ever more urgent.

RESIST responds to this by creating new understandings of the mobilisation and effects of anti-gender politics and enhancing their effective contestation in theory and practice. It aims to do so by mapping the mobilisation of anti-gender politics across Europe; researching its effects and consequences; learning from and amplifying everyday resistance and counter-strategies, and reinvigorating feminist theories in the face of anti-democratic threats.