GENI
GENI draws upon the ethnographic tradition of anthropology and the intersectional paradigm that understands people as culturally ascribed to diverse and sometimes contradictory identity processes, which coexist, overlap and intertwine. These processes, conditioning personal and collective experiences and narratives, are the source of inequalities, hierarchies and exclusions, but they are also the source of resilience, solidarity and transgressions.
From this perspective, identities are understood as processal, cultural and relational. It is through this vision that the inherent ambivalence of categories of identity is made visible: they offer meanings and stability, but they also limit and condition our field of experience. Likewise, gender is perceived as an open and plural category, given that bodily and identity expressions often overgrow the hegemonic binary logic. We are, then, facing multiple dimensions of diversity: identity processes, the interlocking of rules, axes of inequality, experiences, narratives and expressions.
coordinator
Dr. Olga Jubany
Email: olga.jubany@ub.edu
Grup de Recerca Consolidat (2021SGR-0333 / 2017SGR-1091) per l’Agència de Gestió d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca de la Generalitat de Catalunya-AGAUR
research areas
research stays and visits
For more information on the possibility and conditions of research stays and visits, contact emma.fabrega@ub.edu
research
Latest Projects
Currently, GENI coordinates several national and international projects:
MORE is a collaborative academic initiative that critically examines the Returns and Readmissions policy of the European Union and the United Kingdom. This policy has resulted in the narrowing of the pathways meant to safeguard the rights of migrated populations across Europe. The increasingly restrictive interpretations of the Returns Directive, coupled with intensified efforts to facilitate returns and deportations, have contributed to severe human rights violations. MORE analyses how the dynamics of the securitisation of borders, economic interests, and political imperatives have converged to promote and sustain returns policies. The research examines the consequences of these policies on the daily lives of irregularised migrants, their families, communities, and the European society at large. Moreover, it explores alternative approaches beyond return that tackle the structural causes of irregularity and provide dignified solutions.
The EXIT project, funded by the EU under the HorizonEurope programme and coordinated by the UB, attempts to explore the dimensions, root causes and implications of both long-standing and recently emerged socioeconomic inequalities within and between regions. It aims to propose ways to tackle these inequalities depending on their territorial footprint, analysing patterns of social and economic stagnation in a selection of areas across eight countries. The interdisciplinary research will explore how inhabitants, institutions and organizations in these areas perceive, experience and counteract inequalities from an intersectional perspective. This will enable knowledge sharing and best practice transfer amongst European states and affected communities in order to restrategise their sustainable development.
This project aims to investigate reproductive mobilities related to abortion care seeking. It will explore the interconnections between reproductive governance, borders and (im)mobilities and trace how these are based on, or produce, specific kinds of reproductive stratifications and intersectionalities in three main world regions: Europe and Latin America. This ground-breaking investigation will provide new, fresh data on a growing, global phenomenon, reproductive mobilities, which is relevant not only from social sciences, but also from human and health rights and public health perspectives. It will explore understudied phenomena, namely the experiences of women and pregnant people living in countries with restrictive abortion legislation, seeking abortion care far from where they live, particularly abroad as well as abortion seeking and provision via telehealth and the circulation of abortion medications. This project will thus provide a more in-depth empirical and theoretical understanding of reproductive mobilities and justice in specific contexts, particularly in countries that are becoming important hubs for reproductive services, such as Spain in Europe, and Mexico in Latin America.
The project will be developed in two workpackages, the first one focused on reproductive journeys and the second one on (im)mobility and illegal practices: reproductive governance and transnational support networks. While the first one addresses people’s mobilities related to abortion care seeking, the second one investigates the legal and social barriers to access to abortion care and the social networks that allow people to overcome such barriers, including via telehealth and illegal means. The second workpackage investigates the legal, political, and religious debate on reproductive health and rights in all the countries involved in the project and incorporates the perspectives of the professionals working in the reproductive health services that will be involved as well as of representatives of organizations and policymakers supporting or opposing abortion rights.
The long term impact of the covid-19 pandemic on people’s access to abortion services and medications and the related mobility restrictions that it entails will also be investigated.
The objective of this project is to encourage an engaged scientific and political discussion about reproductive governance and justice, stratified reproduction and people’s resistance to discriminatory legislation in different geo-political and social-cultural contexts. We aim to share our findings not only with scholars working on reproductive health and rights, but also with all the main institutions involved in the project (health services and organizations working in the domain of reproductive rights) as well as with policy makers, in order to contribute to the social and political debate on reproductive justice and rights in all the participating countries.
INCA is an HorizonEurope project that investigates the impact that so-called digital platforms have on European democracies and institutions. Indeed, while promoting economic growth and labour transformations, these platforms pose challenges to policymakers and citizens in relation to people’ participation in decision-making processes, wealth inequalities and erosion of trust into public institutions. In particular, so-called GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft) are becoming more and more infrastructures for opinion-making, labour organization and political debate. Their increasing power in shaping and influencing such issues through lobbying, industrial relations and cultural impact opened up a wide debate on the way to deal with these transformations. While European societies grew up based on liberal democracies and institutions with their capacity to sustain a coordinated market economy, today their role seems to be reduced because of the difficulties to regulate platforms’ corporate power that spread through politics, economy and culture.