Project description
Empowering Gulf women: a legal perspective
In the Middle East and North Africa, feminist activism has often been studied through its impact on broader social change. However, this focus tends to overlook aspects of feminism in stable Gulf countries. Women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, Oman and the United Arab Emirates are heavily influenced by Sharia law, limiting this group’s participation in the national decision-making process. Funded by the European Research Council, the GulfFeminisms project will bridge this research gap, studying how feminist movements in the Gulf employ the law, including Sharia, to empower women. Specifically, it will focus on how patriarchal systems repress feminists, and how these movements leverage laws, including Sharia, to empower women in both private and public spheres, effecting political change.
Objective
Abstract: Current literature have tended to analyze feminist activisms in MENA almost exclusively from the point of view of their effect on social change broadly defined, reemphasising the reifications of women as victims by sharia laws, the veil and repressive cultural and political systems. In addition, scholars have often directed their attention to visible forms of feminist activism including protesting in revolutionary countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Yemen, Bahrain, among others, and have marginalised feminisms in stable countries. In this context, GulfFeminisms project is groundbreaking in three ways. First, it examines the under-studied domains of the genealogies of feminisms, and the mobilisation of the law in the three Gulf States of Saudi Arabia, Oman and United Arab Emirates. Womens rights in all the three countries are interpretatively, but differently, operationalized under Sharia law, abridging womens freedom to fully participate in decision-making processes at the national level. While established scholarship has provided valuable studies of how patriarchal religious and political authorities use legal and religious frameworks to repress feminists, maintain gendered inequalities and restrict womens rights. This project shifts the established scholarly perspective by examining how feminisms in the gulf are self-motivated political movements that mobilise laws, including Sharia, to operationalise womens agencies and practices within private and public spheres and to generate political change. Second, GulfFeminisms offers an original and leading perspective on feminisms in MENA as a practice promoting positive social and political change. Third, to analyse the relation of feminisms and the mobilising of the law, GulfFeminisms combines the multidisciplinary, novel, comparative analytical framework of Feminist Comparative Policy theory (FCP), and Epstein and Martins (2004) approaches to qualitative and quantitative empirical law research.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2022-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
1165 KOBENHAVN
Denmark
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