The GRACE (Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe) project researches how the idea of ‘gender equality’ has come into being across Europe. Gender equality is considered by the EU to be a desirable objective, but rather than assessing how successful they have been at achieving it we instead ask the question of what gender equality really means, how it is understood by different publics, and how it might or should be understood differently.
To do this we take ‘gender equality’ not as an obvious and self-evident ‘thing’, but rather as an idea that is historically and socio-culturally constructed. While people may assume that they are talking about the same thing when referring to ‘gender equality’, there is actually a considerable cultural variation—many gender equalities and inequalities, rather than one which can be easily measured.
This research will benefit society through producing a more accurate account of the wide variety of understandings across the EU of what ‘gender equality’ is, should and could be. This knowledge can be used in policy making across Europe and beyond to achieve justice and enhanced well-being for people across genders.
The research for the project is being conducted by 15 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs), who are undertaking PhDs across the 7 universities of the GRACE network, alongside non-academic beneficiary Associazione Orlando (Image 1). These 15 ESRs are all conducting research that is designed to meet the GRACE Project’s objectives through aiming to address the following three core questions:
1. How have cultures of equality been produced, embodied, objectified and visualised in art, media, material and popular culture, as well as ‘official’ discourse in Europe?
2. How might cultures of equality in Europe be produced and performed differently?
3. In what ways do changing and contested cultural productions shape and constrain people’s awareness about, perceptions of, responses to and deployments of equality discourses within specific social contexts?
These ESRs have been assigned to five research Work Packages (WPs), each of which examines the ways that the idea of gender equality has been constructed culturally in different cultural areas, which we refer to as ‘sites’:
1. ‘Mediated cultures of gender equality’ looks at the way the media has constructed the idea of gender equality historically and in the present day through the work of 2 ESRs;
2. ‘Urban cultures of gender equality’ focuses on the specific ways that cities and their inhabitants construct the idea of gender equality through 4 ESR projects;
3. ‘Intellectual and activist cultures of gender equality’ takes a more theoretical approach, and examines the ways in which intellectuals and activists have constructed the idea of gender equality through the work of 4 ESRs;
4. Textual and artistic cultures of gender equality’ examines the ways in which literature, poetry, film and digital images have constructed the idea of gender equality historically, and continue to do so in contemporary times through the work of 4 ESRs;
5. ‘Employing cultures of gender equality’, through the work of 1 ESR who focuses on the ways in which the idea of gender equality has led to employment opportunities in the labour market.
