Project description
Fostering inclusive strategies for democratic resilience
Despite the crucial role women’s movements play in leading peace and democratic struggles, their epistemic practices (how they know and act) in crises remain underexamined. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the WOMACT project aims to bridge this research gap by analysing and developing crisis epistemologies. Specifically, it will examine the strategies women’s movements in Israel, Palestine and Ukraine use in response to the combined pressures of war, autocracy and social fragmentation, exploring how they adapt, form coalitions, create resistant methods and maintain solidarity across borders. Research outcomes will be presented in several publications, policy recommendations and a tailored activist toolkit, supporting inclusive strategies for democratic resilience across Europe and beyond.
Objective
Women’s movements are often at the forefront of democratic and peace struggles, yet their knowledge practices in times of crisis remain underexplored. WOMACT – Women’s Movements as Agents of Crisis Transformation investigates how women’s movements in Israel/Palestine and Ukraine respond to overlapping ruptures of war, authoritarianism, and societal polarization. The project develops the concept of crisis epistemologies: situated, embodied, and strategic knowledges produced by feminist actors under duress, when existing frameworks collapse and new epistemic tools must be forged.
Through a comparative feminist ethnography, WOMACT combines semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and digital content analysis with systematic cross-case coding. This design captures how movements recalibrate in political rupture, negotiate intersectional coalitions, develop embodied and digital repertoires of resistance, and sustain or re-imagine transnational solidarities. The project situates feminist activism as a laboratory of meaning-making, challenging dominant crisis and security narratives, and offering alternative visions of democracy, peace, and justice.
Hosted by the University of Graz, with mentorship from Dr. Maximilian Lakitsch and an international advisory network, WOMACT provides advanced training in qualitative methods, digital security, and public engagement. It will deliver four high-impact publications, a policy brief series, and a co-designed activist toolkit, ensuring benefits for scholarship, civil society, and EU policy agendas. By foregrounding women’s movements as epistemic agents, WOMACT strengthens feminist peace and conflict studies and contributes to inclusive strategies for democratic resilience in Europe and beyond.
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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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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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-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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8010 Graz
Austria
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