Last week the GRACE  team held its end of project conference in Utrecht, Gender and Cultures of In/Equality in Europe:  Visions, Poetics, Strategies.  Led by Dr Suzanne Clisby, Senior Research Fellow and co-director of the sister project GlobalGRACE, based in anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, the GRACE project brought together fifteen EU funded doctoral researchers from across Europe to investigate what equality means and the ways various cultures of equality are made and remade in the European context today. These studies range from the examination of documentary cinema, theatre, poetry slams and science fiction, to disability politics and trans visual poetics, Islamic feminisms, Syrian women’s diasporic writing, the experiences of women in boxing, and the analysis of the role of social media and reproductive health apps in social change. Together, these studies provide a unique lens through which we can think about the processes and practices, as well as the challenges and dilemmas, that create, enable and contest cultures of in/equality.

Prof J Neil C Garcia, University of the Philippines, delivering GRACE conference key note response

Marking international women’s day, the end of project conference not only brought together scholars and activists from across the world to interrogate and challenge equality discourses and practices but also to celebrate the launch of an exhibition and a feminist smartphone app curated and designed by the GRACE researchers at CASCO Art Institute – casco.art.  The exhibition, entitled Footnotes on Equality, may be visited via its online platform – footnotesonequality.eu – and the app, Quotidian, may downloaded from Play Store – or the App Store.

The GRACE project also saw the launch of What is Left Unseen, at Central Museum, Utrecht, that seeks through new forms of exhibition making to, ‘expose the white male gaze that, for centuries, has determined what and how we see in the museum’

What is Left Unseen is part of the Museum of Equality and Difference (MOED) – moed.online–  that also emerged out of and is inspired by the GRACE and GlobalGRACE projects and that brings together ‘artistic perspectives on equality and difference that strive for social change’.