Feminist Research Alliances: Affective convergences

Front matter

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Preface

The GEMMA Erasmus Mundus Masters Degree in Women's and Gender Studies is a pioneer joint postgraduate programme and a transnational consortium of universities that brings together international and multicultural activist backgrounds and intersectional and interdisciplinary academic curricula. GEMMA is supported by the European Commission, which has selected it as Erasmus Mundus project four consecutive times since 2006 and has distinguished it as the “project and model in the field of Women's Studies and Gender Studies in a European and global perspective”.

The volumes included in the “Researching with GEMMA” series trace the development of the feminist alliances constructed throughout the past 15 years of teaching and researching within GEMMA. The discussions included in this series intend to weave the personal and the professional, the empirical and the theoretical, the affective and the political. Together, GEMMA scholars, collaborators, and alumni reflect on the backstage of being young feminist researchers and on the frontstage of being senior scholars in Gender Studies. These volumes aim, in short, at troubling fundamental questions on the meanings of being feminist researchers nowadays and on where we want to go from here.

The title of the first volume within this series refers to our common goal of speculating collectively about how our alliances and affective converges can help us construct more desirable futures.

Acknowledgements

Our deepest appreciation to the European Commission for supporting the Erasmus Mundus Masters Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies (GEMMA) project over 15 years. To the GEMMA Consortium for your commitment, passion and dedication to consolidating and strengthening feminist and gender studies inside and outside academia. To our associate partners for your invaluable collaboration in weaving together an international feminist community. To our entire faculty and administrative staff, students and alumni for making GEMMA much more than an academic project: an alliance of affects and a global feminist community.

Contents

Introduction: Feminist Research Alliances: Affective Convergences. Searching for Directions in Times of Trouble sonicanaisianaisioniteiicinicinc

Adelina Sánchez-Espinosa and Orianna Calderón-Sandoval Feminist Friendships, Solidarities and a Dream Come True: Shared

Conversations about GEMMA oncccociconononcnnononcncncncncnrorononononononononnnnanannnnennananons

Section 1. Movements in Academia

Ana M. González Ramos Introduction: Being on the Backstage of Young Feminist

Beatriz Revelles Benavente Processual Movements in Academia: Being a GEMMA Student or How to Become a Feminist Researcher ...ooocccicicicnoninoniconncnnnnnnnncncnnnnnnnnnns

Wilmarie Rosado Pérez Feminism across Academia: Questioning the Interdisciplinary

Quality of Women’s and Gender Studies vrs casó

12 Contents

Section 2. Embodied Subjectivities

Cristina Gamberi Introduction: Narrating Feminist Subjectivation 0.0.00... 99

Rocío Palomeque Women Asking Questions: Embodied Subjectivity as a Valid

Epitemolop rai 105 Alice Sabbatini

Reflections on Two Years of Research on Asexuality and the Lack of Sexual AC sin licds 121

Part II Weaving Nomadic Knowledges and Affective Methodologies. A Conversation About the Displacement of Knowledge 0.0.0.0... eeceesstesssteeeseeeseteenaes 137

Section 3. Nomadic Knowledges

Suzanne Clisby Introduction: Nomadic Knowledges, Cosmopolitan Subjects and the Power of Embodied Infrastructures ....0....ccsssssssccsseesneecceeeesneeeeees 141

Damiana Ballerini Brazilian National Identity and the Migratory Processes of Brazilian

Womendo Matador: 147 Pranjali Das

Negotiating Discomfort: The Experiences of South Asian GEMMA Students EUfOp E aida 165

Section 4. Affective Methodologies

M.S. Suárez Lafuente

Contents 13

Ana María García López and Ángela Harris Sánchez Hegemonies of Power versus Affective Relational Anarchy in Social

Dresda E. Méndez de la Brena “Researching with the Trouble”: A Journey of Emotions and Affective Challenges in Doing Feminist Research 00.0... 195

Part III Weaving Feminist Pedagogies. A Conversation About Teaching, Researching and How to Do Feminist Pedagogies Otherwise isis ssssscsssasssiusissasessssvastusasen cassshinsnecnsascvnssavee 217

Section 5. Weaving Feminist Pedagogies

Agata Ignaciuk Introduction: Researching and Teaching Feminism: Pedagogies of thé GEMMA CST: ardid AA 221

Carmen Gregorio Gil and Ana Alcázar-Campos Sharing “Other” Knowledges: Thoughts on Teaching Feminist

Ana M. Muñoz-Muñoz Challenges and Problems for Research in Library and Information Science from a Gender Perspective viii oe 243

Victoria Robles Sanjuan

Women’s Movements Around the World: Some Reflections on

Feminist Pedagogy and Its Role in the Feminist Teachings of This

About the Authors w.eccecccecsccsssssssscsssscsscssssssssccssssssssescecsssseassvsnceesssssasssacetecsassneucaees 275

Introduction: Feminist Research Alliances: Affective Convergences. Searching for Directions in Times of Trouble

We started this introduction many months ago. We conclude it now. About to say at the “post-pandemics” but is it really already post-pandemics? We do not know. All we know is that these are still times of uncertainties and of cautions. These are the times of something we have learned to call “social distance”, a concept we had never heard of just some months ago. Indeed, new concepts such as “distancing”, “prevention, *virus”, “isolation”, “lock down’, “vaccination” keep invading our physical and mental spaces as we, the coordinators of this volume, try to return to the project we left unfinished when COVID-19 made its unexpected visit and decided to overstay its “unwelcome”.

Hence, let us start by insisting that the volume we present here is not about distancing but about connections. It does not fear the contagion of a virus but contends it by claiming the need for the contamination with each other's imaginations. This is a result of GEMMA and GEMMA is about close hugging of each other, about friendships forged through touching, about affect and solidarity, about sharing. Thus, this volume is pertinent at this time not only because it summarises what we have been constructing day after day for the last 15 years but, mostly, because it states very clearly what we want to be as a feminist community which honours its name “COMMUNity” at times when unexpected pandemics persists in its teaching that we can only survive by looking for our communalities, for our joint search for the common-wealth, for the shared responsibility of “staying with the trouble”, as Donna Haraway (2016) would put it, while responding together.

Indeed, our main assets in GEMMA are the feminist alliances we have constructed throughout 15 years of working together in order to make the project of an Erasmus Mundus master’s degree succeed. Many have been the challenges that a joint degree taught simultaneously at seven universities in six different countries has had to face throughout all these years. Brexit forced us to change partners from Hull to York and the ultra-right politics of the Hungarian government forced Central European University in Budapest to stop being our partner until they reestablished themselves as Central European University in Vienna, just to name two of the most threatening events in all these years. Before all these challenges we always stuck together, cherishing the extra strength and added value of our convergence. Together, and with the indispensable help of the European Union through its EACEA unit, our strength is much greater than the sum total of seven partners.

The writing of this introduction has also been cut apart by two tragic events. Aurora Morcillo, part of our GEMMA community and collaborator to this volume, left us without previous warning in March 2020. As Florida International University Coordinator and associate partner representative she was one of the instigators of this project. Always there, from the very beginning. A most beloved teacher in GEMMA and an extraordinary colleague. Sit tibis terra levis.

The second one is still ongoing. On 7th of February 2020 one of our GEMMA students, Patrick Zaky, was illegally detained by the Egyptian regime because of his work in defence of human rights in Egypt. Eighteen months later he is still in jail, waiting for his case to be taken to court. Throughout all this time the GEMMA community has been keeping his cause alive by urging people to raise their voices on his defence. Many have been the claims for his liberation coming from institutions such as the European Parliament, national and regional governments, rectors of all consortium universities or city halls. Together with these, GEMMA friends have fed an artivist social network forum called “Voices for Patrick”, We hope this volume works as yet another voice for Patrick's immediate liberation.

When we started planning this introduction we were wondering about the questions which might best represent the contents of this volume intended to be a summary of the research generated by GEMMA in all these years. Many have been the master theses produced by the students within the programme and the research projects put together by the GEMMA faculty through research alliances with each other. We wondered: what makes our research feminist? What makes us feminist researchers? What does feminism signify in our troubled world? What does it mean to be a feminist of colour scholar in white academia? How should we apply our

Introduction: Feminist Research Alliances 17 feminist practices into our research? How can we reconcile our theoretical knowledge with our daily life decision-making? What is the best way to queer our methodologies? How, in short, did we end up choosing this path? These questions are part of the academic journey we, feminist and queer scholars and researchers in GEMMA, have gone through when we chose to orientate ourselves towards feminism. Because as researchers the issue of why we have chosen that type of research rather than any other does matter, indeed. How feminism has found us also matters. And so does the why we have let feminism encounter us and become such a significant part of our lives. Or rather: the why and how we have come to pursue, live and perform feminist lives.

As feminist scholars, students and researchers, we realise that gender dynamics are embedded thoroughly in our institutions, our research, our actions, our beliefs, and our desires. One of our most successful responses to this situation is to orientate our engagement with the form of teaching, researching and theorising gender and its relation to race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, disability and age in both the personal and professional spheres. We are reminded by Sara Ahmed (2006: 56) that orientations “are about the directions we take that put some things and not others in our reach,” which suggests that these directions are not simply randomly chosen. If we follow Ahmed’s line of thought, we can argue that, as feminist researchers, we are orientated by stories of oppression and the structures that sustain them, by our backgrounds, past experiences and emotional ups and downs. This is why we orientate ourselves towards research into some things and not into others. Our stories orientate us and lead us to different theoretical places and different objects of study. As such, as feminist researchers, we have an “embodied orientation” which is a key part of “how (...) we come to find our way in a world that acquires new shapes, depending on which way we turn” (ibid.: 1).

But then, we orientate ourselves towards something because we feel disorientated in the first place. As Ahmed suggests, as feminists we feel disorientated and this might be the moment when our orientation starts existing to the extent that we start questioning the comfort we had formerly assumed to be the norm. In other words, we disorientate ourselves towards something because we have agreed to exist without being comfortable. In our own specific ways, each of us relates to a world that swings on hinges, a world that is frustrating, exhausting and shattering. We are disorientated feminist scholars and “killjoys, misfits, trouble-makers; willful wanderers and woeful warriors: we fight for room to be as we wish; we wish for room in which we did not have to fight to be” (Ahmed, 2020).

We, at GEMMA, disorientate ourselves because we believe new perspectives could become also available to critically reorientate the world. Academic orientation, therefore, is something that is both embodied and embedded, and includes the power/knowledge of the disorientated subject. In this volume we attempt to present how GEMMA feminist researchers and scholars choose to dis/orientate. For the authors collaborating in this volume, GEMMA has meant a feminist compass, a starting point for dis/ orientation. GEMMA has de-guided us and helped us find our way in life. As such, GEMMA is a personal, embodied, situated experience that has meant something different to each and every one of the people who have taken part in this project. And, still, as personal as GEMMA is, we are all connected by shared readings and experiences, by artistic works and political activism, by disciplinary miss-understandings and transgressive methodologies. Overall, this volume is about feminist embodied orientations, embodied feminist politics, vulnerable feminist writings and politics of dis/orientation which become productive within the context of the new feminist alliances we have constructed, through the convergences of our lives both at a personal and research level.

Considering the international and multicultural background of the GEMMA community, this volume reflects on and weaves the personal and the professional, the empirical and the theoretical, the political and the affective. In this sense, intersectionality and interdisciplinarity are the most defining features of GEMMA as a collaborative project. And within this diversity, the articles gathered in this volume trace the development of the fundamental traits of GEMMAS feminist and gender research: the goal of social and political transformation; the decolonisation of academic practices and curricula; the conception of research as involved in a process that calls for self-reflexive and participatory approaches; the rejection of absolute notions of objectivity; the necessary involvement of, and claim for, emotions and affects in our research practices; and an emphasis on qualitative and creative research methods and pedagogies. This volume aims to show how our feminist academic master programme has moved to positioning itself beyond the pedagogical comfort of an unrisked academic environment and towards a dis-orientated and trouble-making one. And this endeavour, we insist, is not a single effort but the result of collective and collaborative activism. It is a turn we have come to refer to as GEMMAnism.

Introduction: Feminist Research Alliances 19

We want to thank the GEMMA community which has accepted the invitation to reflect on our teaching, research and theorisation of gender, sexuality and queerness and on how we aim to challenge stagnant forms of scientific discourse by placing ourselves at the intersections between gender/queer perspectives and methodological considerations in humanities and social science research. We are proud to say that the GEMMA programme has contributed to disseminating multifarious feminisms, methodologies, theories and practices globally, since GEMMAnism is spread widely across the world after 15 years of hosting students coming from so many different countries. They have brought a myriad of new perspectives to GEMMA, enabling us to look deeper into what a feminist gaze might consist of, and into how immediate personal and academic disorientations can connect to and intersect with the wider world, hence helping to attain a different, and better worlding.

How to read this volume

This volume inaugurates the “Researching with GEMMA” series. Under the title of Feminist Research Alliances: Affective Convergences it aims to provide an in-depth and wide-ranging consideration of what we think characterises feminist research within GEMMA. All the contributions selected to be part of this volume belong to the GEMMA community either as scholars, collaborators or alumni. Each article is a reflection on the backstage of being a young feminist researcher and/or the front staging of being senior scholars. The volume is divided into three parts dealing with theories, methodologies and reflections on pedagogical experiences. All the issues and insights within these are articulated around “weaving” as a fitting metaphor for our networking and cultivation of affective alliances and convergences which bridge our academic and personal spheres.

The opening chapter, “Feminist Friendships, Solidarities and a Dream Come True” by Adelina Sanchez-Espinosa and Orianna Calderón- Sandoval, is the shared conversations of a group of participants in the GEMMA community. Consortium representatives, members of the executive and advisory boards, project officers, students and alumni who gathered for the third graduation ceremony and Voices of GEMMA conference in

Granada, in December 2018, reflect on the meaning of GEMMAnism: on the way GEMMA has shaped their lives and on how they have become different people from their contaminations with each other. This is followed by the warm words of some of the people whose friendship we have made throughout these 15 years. To all of them we want to say thank you for their input. Our programme would not be what it is were it not for their generous collaborations.

The first part Weaving the Personal and the Professional explores the personal and professional boundaries and challenges faced throughout GEMMA. This part is divided into two sections: Section 1. Movements in Academia is introduced by Ana María González Ramos (Pablo de Olavide University) who reflects on Beatriz Revelles Benaventes and Wilmarie Rosado Pérez's articles. In “Processual Movements in Academia: Being a GEMMA student or how to become a feminist researcher”, Revelles Benavente engages from a new materialist approach with topics of feminist research practices. By exploring how different movements create professional and personal paths that matter, Revelles appeals for new forms of academic practices and collaborations “otherwise”, entangling theoretical reflections, personal experiences and praxis in search of more just and solidary ways to navigate academia. Wilmarie Rosados contribution “Feminism across Academia: Questioning the Interdisciplinary Quality of Womens and Gender Studies” explores the challenges of interdisciplinary practices within higher education institutions. By reflecting on intesectionality, Rosado brings to light the many difficulties concerning the legitimation of WGS as a field of study and how, in order to overcome these constraints, it demands partnerships and cooperation among specialists working from different universities and diverse fields of knowledge. Ana María González's reading of these two contributions makes them dialogue as examples of how young feminist researchers build their own paths driven by their desires and chances within a most challenging neoliberal academia. González Ramos proposes that senior feminist scholars need to support young academics to navigate and find their own way in this often unfriendly and elitist scientific community. Movements in academia should be, as Ramos puts it, a “sense of response-ability” and an invitation of GEMMA young scholars for building intersectional and transnational practices of solidarity within academia.

Section 2: Embodied Subjectivities, introduced by Cristina Gamberi (University of Bologna) captures the contemporary political imaginaries

Introduction: Feminist Research Alliances 21 of feminist academia and feminist movements over recent decades, identified as the fourth wave of feminism. Gamberi reflects on Rocío Palomeque Recios and Alice Sabbatini's essays so as to provide a general overview of the potential of the fourth-wave perspectives when studying issues of bodies and sexuality, intersectionality and affects. Palomeque Recios article, entitled “Women asking questions: embodied subjectivity as a valid epistemology” takes on the question of the legitimate subject(s) of knowledge and the forms of knowledge that can be legitimately elaborated in current neoliberal times. She eloquently explores “how to create an embodied research that uses one’s ontology as standpoint” by connecting sex work to the neoliberal dynamics affecting university education in the United Kingdom.

Following the same discussion, Alice Sabbatini, investigates the pervasiveness of the sexual imperative that permeates many of our current social movements. In her “Reflections on Two Years of Research on Asexuality and the Lack of Sexual Attraction’, Sabbatini explores asexuality as a resistant and non-conforming category that even shakes the foundations of women’s and queer movements. “If sex is political”, she questions, “what is the place for a-sexuality in contemporary activism?” By blurring the private and the public both essays presented in this section invite us to revitalise what is overlooked and unexplored within feminist criticism and gender studies. As Cristina Gamberi mentions, “these essays invite the reader to interrogate knowledge-producing practices and to de-familiarise the terrain of knowledge in order to adopt a new, fresh look at what is presented as natural and unquestionable”.

The second part Weaving Nomadic Knowledges and Affective Methodologies explores the role played by affect in the construction of the feminist knowledges of the GEMMA community. Suzanne Clisby opens section three by reflecting on how the nomadic experience of the GEMMA students is an added value to the knowledges generated. GEMMA, she states, “encourages us to become cosmopolitan subjects” since “through our international feminist networks of care and gender politics we have created an embodied infrastructure of support, connections, and threads of feminist power that stretch far beyond the borders of Europe”. The two authors included in this section, Damiana Ballerini and Pranjali Das, deal with the frictions produced by such movements. Ballerini accounts for her research on Brazilian migrants in Italy and how their construction of their new identity in the hosting country is attained by constantly navigating the pressures of stereotypes representing Brazilian women as extremely sexualised women. Das, on her behalf, focuses on the discomfort produced on extra communitarian students, particularly on those coming from Asia, when having to cope with European structures at all levels, “bridging gaps between their South Asian centric situated knowledge to the Eurocentric education system, challenging colonial stereotypes, and addressing issues arising out of regional conflicts within the academic space”. Ultimately, she maintains, GEMMA, as a programme, makes it possible to build communities and networks that challenge “these restrictive physical border policies and encourage feminist solidarity on issues across the globe” As Clisby highlights, GEMMA exemplifies a most positive form of alternative cosmopolitanism: *the sort that connects subjects across the world in a greater sense of each other in the context of the places surrounding them [...] broadens their understandings of ways of seeing and ways of being”.

Section 4 focuses on the role of affect as a methodology to approach feminist knowledges. Socorro Suárez introduces this section by interpelating her own feminist life in the context of the tales narrated by the three authors included in this section. When in the company of other feminist researchers from all over Europe participating in the ATHENA network, Suárez started questioning her own sense of belonging to a certain cultural background and this was further troubled by the GEMMA experience immediately afterwards since the teaching in multicultural classrooms was a second eye-opener which placed her as a nomadic subject in the construction of affects with so many other feminists, all of them finding new knowledges in the relational possibilities with each other. The two articles in this section, “Hegemonies of Power vs. Affective Relational Anarchy” by Ana Garcia Lopez and Angela Harris and “Researching with the Trouble: A Journey of Emotions and Affective Challenges’, deal with the way disciplinary knowledges can change when affect is applied to them. Garcia and Harris explore how two disciplines such as Artherapy for social inclusion and Social Work can be transformed after deconstructing the power dynamics which often rule the intrapersonal relations and practices within these fields. They end up by offering a Spanish located (yet portable) feminist toolbox “with tips and examples for more solidary and thoroughly inclusive practices which may rekindle our dwindled enthusiasm and compromise as feminist practitioners in our fields”. Méndez de la Brena, in her turn, aims also at adopting subversive research methodologies which may contribute to changing academic disciplines. Her choice “researching with

Introduction: Feminist Research Alliances 23 the trouble” is an anti-solutionist feminist methodology that differs from the normative and traditional approaches of doing research. Rather than avoiding troublesome feelings, the author proposes a better understanding of how we came to accept ourselves as “troublesome” researchers and how this can help us to create innovative methodologies in the present.

Finally, the third and last part of this volume, Weaving the Personal and the Professional tackles the pedagogical practices within GEMMA. The authors included in this section illustrate how these different feminist knowledges are being incorporated not only into the ways we research and theorise differently but also into our alternative ways of teaching. As Agata Ignaciuk, introducing this part, reflects upon, teaching in GEMMA is about the “singular exchange processes” of a community of students and lecturers which subverts the traditional hierarchical top-down dynamics of academia by creating classroom spaces in which students and lecturers are situated in a sharing community. Hence, in “Sharing ‘Other’ Knowledges” Carmen Gregorio Gil and Ana Alcazar Campos deal with their reflections on the experience of teaching feminist ethnography in the GEMMA classroom claiming for “the importance of writing when we focus on our own life and subjectivities and we bridge the gap between subject and object using our own constructions of gender, class, race, age, ethnicity and sexuality”. Ana Muñoz-Muñozs chapter “Challenges and Problems for Research in Library and Information Science from a Gender Perspective” also touches on this need for rethinking disciplines from a gender perspective claiming that the discipline of Library and Information Studies will benefit enormously by recognising the enormous contribution of gender scholars within the field, hence counteracting the heteropatriarchal production of knowledge which has formerly dominated the field, often, as Ignaciuk notes, elevating “productivity” as a criterion of excellence which finally resulted in more inequalities between productive male and not so productive female researchers in the field. Finally Victoria Robles Sanjuán closes this volume with her “Women’s Movements Around the World: Some Reflections on Feminist Pedagogy and Its Role in the Feminist Teachings of This Course” which presents her reflections as tutor of the Women’s movements around the world module. She focuses on the autobiographical projects produced by students throughout all these years and interprets the connections between problems of exclusion and gender subordinations that students consider to be essential in their lives.

We close this volume by staying briefly with Orianna Calderón, Cristina Gamberi, Beatriz Revelles and Agata Ignaciuk because of their unique double position as GEMMA alumni from the first generation and tutors and teachers in some of the GEMMA courses at present. They are our embodied testimony that GEMMAnism can change our worlds for the better, fostering new types of feminist convergences which contest hierarchical, tight-up Academia making our research and teaching spaces more liveable and enjoyable. All in all this volume presents only a tiny fraction of the multifarious and diverse research conducted within the GEMMA communities throughout so many years. It inaugurates our series and it triggers it off for, hopefully, many more contributions to follow in the future. Long life to our Researching with GEMMA series.

Ahmed, Sara. (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Duke University Press, Durham.

Ahmed, Sara. (2020). Feminist at Work. feministkilljoys. Available at: https://feministkilljoys.com/2020/01/10/feminists-at-work/

Haraway, Donna J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Feminist Friendships, Solidarities and a Dream Come True: Shared Conversations About GEMMA

On December 10th and 11th, 2018, the GEMMA Third Graduation Ceremony and the “Voices of GEMMA” Intercultural Forum! took place at the University of Granada. Taking advantage of the occasion, GEMMA celebrated its 10th anniversary of being the first and only joint Erasmus Mundus Masters Degree in Womens and Gender Studies in Europe. The event brought together the coordinators of the partner universities involved in the programme and hence provided a unique opportunity to gather their insights looking back on their shared paths.

We carried out a series of video interviews with professors Jasmina Lukic (Central European University), Vita Fortunati and Rita Monticelli (University of Bologna), Suzanne Clisby (University of Hull), Rachel Alsop (University of York), Isabel Carrera and Emilia Durán (University of Oviedo), Rosemarie Buikema (Utrecht University), Aleksandra Rozalska (University of Lodz), Adelina Sánchez, Ana Muñoz and Victoria Robles (University of Granada).? We also talked to “Voices of GEMMA” keynote speaker and member of the Board of Expert Advisors, professor Chandra Mohanty (Syracuse University); to the GEMMA consortium technical coordinator, Omayra Herrero; and to some students who had completed their masters degrees: Dresda Méndez from Mexico; Roghayeh Rezaei from Iran; and Angela Harris, Rebeca García, and María Sánchez from Spain. In this chapter, we bring together their interventions on the main issues concerning the GEMMA experience. We have constructed a round table where participants dialogue by reading their ideas through one another.

1 The third “Voices of GEMMA” Intercultural Forum was an international meeting that brought together graduates of the GEMMA master’s degree. Its main aim was to give graduates the opportunity to share their academic and professional experiences in the field of Women's and Gender Studies.

2 The final version of the video is available on GEMMAS website: https://masteres.ugr.es/ gemma/

Adelina Sánchez and Orianna Calderón: We might start by brainstorming about what GEMMA means to all of us.

Suzanne Clisby: I think GEMMA is possibly, in my opinion, the most powerful transnational feminist network in the world emerging from Europe; and that’s just amazing to be able to be part of that.

Jasmina Lukic: Yes. GEMMA is not just, let's say, a project we have and then do. It's a kind of living organism. It is being made by us and done by us but it’s always giving back and we are kind of working with it all together all the time.

Adelina Sánchez: GEMMA is a collective experience, it is a dream dreamt by many people for along, long time. We decided to come together and collect all the work we had been doing for so many years, thinking of how we could have a joint European programme in Women's and Gender Studies. The European Commission's funding provided us with the opportunity to make that shared dream come true.

It is 8 universities from seven European countries and 47 more associate institutions within Europe and beyond. Such a large group can only work so well, and for so long, if there is total trust with each other. And I think that this is one of the most valuable assets of the GEMMA community... from the consortium coordination dynamics. Then there is, of course, the other part to GEMMA, the students and alumni. Without them, without those people who are constructing/have constructed their future taking GEMMA as their starting point, GEMMA would simply not be.

Orianna Calderón: GEMMA is also the communities built within the countries in which we lived during the master's, our communities of origin and the actual crossing of cultural, intellectual and personal boundaries, which helped us forge new identities throughout relationality with the others.

Dresda Méndez: I agree. Placing myself from the position of the GEMMA student I was, I would say that it is not merely a curriculum leading to a double degree. It is much more than that. It is what we build during the GEMMA experience which is always remembered by alumni as a very precious memory: the experience of two different cities in two different countries and often two or three different languages, the building ofa community which will last many years after finishing the master and receiving our two degrees.