Fredericke Weiner

Research Area 5

About myself and my Project: “Recent Feminist Activism in Eastern Europe in a European and Global Context ”

With my PhD proposal, I aim to focus on the recent feminist activist movements in Eastern Europe in particular and their European and Global context. Starting point of my research are events like the “czarny protest” movement in Poland which brought hundreds of thousands to the street despite huge political and medial headwind or the “Handmaids march” in Croatia which fueled a debate about Croatia’s national self-understanding.
My thesis seeks to understand the local conditions, the regional entanglements and the global influence of current feminist movements in Middle Eastern Europe and Southeastern Europe. A multi-layer approach to feminist activism will not only focus on the local political environment in which action takes place, but also intends to find out how this relates to the region (esp. in an EU context) and the global discourse. For this, I draw from various disciplines and theoretical backgrounds that I got acquainted with in my academic career.

By training I am a humanities scholar and studied Literature Art and Media in my Bachelor at the University of Konstanz. In this interdisciplinary course work I focused strongly on structures of inequality, especially the power structures surrounding gender and race issues. As a literary student, my research was mainly conducted in the field of dystopian science fiction which I considered the literary form of social and political commentary. During my BA, I spent a year at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow where I developed my research interest in Eastern Europe.
In 2017, I graduated with honors from the EMGS Global Studies program earning a joint degree from the universities of Leipzig and Wroclaw. As a graduate student/ my focus lay on the European idea and its characteristics in Eastern Europe. I wrote my master thesis on the legitimation narrative of the European Union and its failures.
Additionally, I spent a volunteer year in Zagreb, Croatia where I got drawn into the immensely interesting historical and social set-up of the Western Balkans.

My PhD project will be the combination of my strong interest in feminist idea(l)s and research on inequality with the contextual narratives of Europe as well as a work on global and regional entanglement. During my time at EEGA I aim to sharpen my research focus and develop a PhD proposal that combines my various interests in a constructive and comprehensive form.

Video Interview with Fredericke Weiner:

#1 – Please present yourself and your research project

#2 – How did you get to know EEGA ScienceCampus?

#3 – What are the links between your research project and EEGA ScienceCampus?

#4 – The benefit of EEGA ScienceCampus to me is…