Now that the frenzied pace required right before and after the publication of the first report from our LGBTIQ+ survey is slowing down, new research horizons have the time to settle in.
While articles, interviews, and social media content building on the survey keep coming in, other aspects of the project are now taking center stage. In the project proposal that was drawn up by Elisabetta, Massimo, and Pamela to land the funding last year, one of the big objectives that was set was to “map and analyze quantitative and qualitative aspects of anti-LGBTIQ+ protest events” in EU member states. The idea here was to use Protest Event Analysis tools to take record of events coalescing around anti-gender organizing. However, we soon came to realize that the sole focus on anti-gender protests would cast a significant portion of events outside our purview. Anti-gender mobilizations have a decade-long history related to religious actors; yet this ideological matrix has more recently been compounded by specifically anti-trans protest events that are grounded in ideological streams within the so-called gender critical feminist activism.
We thought it vital to expand the breadth of the task to anti-trans protest events. This is why the project was presented to a group of students at the University of Verona and two of them will now be joining the team as interns starting from early July. Maddalena and Matija hop aboard to work on two main tasks. They will handle the post-production phases for our Pride & Politics podcast; and they will work on data collection that will allow to specifically map anti-trans protest events.
Their participation was not planned from the beginning, but on the one hand, our research objectives expanded, and on the other, we have found unexpected fun and satisfaction in making the podcast, which motivates us to dedicate more energy to it.
In a nutshell, more research means more people!
Welcome aboard Maddalena and Matija!
