The end of the academic year definitely takes a toll on our energies, but we all happily joined forces for a last throw of the dice before summer break! In mid-July we had our second “progress review meeting”, which is an admin inspired way of saying that we met to discuss where we’re at with our different strands of research.
If you look at our website or you’re not familiar with medium-size research projects, you might think that all our researchers work together on a daily or maybe weekly basis. The reality is that the LGBT Equality Politics project is made up of several people scattered around different unis, which means that being all together (even virtually) requires some active efforts.
This second progress review meeting was a great occasion to come together. Our goal was to be able to share the advancements we made on the different research objectives, not only to make sure that we’re on track, but also that our work remains coherent among the different research axes. Since the meeting had a quite informal tone, it was really a great time to exchange useful pieces of advice and get honest feedback.
Let us give you a foretaste of the research paths we’re going down. Pamela and Margherita have been exploring the ins and outs of the ILGA Rainbow index. Their task is double, on the one hand, they are getting into how the index is built and how it changed across time; on the other, they’re trying to understand how viable it can be as an indicator in an academic research work.
Massimo and Federico shared their progress on mapping anti-gender and anti-LGBTQI+ events. They have been testing a first research protocol to identify protest events through keywords applied to major national news outlets in France, Spain, and Italy. While the protocol needs some sharpening, its initial testing seems promising!
Finally, Elisabetta told us about how they are getting their dataset on parliamentary activity in Spain, Portugal, and Italy ready to research (anti-)LGBTQI+ legislative initiative and how they planning to complement this data with a written survey or interviews, or both! You can be sure that research ambition never runs out in our team!
