Local Organizers

Martina Avanza

Martina Avanza is Senior Lecturer in political sociology at the University of Lausanne (Institute of Political Science) . For the 2015-2016 academic year she is invited professor at the Venice International University where she teaches gender and politics. Her research interests include: identity politics and political activism (parties, unions, social movements) especially conservative activism in a gendered perspective. She is a political ethnographer working on the field to understand activism from below. Her current research is about the pro-life movement in Italy.

Sebastien Chauvin

Sebastien Chauvin is the author, with Laure Bereni, Alex Jaunait and Laure Revillard, of Introduction aux études sur le genre (De Boeck, 2nd edition 2012) and, with Arnaud Lerch, of Sociologie de l’homosexualité (La Découverte, 2013). His recent research topics cover migration, sexuality, social class, and the historical epistemology of sex and gender. In 2015, he and Saskia Bonjour organized an international symposium on “Class, Gender and Migration”, now being turned into a special journal issue. Ongoing writings (with Yannick Coenders, Alex Jaunait, Timo Koren, Manuela Salcedo, Fatiha El-Hajjari and Apostolos Andrikopoulos) explore the intersections of race, nationalism, sexuality and citizenship in the Netherlands, France and the U.S. He was the founding director of Amsterdam Research Center for Gender Studies (2010 to 2013).

Rahel Kunz

Rahel Kunz is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Political, Historical and International Studies of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her research interests gender in migration and development issues, feminist security studies, and feminist, poststructuralist and postcolonial theories. She is currently working on a collaborative research project on gender experts and gender expertise, focusing on the context of Nepal and Liberia. Rahel Kunz has published in International Political Sociology, European Journal of International Relations, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Journal of European Integration, Migration Studies, Review of International Political Economy and Third World Quarterly. She is the author of The Political Economy of Global Remittances: Gender, Governmentality and Neoliberalism (Routledge 2011).

Eléonore Lépinard

Eléonore Lépinard (Doctorate EHESS Paris) is Associate Professor in Gender Studies at the Université de Lausanne, where she headed the Center for Gender Studies from 2014 to 2016. Her research is situated in the field of gender and politics, in particular in two subfields : gender quotas and women’s movements/intersectionality. Her first monograph (L’égalité introuvable, la parité, les féministes et la République, Presses de Sciences po 2007) retraces the French gender quota constitutional reform and its challenges. She has published numerous articles, often with a comparative perspective, in journals such as Politics & Gender, Gender & Society, Ethnicities, Social Politics, American Behavioral Scientist, Signs, and Constellations. Her work has been awarded the Best paper award by the Women and politics section and the best paper award by the French politics group, both entities of the American Political Science Association.