Doing the document: Gender studies at the corporatized university in Europe

Abstract

Rosemarie: Christmas Eve, 2011. 7:30 p.m. I have been sitting in front of my computer on a phone call with our British consortium partner for more than an hour now. We are in the process of submitting an EU FP7 ITN and I am going through a long e-mail our partner sent earlier that day in which she lists the points we still have to discuss before she will be able to get the signature of her university’s officials. Right now she is explaining the complexities of the PhD quality assurances and other requirements in her country. My mobile beeps. Maybe this is a cry from the kitchen; C. was thinking we’d finally have a proper dinner together. But no, the kitchen is trained to be silent. It is Iris instead, SMSing that she just managed to cut the summary down to the allowed 250 words and will now check the B2 part of the application. That’s great. While I am sitting here solving problems larger than life, the application machine keeps running smoothly. I quickly reply with a smiley. In the meantime I get to point 8 of the list with Britain. Our consortium member is explaining that she has been running back and forth that week, cancelled a trip, contacted her head of department, her dean, the doctoral school coordinator and a couple of members of the support staff, even made several phone calls to the national EU contact point herself and is still not sure which route she should take to reconcile local, national and European legislation. The last thing she wants is to blow up a possible consortium agreement in advance, but Britain is not an easy partner when it comes to the development of joint degree programmes. What do vignettes like these tell us about the environment of gender research in the 2010s? Let us unpack our recent experiences with research applications to the European Commission in order to find out what the characteristics of the university (the cause) are that make us caper about like this on a Christmas Eve (its effects).