feminist autonomous centre for research
WHAT THE FAC?
The Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research (FAC research) is a space for learning, reflection, collaboration, support, exchange, knowledge production, political interventions, and trouble-making. Working across and against nation-state and continental borders, disciplinary boundaries, and institutional barriers, we return to the feminist roots of autonomous knowledge production, challenging what counts as legitimate knowledge and who is granted the right to produce and receive it. Our feminisms are queer, trans, intersectional, antiracist, anti-authoritarian, always in plural, reflexive, and internally contested. Read more about our vision, meet our team, and join us.
projects
Community Courses
Abolition Feminisms
Fall 2022
Transfeminisms
Fall 2022
CFPs coming soon...
BRIDGES
Building Inclusive Societies
An Erasmus+ funded research project to break down barriers to higher education and decolonise curricula
Feminist Library
Donate a book you wrote or a book you love,
or bring one into the world with FAC press
Library opens in Fall 2022
Summer School
5th annual
Feminist No Borders Summer School
15-18 June 2022
111 participants in 4 nodes
dismantling walls,
building bridges
antiracist feminist alliances for a radical education
international conference
7-8 July 2022, barcelona
The conference is free and open to anyone interested in creating new ways of understanding the production and exchange of knowledge from an antiracist feminist antiracist perspective: students, researchers, teachers, activists, artists. We believe in the importance of creating interdisciplinary transversal spaces, to share practice and theory around shared struggles.
Registration deadline: 10 June 2022
For more information and to register, visit the BRIDGES website.
feminist no borders
summer school
abolition/covid borders/positionality
15-18 june 2022
palermo/heraklion/berlin/athens-virtual
The annual feminist no borders summer school provides a space of encounter, mutual learning, and inspiration for researchers, activists, artists, and members of community organisations to exchange experiences, strategies, and struggles across and against borders. We seek to displace the hegemony of academia as the primary location from which knowledge is produced and distributed. It’s an antiracist, abolitionist feminist space that seeks to challenge the division between knowledge and practice and to intervene in the dominant ways in which borders are reproduced in academia, media, and humanitarianism. We practise alternative ways of learning, listening, and speaking to each other, prefiguring political communities through which we’d like to struggle. This year, over four days, we will meet both within each node as well as hybridly, to enable conversations and exchange across these locations, and to connect our struggles in different localities. Read more…
With: Associazone Closer, de:border – migration justice collective, Legal Centre Lesvos, Thalassa of Solidarity, Kompass Collective, LasciateCIEntrare, Watch the Med – Alarm Phone (Women* On The Move).
At: Booq (Palermo), Kato Theatre (Heraklion), Kulturfabrik Moabit (Berlin), FAC research/zoom (Athens – Virtual).
homonationalism & femonationalism
a virtual discussion with dissensus gender
wednesday 18 may 2022
7:00-8:30 pm AThens time, UTC+3
Το ΦΑΚ φιλοξενεί την ερευνητική ομάδα Dissensus Gender για μια κριτική παρουσίαση των φαινομένων του ομοεθνικισμού και του φεμοεθνικισμού. Θα ακουλουθήσει ανοιχτή συζήτηση. Τα δύο φαινόμενα, ομοεθνικισμός και φεμοεθνικισμός, αποδίδουν μια διττή πραγματικότητα: αφενός την στροφή γυναικών και ΛΟΑΤΚΙ+ ατόμων προς την δεξιά, και αφετέρου την ανασύσταση του δεξιού και ακροδεξιού λόγου ως φιλικά προσκείμενου στα έμφυλα υποκείμενα. Για να συμμετάσχετε στην εκδήλωση, η οποία θα λάβει χώρα στα ελληνικά μέσω zoom, παρακαλούμε κάνετε εγγραφή ακολουθώντας αυτόν τον σύνδεσμο: Dissensus Gender
Συμμετέχουν οι: Ηρώ Τσαρμποπούλου-Φωκιανού, Ανδρομάχη Κουτσουλέντη και Άννα Μπιρμπιλοπούλου από την ομάδα Dissensus Gender.
membership drive
FAC’s annual membership drive 2022 has now ended*
We are grateful to 245 members who contributed a total of €10.936 (€7.968 in donations and pledged €2.968 in monthly instalments). This will cover 50% of our basic operating costs, and represents 15% of our campaign goal. We also raised an additional €1.777 in solidarity contributions, which we will redistribute to collectives and organisations participating in the Feminist No Borders Summer School.
New and returning members: you will soon receive an invitation to join us at the FAC members’ assembly, to take place virtually on Tuesday, 14 June (7-9 pm Athens time). Thank you for helping to #keepfacalive!
* You can always become a member throughout the year.
TRANSFEMINIST INTERNATIONAL!
a virtual discussion: Thursday 5 may 2022
7:00-9:00 pm AThens time, UTC+3
How can we create a transfeminist international? What are the relationships between the multiple, intersecting crises of capitalism, the global rise of fascism, and the emboldening of TERF discourses? At this conjuncture, what forms of resistance does transfeminism open up against transphobia, its institutionalisation, normalisation, and violent expression, as it manifests across political spectra and in a range of political formations? What is intersectional/Black transfeminism? What is the genealogy, the value/significance, and the future of the transfeminist movement?
Please register by following this link: Transfeminist International!
With: Marquis Bey, author of Black Trans Feminism; Jules Joanne Gleeson, co-editor of Transgender Marxism; Elle O’Rourke, co-editor of Transgender Marxism; Trish Salah, author of Wanting in Arabic: Poems and Lyric Sexology Vol. 1; McKenzie Wark, author of Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?
new publication
Come, let me tell you: Feminist, lesbian, and Queer narratives of the post-dictatorship period
This collective volume (in Greek) comprises eight feminist, lesbian, and queer narratives of the post-dictatorship period (1974-), following the fall of the junta (1967-1974) in Greece. Whilst the social effects of the restoration of democracy are undeniable, the limits (and borders) of democracy, its inclusiveness and its consensual, representative legitimacy remains a continuous struggle into the present day (or perhaps especially so in the present). Based on oral histories conducted in the community course “Let’s Talk About ‘Sex’, Baby”: Histories and Theories of Genders and Sexualities (2019-2020), the volume contributes to tracing an alternative history of the post-dictatorship era, which dominant histories render unheard. You can download the open access ebook in PDF or EPUB formats now, and/or obtain a print copy in early 2022.
why we Fight
Sharing the stories of how we came to be involved in the fight against gender-based violence
Because heteropatriarchy makes gendered violence ubiquitous, normalised, and even banal, the struggle to end gendered violence is a daily one and, at times, can seem endless. Still, we fight, and we fight to win!
By collecting anonymised personal stories, the website whywefight.gr and social media campaign will offer a forum for reflecting on how we came to be involved in this collective struggle. Beyond raising awareness of the urgency to join the struggle against gendered violence, Why We Fight aims to empower us to persist in our resistance. Tell us your story.
years in review
How to sum up the two years that have passed? The ‘year’ we review here is not a calendar year, nor is it an academic year. It represents a period lived, paradoxically, both as compressed and as expansive time, a time of existential threat posed not only by the pandemic but by its ‘management’ by states, and its exploitation by capital. This narrative report has undergone many versions, revisions, and postponements, as we felt uncomfortable simply reporting, let alone celebrating, ‘what we’ve accomplished’ in a time of global pandemic. As we close this cycle, and FAC enters its third academic year, it’s hard to articulate how beautiful, and how difficult, this journey has been. Throughout, what has kept us going is, in a word: you. We present the Year(s) in Review 2019-2020/2020-2021 [PDF], now, to you, our community and members with gratitude, humility, and hope.
