MEMBERSHIP DRIVE
Join Us!
We offer a sliding scale of membership fees, in the hope that no interested individual is excluded from membership. Although memberships are individual, their impact is collective. By paying an annual membership, you make the Centre accessible to members who cannot afford the fee.
FAC research ensures its continued autonomous operation through the financial support of its members. Membership fees are used to pay for basic operating costs, grants, and programming. We encourage you to self-select the membership fee according to your financial situation.
If the annual membership fee is not feasible, but you would like to join FAC research, please email us.
If you prefer to make a payment directly to our Bank account, here is the information needed:
FEMINIST AUTONOMOUS CENTRE FOR RESEARCH
IBAN: GR6901720180005018097574540
SWIFT CODE (BIC): PIRBGRAA
Subject: FAC Membership / NAME or CENTRE/GROUP
WHY BECOME A MEMBER?
We aspire to create a community of active participants. We imagine various ways that we can generate connections amongst us that defy borders and acknowledge the inter-connectedness of our struggles.
- Active participation in the Centre’s programming. At monthly Open Days, annual virtual assemblies, and on a day-to-day basis, members can propose working groups, research projects, lectures, seminars, workshops, performances, publications, exhibitions, courses, and other activities.
- Research visits. We can host, advise, consult with, and otherwise assist researchers with their projects.
- Facilities. You can use the facilities (library and reading room, meeting space, kitchen, garden, etc.)
- Grants. With the proceeds of this year’s membership drive, we aim to redistribute €10,000 in the form of research grants to precarious researchers (or, 7% of our total budget in excess of our operational costs, whichever is greater)
- Feminist Network. You can participate in an engaged network of feminist activists, academics, artists, and community organisers (enabling the formation working groups at a distance or in their local community).
- Feminist No Borders Summer School. You can participate in the annual Feminist No Borders Summer School co-organised with Feminist Researchers Against Borders.
- Feminist Film School. You can participate in the Feminist Film School organised with film and video artists, visual studies scholars, journalists, and photographers.
- Conferences. You can use the space to hold a conference, and you can participate in the bi-annual conference organised by FAC research.
- Open-access publications. You support open-access publications of FAC research, and can propose their own manuscripts or translations for publication.
- Communication. You receive the newsletter and the annual financial report, and are welcome to join our virtual community space.
What you support
Our annual membership campaign aims to raise sufficient funds to maintain the Centre’s facilities, run our core programming and public research activities, ideally at no cost to participants.
WHAT IS FAC RESEARCH?
FAC Research is a space for learning, reflection, collaboration, support, exchange, knowledge production, political interventions, and trouble-making…
FAC research is a community-based research centre. Located in Athens, a city at one epicentre of global, intersecting crises, we have a need to build spaces in which encounters can take place, and coalitions can flourish.
Particularly for groups excluded from the hegemonic mappings of the city, FAC offers a space to breathe, in the daily struggle against multiple forms of violence. By unleashing our collective capacities for creativity, resistance, and care, we can unlearn the dominant ideologies that we have internalised and produce new knowledges. The physical space of the centre is open to groups and individuals who want to come together, exchange ideas, generate projects, to understand and transform our collective realities.
FAC research is based in Athens, yet is not confined to the physical space of the centre, or even the city, the country, or the continent. It seeks to establish collaborations against borders with collectives, organisations, individuals, and communities in struggle.
We see ourselves as part of an emergent global movement against heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, neocolonialism, and ecological genocide. We seek to forge coalitions across and against borders for self-determination: in unity we rise!
Learn more about our team, how we started, our research areas, and our vision.
WHY RESEARCH?
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.
We question the (neo)colonial uses to which research has historically been put, and how research remains, today, a tool of domination. Bridging theory and practice, art and activism, we resist the exclusive authority of academic institutions to define what counts as knowledge and who counts as a legitimate knower. What would community-driven research look like?
While we strongly oppose the privatisation of education at all levels and believe in free universally accessible education as a fundamental human right, we also contest the state’s authority over knowledge production and reproduction. The nonsecular state attempts to contain, limit, and censor ways of knowing, traditions of practice, and schools of thought that challenge power relations and social hierarchies. Consequently, we seek political and financial autonomy from state institutions–but also from supranational funding agencies, from private foundations, and rely on our members for the inspiration, sustainability, and accountability of the centre.
That is, our day-to-day sustainability depends on the contributions of our members, not on the vagaries and unpredictability of external funding. Around the world, a backlash against gender studies, feminist and LGBTQI+ movements is coordinated and carried out by the far right, and the space for the expression of dissident thoughts is becoming ever more constricted. We also witness the seemingly inevitable corporate takeover of academic institutions (both private and nominally public) by the neoliberal model of the “knowledge factory.” The permanent and proliferating precariat is the linchpin of the academic-industrial complex, while students are constructed as consumers, and studying is seen as a(n expensive) passive-receptive activity rather than a productive one. Our feminist conception of autonomy disrupts the dichotomy between “public” and “private,” seeking to foster self-determination particularly for groups that are epistemically oppressed in academic institutions.
More and more, feminists critical of academic institutions have elaborated their reasons for making individual exits from neoliberal universities. FAC research is an experiment in staging a collective exit. Breaking with the neoliberal logic of There Is No Alternative, we are, in practice, asking, what might it mean to create an alternative to hegemonic institutions of knowledge production?
Centre Affiliations
By becoming an affiliated centre or organisation, you not only enjoy what individual members do; you also thereby support the formation of a working relationship.
Independent or autonomous research centres or non-profit community organisations can become affiliated with FAC research by selecting one of the suggested member rates and registering in the organisation’s name.
Research centres based at Universities with shared values can become affiliated with FAC research by making an online donation in the suggested range €500 – €2000.
An affiliation may lead to, for instance, the coordination of student exchanges or study trips; collaboration on research projects; co-development of educational programmes (e.g., online courses); or the co-organisation of conferences. We are happy to arrange a virtual meeting to discuss possible affiliations further.
The Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research is a registered urban non-profit organisation (tax registration no. 996857778) in Athens, Greece.