Gloria Wekker, White Innocence in the Academy

This talk will address different ways in which the coloniality of knowledge goes unnoticed and is thus still present in The Dutch academy, including in the disciplines of History and in Gender Studies.

October 21, 2016 | 09:30am, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra

Gloria Wekker is emeritus Professor in Gender Studies, Faculty of the Humanities, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. A social and cultural anthropologist (MA, University of Amsterdam 1981, PhD, UCLA 1992), she specializes in Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, African- American and Caribbean Studies.

Some of her major publications include The Politics of Passion; Women´s sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (Columbia University Press, 2006), for which she won the Ruth Benedict Prize of American Anthropological Association in 2007. Her last book is White Innocence; Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race, which was published in April 2016 by Duke University Press.

Her research themes are: constructions of sexual subjectivity in the Black Diaspora; gendered and racialized knowledge systems in the Dutch academy and society; and the history of the Black, migrant and refugee women’s movement in the Netherlands.

Wekker is on the board of several international journals in the fields of Gender Studies, Gay/ Lesbian and Queer Studies and Critical Race Studies. She served as an advisor to the Dutch government in the fields of ethnic minority policy, health issues and women’s emancipation policy. She also is a poet and activist.

Currently (2015 – 2016) she serves on two committees that are to make proposals to restructure the University of Amsterdam, after the Occupation of the Maagdenhuis: The committee on Democratization and Decentralization (D &D) and she is the chair of the Diversity committee.