Irina Schmitt

Background

My research explores power relations and experiences of the intersections of gender, sex and sexuality with ideas of national attribution and belonging. How can we understand the powerful negotiations of gender, sex and sexuality that we see in our societies? What are resistances to lives, bodies and expressions that challenge the norms, and how are spaces created in the present and future for these lives? Theoretically, I anchor these questions in critical trans- and queer-feminist theories and trans- and queer-feminist education research. From these stem also important methodological and research ethics intervention, which engage the methodological knowledge production so central to gender studies. Empirically, I place my research in organizations where knowledge is produced and the national is inscribed, such as schools and universities. In this work I also learn from post- and de-colonial, anti-racist and crip knowledge production.

These research questions also speak to my interest in teaching and feminist pedagogies, and my teaching and research inspire each other. This interrelation has existed and deepened since I completed my PhD in 2007 at the University of Bremen, Germany, with a dissertation on young people's negotiations of national belonging in schools in Germany and Canada. I came to the Department of Gender Studies as a postdoctoral researcher in 2008. In October 2010, I was a Visiting Associate Professor at the Centre for Women and Gender Studies, University of British Columbia. In 2011, I was hired as associate senior lecturer at the department, and in 2015 I was hired as senior lecturer. From 2011-2014 I held the position of Director of undergraduate studies in the department. Currently, I am program coordinator for the Bachelor's program in Gender Studies, and deputy teacher representative at the Department of Gender Studies' board.

Research areas

• Queer-feminist studies and theories
• Trans-feminist studies and theories
• Feminist, queer feminist and transfeminist methodologies and methods
• Justice, law, nation
• Justice and LGBTQIA+ in schools and academia
• Feminist pedagogies

Ongoing research and teaching

Through various research projects, I have explored negotiations of national belonging, children with LGBTI+ parents and their experiences at school in a European collaborative project, equality work in academia and strategies for LGBTI+ and queer justice work in schools.

In my latest project, I investigate how young people and young adults who are transgender and non-binary negotiate their identity with the normative, nationally coded expectations in schools. What do they experience as supportive and what support would they have expected? The participants' analysis of school highlights both concrete situations and overall structures where school is not reliable, as well as classrooms and schools that actively work cisnorm-critically. The study, which is the first of its kind in the Swedish context, contributes to the growing field of trans_intersex research in Sweden, and to international trans- and queer-feminist education research. The study clearly shows that gender identity is negotiated intersectionally in school and that cisnormativity is co-produced with not least racism, and norms of class and ability in school's expectations of cisnormative purity. The project was funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Together with Maja Sager, I am the editor of the Swedish Journal of Gender Studies (Tidskrift för genusvetenskap), one of the oldest and largest peer-reviewed journals in the Nordic region for current interdisciplinary research across the entire field of gender studies.

Teaching

I teach, develop courses, coordinate courses and supervise theses together with colleagues in the Department of Gender Studies' courses and programs at undergraduate and master's level, and also the Faculty of Social Sciences' international master's program Social Studies of Gender. In my teaching I focus on feminist theories and methodologies, feminist knowledge production and social negotiations of justice. I am also the co-supervisor of a doctoral student.

Together with colleagues from different departments, I have developed and teach the course Gender and Diversity in Learning and Teaching in the Faculty of Social Sciences' higher education pedagogical program, and give lectures on justice work in academia.

I am a member of LGBTQ-LU, the LGBTQ network for employees at Lund University.