Cities and urban forms are not neutral spaces.They reproduce patriarchal and colonial spatial relations (Hayden, 1995; Simpson, 2011; Pojani et al., 2018). But they are also sites of resistance and reimagination. Collective urban action and feminist alliances create spaces to challenge social and spatial oppressions.
How do feminist identities emerge through the intervention in the urban space? I investigate the ways a selected number of European feminist-urban groups understand and express feminism in their cities.
How do these groups construct feminist practices and discourses? I analyse how feminist practices and discourses are built to challenge and change urban spaces. Feminist practices are political acts with the purpose of defying the status quo and relations of power (Gottfried and Moss in Brown, 2011).

I expect to deepen the understanding of heterogeneity and fluidity within feminism and feminist identities. By considering the interplay between the individual and collective level. Thus, the contemporary urban arena allows for a layered reflection on critical spatial and feminist practices.

Conducting research in the field of feminist urbanism requires a multidimensional approach both in the theory and methodologies. In my qualitative research I adopt semi-structured interviews to explore individual and collective feminist identities; practices. Online and offline ethnographic observation to analyse practices and discourses. Then, feminist frame analysis to deconstruct the relationality of collective identities.

Feminist urban bottom-up groups contest the hierarchy of academic production of knowledge. They highlight the interconnection between praxis and theory. Participatory methods such as exploratory walks, collective mapping, and urban co-design, are fundamental in their work. These groups recognize how women, vulnerable subjectivities, and minorities construct knowledge about their cities.

Feminist approaches to urban design explore how women’s identities shape their use of urban environments, and how the design of cities and commodities can better accommodate people’s needs. How we use urban environments can be constraining when our experiences reinforce discrimination and oppression, but they can also represent sites for rebellion. The incorporation of a gender perspective in urban planning allows the different facets of people’s everyday life to be prioritised and planned for.

Recognizing how the built environment is a socio-political product allows us to acknowledge and fight interconnected oppressions. I anchor my research in decolonial and intersectional feminism. Grounded in feminist urbanism, where gender and social reproduction play a key role in capitalist neoliberal cities, I apply a critical understanding to the right to the city and to occupying urbanscapes.

In the twenty-first century, EU institutions increasingly champion human rights as a fundamental European value, with LGBT in particular taking on a central role in both intra-Union and accession politics. This symbolic LGBT rights-Europe association has led many conservative actors to presume or claim a natural confluence of interests between LGBT movements and Europe which is inherently anti-national. This chain of equivalences—between Western Europe, EU politics, LGBT rights, and social change—is weaponised to divorce LGBT people from the interests of the national community by positioning LGBT issues either as elite, foreign or in competition with the rights and privileges of majorities. This essentialisation of LGBT people and movements within the artificial binary of national or European identification obscures the myriad attachments and ambivalences that LGBT people hold, at multiple levels and with varying intensity. And yet, discussion of belonging—particularly in the Balkan context—continues to be framed within or around the nation-Europe binary, and there has been little investigation into how movements interpret these associations, negotiate belonging amidst them, or how belonging is or can be instrumentalised as a tool for equality (or liberation). This study begins to bridge this gap by exploration the negotiation of belonging within LGBT movements in the Balkans, focusing on movements centred in Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia. Drawing from a variety of literatures and their critiques of identarian LGBT politics, I conclude that queer and decolonial insights have transformative potentials for the study of belonging. Exploring these negotiation processes has the potential to yield new insight into how LGBT movements negotiate belonging and how belonging informs collective action.
I explore the negotiation of belonging through a theoretically and ontologically relational approach which is grounded in the fundamental inter-constructedness of actors, meaning that belonging is never singularly constructed or negotiated but, rather, is a collective process that occurs within multiple, overlapping relational dynamics across space and time. To better understand these dynamics while also centring the knowledge of local actors, I employ a relational comparative research design which incorporates an action research methodology. Within this design, I draw on a variety of methods which work synthetically to address both the negotiation of belonging and its (potential) utilisations within activist contexts. This paper explores these dynamics as they occured during my PhD dissertation fieldwork in North Macedonia and Montenegro.

Over the past two decades European institutions’ decisions in matters of sexuality have redefined the articulation between democracy and liberalism. On the one hand, European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) jurisprudence has taken liberalism to its extreme by upholding the rights of children over the rights of their parents, i.e. that the freedom of each individual should not be curtailed even by those who act on his/her behalf as legal guardians (ECtHR, 2011); while, on the other hand, European Parliament and European Commission resolutions have established that the very definition of democracy includes unrestricted respect for sexual minorities and for the sexual freedom of each individual.
While contemporary trends indicate that the sexual rights of LGBTIQ populations are increasingly recognised by liberal democracies (Sabsay, 2016), not all democracies follow this trend. Within both Europe's coexisting legal orders, that of the European Union (27 states) and that of the Council of Europe (46 states), transnational institutions have intervened to define how liberal democracy is to be interpreted. So that in court cases against Russia, for example, two visions of democracy have been set against each other: Russia defends an illiberal democracy that regulates and imposes the dominant values of a majority, adopting a conservative democratic model (ECtHR, 2017). Whereas European institutions, on the other hand, defend a liberal democratic model in which each individual, in his/her specificity as a gendered and sexual being, can develop his/her life even against collective norms, promoting a model that guarantees individual freedoms.
Based on a detailed documental and empirical examination of various sources, this presentation examines the fields of justice (ECtHR case law), legislative (European Parliament archives), and public policy (European Commission archives) regarding democracy and liberalism. I will present the most recent results of my postdoctoral research on European institutions (Marie Curie Fellowship) articulating a comparative law approach and a governmentality perspective on gender and sexual politics. One of this presentation contributions lies in the study of European institutions interventions on sexual democracy issues through different kind of regulations revealing symptoms of major transformations in European societies.
References:
ECtHR, 2011, Case of Dojan and Others v. Germany, (Application no. 319/08), Strasbourg.
ECtHR, 2017, Case of Bayev and Others v. Russia, (Applications nos. 67667/09 and 2 others), Strasbourg.
Sabsay, Leticia. The Political Imaginary of Sexual Freedom: Subjectivity and Power in the New Sexual Democratic Turn. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.