The Long March Through the Patriarchal Institutions: A Dialogue Between Rosi Braidotti and Nina Lykke

Abstract

The dialogue between Rosi Braidotti and Nina Lykke took place at Aarhus University in Denmark in September 2018. The event was organised by the Gendering in Research Network and the three editors of the special issue of Women, Gender and Research called Feminist STS at Work 1 (Adrian, Skewes and Schwennesen, 2018). In this special issue, Lykke featured with an interview about how her academic career had been entangled with her activist intentions of rethinking knowledge production and epistemology (Skewes and Adrian, 2018). We invited yet another inspirational activist and feminist researcher, Braidotti to join in the reflections about her experiences with the long march through the patriarchal institutions.Braidotti and Lykke have collaborated in multiple ways throughout their careers. Together they edited Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs (1996). They have also been among the driving forces in a multitude of key feminist research and teaching networks in Europe, such as the European feminist curriculum development organisation Athena, which grew into the European Association for Feminist Research and Teaching At Gender (https://atgender.eu/), as well as the Noise Summer School (https://graduategenderstudies.nl/education/noisesummer-school/), gathering feminist students for summer schools annually since 1994. Furthermore, they have collaborated within the framework of a Marie Curie network for feminist PhD education GENDERGRADUATES. All of these networks and collaborations across disciplines, universities and countries illustrate their passionate desire to establish a solid basis for feminist researchers.Braidotti and Lykke are close friends. Their academic careers have in different ways been dedicated to the struggle to expand the fragile spaces of academia's interdisciplinary feminist borderlands and included transgression of national borders. Both are openly married lesbians, Lykke widowed since 2014.Braidotti describes herself as having led a nomadic life-born in Italy, growing up as a migrant in Australia, only to move to Paris in order to complete her PhD and start her academic work in the Paris campus of Columbia 1 The event was made possible through funding from Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University and the Danish feminist journal, Women, Gender and Research.