Awardees
Emma Goldman Snowball Award 2022
Adriana Zaharijević
Adriana Zaharijević is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. Her work combines political philosophy, feminist theory and social history. She is the author of three monographs in Serbian (Becoming a Woman [2010], Who Is an Individual? [2014, 2019], Life of Bodies [2020]), and her latest book, Judith Butler and Politics will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023. Her texts have been translated into Albanian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, and Ukrainian, and she has actively translated feminist theory and philosophy into Serbian for two decades. She regularly writes short pieces for a wider public, in which she tackles social inequalities, antinationalism and antimilitarism.
Adriana considers herself part of the vibrant post-Yugoslav feminist scene. She believes in the power of words, in making connections, producing translations of contexts and struggles, in crossing visible and invisible borders, in learning and sharing. She is guided by the belief that there is indeed a society, rather than merely individuals and their families.
https://ifdt.bg.ac.rs/index.php/dt_team/zaharijevic-adriana/?lang=en
Edna Martínez
Edna Martínez is a social and political activist from Colombia. She lives in Berlin and received her PhD in Sociology at the Free University of Berlin on the continuity of primitive accumulation, using as an example the oil palm industry in the territories of black communities on the border of Colombia and Ecuador. She was a fellow of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and her doctoral dissertation received the - ‘Young Researchers’ Award from Peter Lang Publishing House in 2016. Her postdoctoral work ‘Women's political subjectivity’ analyzes the motivations of peasant women to join the former FARC-EP guerrilla in Colombia. In Germany she worked with the organization Women in Exile and was co-founder and president of LAFI (Latin American Women's Initiative in Berlin). She is a reference for political analysis on Latin America, anti-racism and feminism in Germany. She is a boxing trainer, and uses ‘bexeo’ as a strategy to build community and empower women* BIPoC in Berlin.
* in fact she is writing a PhD on this.
Hannah Fitsch
Hannah Fitsch is a very committed critical neuroscience researcher, combining perseverance with a good way of knowing when the rules must be broken to realise solidarity in academic and activist feminism. This understanding refers to her long and various political activism in anti-fascist and feminist groups and creating networks, such as the network behindert und verrückt feiern - Pride Parade she has co-founded in Berlin 2015. Since 2010 she is a member of the internationally operating NeuroGenderings Network. In 2018 she co-founded the Network Museen queeren Berlin. She studied sociology, biopsychology and new media and earned her PhD at the Technische Universität Berlin on visibilities and sayabilities in functional magnetic resonance imaging. She just published her second book on mathematization of perception in computational neurosciences.
Hannah is a feminist sociologist of science and technology with a focus on neuroscience, (technology) museums, image knowledge/image practices, aesthetics, and feminist theory. In addition to her theoretical research, Hannah Fitsch is always looking for other formats of expression at the intersection of scientific and artistic practices, for example curating exhibitions in museums, dramaturgical counseling in theaters, and with own artistic works like video, audio and/ or visual works. With the award, referring to Emma Goldmanns political struggles, she wants to work on feminist and communist utopias in connection with technological conditions that would be needed for this, and what it is that makes people fight against sexism, racism and classism, and what are the hopes that keep us going. www.hannahfitsch.de
Inna Michaeli
Inna Michaeli is a feminist scholar, writer and activist, who works at the intersections of gender and sexual politics, economic inequalities, anti-colonial politics and migration. Her political writing is an original feminist voice on a range of pressing and contested social issues, from lesbian gender politics to antisemitism and Palestine.
Inna’s book ‘Women’s Economic Empowerment: Feminism, Neoliberalism, and the State’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) is based on her magna cum laude doctoral dissertation, from the Humboldt University of Berlin. It interrogates the complexities of women’s empowerment in political and economic contexts, national and global, that continue to disempower racialised and migrant women along the lines of gender, race, ethnicity and class.
Inna has started her activism two decades ago, when at the age of 17 she has moderated a LGBT+ youth online community. In 2004, she has co-founded a project of feminist and political education by and for migrant women. She is also a Board Member of the Jewish Voice for a Just Peace (Germany). Since 2022, Inna serves as Co-Executive Director at AWID, a global feminist organisation supporting feminist movements worldwide.
Inna is based in Berlin, Germany, raised in Haifa, Palestine/Israel, and born in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Maya De Leo
Maya De Leo (she/they) is nominated for her impressive work as both an academic and queer activist. Maya De Leo obtained her PhD in History at the University of Pisa with a multiple award winning thesis on the representations of homosexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her research interests focus on the cultural history of LGBTQIA+ communities and queer theories. On these topics she has published numerous contributions in scientific journals and collective volumes. She has taught Gender History at the University of Genova and History of Homosexuality at the University of Turin. In 2018, the opening of this course - the first of its kind in Italy - has faced brutal attacks by right-wing political groups. Her recent book, Queer. Storia culturale della comunità LGBT+ (Einaudi, 2021) has been a huge publishing success and has been awarded the 2022 SISSCO prize for best first work by the Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History. While Italy is a country still strongly marked by sexism, homophobia, lesbophobia, biphobia and transphobia, Maya De Leo's work has become a vital reference point for LGBTQIA+ people.
Sandrine Bergès
Sandrine Bergès is a French philosopher who has worked for many years at the University of Bilkent in Turkey (http://www.phil.bilkent.edu.tr/index.php/sandrine-berges/ )where she teaches feminist philosophy. That the circumstances for humanist/ atheist philosophers to do work in Turkey become increasingly difficult needs no further explanation. She does both history of philosophy, and contemporary political philosophy, and in both advances feminist topics as well as uncovering the work of female philosophers. She made female (some feminist, some not) philosophers more visible, by writing articles on their work, and also, in the case of Sophie de Grouchy published the first French-English annotated translation of her Letters on Sympathy (her husband Marquis de Condorcet is very well-known among those studying voting systems and collective decision making, but the very interesting contribution that de Grouchy made has been totally neglected, one does not need to wonder why…)
In terms of ‘academic activism’, she is an active member of Project Vox and the Extending New Narratives Project - international groups striving to reintroduce important texts by women philosophers into teaching and research. In addition, she is the co-founder of the Turkish-European Network for the Study of Women Philosophers and of SWIP-TR (SWIP is the Society for Women in Philosophy, which has chapters in a number of countries, and this is the Turkish chapter).
On her personal website - http://www.sandrineberges.com/ - you can find research blogs, but also her art work on female and feminist historical philosophers, including a freely downloadable yearly calendar.
Zarina Ahmad
Zarina Ahmad is a feminist climate change and race equality activist, based in Scotland & England. She has worked with a range of organisations in the UK. For over ten years, Zarina has worked to involve minority ethnic women in knowledge building and policy influencing around climate change agendas in Scotland and England, challenging assumptions in government that ‘ethnic minority communities aren’t interested’. Zarina pushes environmental groups to take an intersectional perspective, and she pushes women’s and intersectional organisations to engage with climate change.
In her own activism, Zarina facilitates minority ethnic women in generating climate change solutions using participative approaches and an intersectional analysis, and building on existing multi-generational and cultural knowledge on sustainability and global justice within their communities[1]. This type of work is hardly facilitated or researched, as most funding is project-focused, is linked to ‘ready-made policy solutions’ and does not ensure that community knowledge is used. In contrast, Zarina has long standing experience in engaging with communities that white dominated organisations have difficulty reaching and she is deeply committed both to building the capacities of other activists and to elevating the status attributed to knowledge present in minority ethnic communities which has led to Zarina’s PhD at University of Manchester. Zarina has also run a leadership academy for minority ethnic women, building the confidence and skills of minority ethnic women to engage with climate change debates using creative methods such as visual art and creative computer simulations.
With all this, Zarina makes a unique contribution to knowledge, capacity building and policy influencing on climate change agendas in and beyond Scotland.
https://www.wen.org.uk/2020/05/18/interviewwithzarinaahmad/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarina_Ahmad