Today was the official launching of the first Interdisciplinary Research Nucleus in Gender Studies at the Central University, which will be directed by researchers from the Faculty of Economics, Government and Communications and its Max Planck Research Group in Economics and Society.
“Gender autonomies: employability, migrations and youth” (NIAG) is the name of the initiative that will be led by Dr. Paz Concha, Dr. Neida Colmenares will be deputy director of the space, while Dr. Gabriela Zapata will be one of the researchers, all three members of our faculty. Dr. Marcela Betancourt, who is part of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Universidad de Chile, also joins the core group.
Dr. Concha explained that the objectives of the lines of research and a road map for the next two years have already been defined. “As a nucleus we have proposed an active work, in the first instance academic, which is to develop a collaborative and interdisciplinary research space that is of excellence and that borders the subjects of the challenge in gender and sexogenic autonomy in the themes that we have defined, employability, migrations and youth,” he commented.
He added that the aim is also to “form a collaborative network between academics and academics from different faculties, that is, to be able to work collaboratively together, and once the lines of research have been established in a second year, to generate an information network with a general cross-cutting information course on the general perspective of the university (…) With the aim of creating a legacy that our research work can leave behind”.
She also mentioned that “we want to think of autonomy in a more comprehensive way, as a condition that allows us to overcome the elements of gender subordination in which we now find ourselves, and with respect to the lines of work, we have this one”.
The initiative will have three lines of work: the first will focus on the study of employability and its relationship with gender economic autonomies, such as the labor insertion of women in the post-pandemic scenario; the second will be centered on migrations and will seek to analyze the institutional conditions that favor and hinder the labor insertion processes of migrant and refugee women in Chile; while the third will observe the field of youth with the purpose of revealing the counter-hegemonic conceptions linked to the experiential meanings of the concept of youth.
