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- Svensson, Emma M., 1979-, et al.
(author)
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Coat colour and sex identification in horses from Iron Age Sweden
- 2012
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In: Annals of Anatomy. - : Elsevier BV. - 0940-9602 .- 1618-0402. ; 194:1, s. 82-87
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Domestication of animals and plants marked a turning point in human prehistory. To date archaeology, archaeozoology and genetics have shed light on when and where all of our major livestock species were domesticated. Phenotypic changes associated with domestication have occurred in all farm animals. Coat colour is one of the traits that have been subjected to the strongest human selection throughout history. Here we use genotyping of coat colour SNPs in horses to investigate whether there were any regional differences or preferences for specific colours associated with specific cultural traditions in Iron Age Sweden. We do this by identifying the sex and coat colour of horses sacrificed at Skedemosse, Oland (Sweden) during the Iron Age, as well as in horses from two sites in Uppland, Ultuna and Valsgarde (dated to late Iron Age). We show that bay, black and chestnut colours were all common and two horses with tobiano spotting were found. We also show how the combination of sex identification with genotyping of just a few SNPs underlying the basic coat colours can be used to identify the minimum number of individuals at a site on a higher level than morphological methods alone. Although separated by 500 km and from significantly different archaeological contexts the horses at Skedemosse and Ultuna are quite homogenous when it comes to coat colour phenotypes, indicating that there were no clear geographical variation in coat colouration in Sweden during the late Iron Age and early Viking Age.
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- Sundkvist, Emma, Högskolelektor
(author)
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Feminism during social and political repression in Egypt : making or breaking resistance through legal activism
- 2018
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In: Gender in Human Rights and Transitional Justice. - Cham : Palgrave Macmillan. ; , s. 17-43
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Scholarly work on feminists’ use of law reveals a complex reality where social and political domains, practices, and institutions are at play. Law as an instrument for improving gender justice is also the arena where obstacles to achieving greater gender equality remain (Cornwall & Molyneux, Third World Quarterly, 27(7), 1175–1191, 2006). Feminist scholars have debated law’s role within feminist activism concerning questions of identity politics, conditioned citizenships, and the state’s role. In recent years, influential feminists have criticized the role of law in feminist projects and argued that feminists should shift focus from the identity project (Hekman, Feminist Theory, 1(3), 289–308, 2000; Lloyd, Beyond identity politics: Feminism, power & politics. SAGE, London, 2005; Zerilli, Feminism and the abyss of freedom. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005) and legal activism (Brown, States of injury: Power and freedom in late modernity. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1995; Brown & Halley, Left legalism/left critique. Duke University Press, Durham, 2002; Butler, Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge, New York, 2006; Halley, Split decisions: How and why to take a break from feminism. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2006) to other forms of activism outside of state institutions and the legal apparatus. Their claim is that as law is not a neutral instrument, legal activism has a cost to other projects for political change. While these ideas could be argued to be relevant only in the context of liberal democracies, theories of law, rights, and legal activism should also be applicable to the idea of human rights and human rights activism, which are pressing issues in non-democratic societies where human rights abuses are common. How, then, does this critique of feminist legal activism play out in repressive states and less-open societies where the public space is strictly regulated and controlled? Can the relationship between law and politics be asserted in the same way in all different societies or does legal activism have different outcomes depending on the political context? These questions are explored in this chapter by drawing from fieldwork and interviews with Egyptian feminist activists and their struggle for political and social change.
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- Sundkvist, Emma, Högskolelektor
(author)
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Human rights as law, language, and space-making : women’s rights movement in post-revolutionary Egypt
- 2022
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation analyses feminist activists’ use of human rights in post-revolutionary Egypt from 2011 to 2019. Drawing on interviews with feminist activists under three fieldwork trips, the dissertation investigates how: activists tried to implement gender equality in the country’s new constitutions, navigated the shrinking public space after 2013, sustained their activism against sexual violence despite a fragmented movement and repressive politics, and how we can understand contentious streets activism against sexual violence from a human rights perspective. The overarching question is how activists pursue human rights activism in a post-revolutionary setting, focusing on what function human rights are given in a context of some opportunities but also growing constraints. To answer that question, the dissertation develops a three-dimensional framework that conceptualises human rights as law, language, and space-making. The dissertation thereby contributes to theories of human rights activism as well as research on women’s rights activism in post-2011 Egypt. The three-dimensional framework helps to capture and analyse how human rights – whether used as law, language, or space-making – challenge different societal and political aspects of women’s rights.The findings and arguments draw primarily on semi-structured and in-depth interviews conducted under fieldwork trips in 2013, 2015, and 2019. The study also involves ethnographic observations and text analysis. The analysis of these source materials is based on the ontological position that to know what human rights are, we need to explore how activists use human rights and the ways in which they navigate their political surrounding. This position invites scholars to avoid applying pre-defined understandings of human rights and instead investigate how certain political conditions facilitate different modes of activism and what meanings and functions human rights acquire in them.The thesis comprises four original articles. Article 1 concerns the drafting of two Egyptian constitutions after 2011 and how feminist activists attempted to integrate gender equality into different versions. The article argues that while activists used international human rights principles and a feminist definition of equality as their starting points, they also had to navigate the politics of the Egyptian constitution-making process to find resonance within their communities. Article 2 analyses the period after 2013, a period when the Egyptian political landscape became more oppressive under the rule of President Abd el Fattah el-Sisi. This article focuses on how activists pursued human rights advocacy during such conditions. It argues that, in a context where mobilization and activism for human rights are restricted, legal activism may have means and implications other than reinforcing state power. Article 3 concerns how young feminists try to sustain their activism, especially in their work against sexual violence, which became rather fragmented in the decade since the revolution. The empirical material comes from 2019, a point at which women’s rights were integrated with revolutionary memories and emotions and gained a function of keeping the feminist struggle alive. The final Article 4 analyses the movement against widespread sexual violence in the turbulent political landscape from 2011 to 2013. By developing the concept of human rights as space-making, this article reveals how activism for women’s right to bodily integrity transformed into a movement that claimed women’s rights to reconstitute the preconditions for Egyptian politics.
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- Sundkvist, Emma
(author)
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Human Rights as Space-Making : Bodily Performative Activism Against Sexual Violence in Egypt
- 2023
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In: Nordic Journal of Human Rights. - 1891-8131 .- 1891-814X. ; 41:2, s. 133-150
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article introduces the concept of space-making as a form of human rights activism. To develop the concept, I use the example of contentious street activism against sexual violence in post-2011 Egypt. My research has found that feminist activists utilised human rights as a legal tool for improving legislation and policy and as a linguistic strategy to challenge derogatory discourse. Using human rights in these two ways required that activists identify violations of rights and articulate their demands. Yet the contentious street activism in Egypt against sexual violence did not contain verbal utterances, so it cannot be captured through these two dimensions of human rights. In this article, I explore how to capture and analyse activism that sits within a human rights framework, but which is devoid of specific rights claims or clarified motives, where the focus seems instead to be on the public space. By engaging with theories of performativity, vulnerability, rights claiming, and subjectivisation, I argue that through modes of activism against sexual violence that take the form of performative bodily enactments of space, people convert themselves into the human rights subjects they are told they cannot be.
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- Sundkvist, Emma, et al.
(author)
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Konstitutionen som politisk arena : Feministers kamp om jämlikhet i det ”nya” Egypten
- 2018. - 1
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In: Mänskliga rättigheter i samhället. - 9789186980702 ; , s. 127-148
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Book chapter (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Det här kapitlet handlar om egyptiska kvinnorättsaktivister och deras arbete med att påverka Egyptens nya konstitution efter revolutionen 2011. Aktivisternas mål var att stärka kvinnors konstitutionella rättigheter och det försökte man nå genom att etablera en arbetsgrupp som på nära håll följde konstitutionsprocessen. I kapitlet analyseras dessa aktivisters kritik av utkasten till konstitutionen och deras förslag på alternativ. Kapitlet visar att det till stor del kom att handla om vilken jämlikhetsmodell som implementerades i konstitutionstexten. Aktivisterna erkände att jämlikhet kan genom fel definition lika gärna förvärra kvinnors rättigheter som att förbättra dem. Utifrån den egyptiska kontexten sökte därför aktivisterna en definition som erkände att grupper av människor är hierarkiskt strukturerade vilket kräver en kompenserande och jämförande förståelse av jämlikhet.
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- Sundkvist, Emma
(author)
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Making or breaking resistance : Women's rights activism in contemporary Egypt
- 2016
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The last five years of unfolding political unrest in Egypt and beyond has urged research to explore activism beyond civil society and NGO-work in the region. This has generated a turn towards social movement theory (SMT) which has revealed both the limits and possibilities of SMT when applied to different sites of the Arab world (Akder 2013, Durac 2015, Tadros 2011). While the dominant focus has been to understand how and why the uprisings occurred, this paper takes the opportunity to explore the particular context in Egypt five years later in the light of this theoretical shift. While completing fieldwork with young feminist activists in Cairo, from both traditional NGO’s and other politically driven groups, their perception of the political and their respective activities challenged the imagined divide between civil society and other forms of political resistance. If civil society is framed as in rights claims against a state, meaning that the idea of the state is as a right provider, other forms of activism can be viewed as “space making” of rights outside the state. In order to comprehend and explain how resistance is framed and pursued in authoritarian regimes, this paper will discuss the theoretical concepts of the state, the political and human rights in relation to resistance. This debate draws on critique and development of Hannah Arendt’s perception of the political as a space full of indeterminate and inherently unending struggles and the ultimate meaning of freedom. How we perceive and understand the state, the political and human rights also set the contours of how we define the civil society, other forms of activism and the imagined boundaries between the two. Following an outline of the concepts, the paper will relate these to the feminist critique of feminist legal activism that have been argued counterproductive because it cements state dependency and identity boundaries (Brown 1995, Lloyd 2005 , Zerelli 2005). This critique often results in a call for action beyond law. The adherent issue to this plea is to under specific conditions produce a political consciousness with the potential to pursue this alternative project (McNay 2010). I will argue that in a context where the voice of resistance is urgent and the public space is shrinking, law and legal institutions are often the remaining space for creating a limited yet existing arena within which activists can sustain public discussions of gender related issues.
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- Sundkvist, Emma, Högskolelektor
(author)
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Navigating Human Rights, Feminism, and History : Egyptian Feminist Activists’ Demands for Constitutional Equality, 2012–2014
- 2022
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In: Social Politics. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 1072-4745 .- 1468-2893. ; 30:1, s. 47-68
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article analyzes the efforts of Egyptian feminist activists to insert gender equality in the country’s post-revolutionary constitutions in 2012 and 2014. While the literature on women’s political role during this period provides insights into exclusionary gender practices and conditions for bargaining power structures, this study contributes with a conceptual analysis of how feminist activists construed constitutional gender equality. The study is based on interviews with, and written statements by, activists engaged in the constitutional process. The article argues that these activists viewed the constitution as a central instrument in the struggle for gender equality and demanded a gender equality model beyond the sameness/difference paradigm. Instead, they argued for a substantive notion of gender equality that reflected women’s situated experiences while they, at the same time, navigated the legacies of Egypt’s earlier constitutions.
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- Sundkvist, Emma
(author)
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Sustaining Motivation : post-revolutionary oppositional consciousness among young Egyptian feminists
- 2023
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In: The Journal of North African Studies. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1362-9387 .- 1743-9345. ; 28:2, s. 269-293
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Activism against sexual violence was one of the Egyptian Revolution’s most significant mobilising forces, but the country’s return to authoritarian rule has circumvented possibilities for organising and carrying out political resistance, including activism against sexual harassment. This article shows that despite this political oppression, young feminists continue to raise their voices and organise against the continuing problem of sexual violence. To illustrate this, the article draws on interviews considering a recent controversy surrounding allegations of sexual violence within the Egyptian political party Bread and Freedom. Interviewees describe that instead of receiving support in their criticism of the party’s handling of the accusations, they were criticised by feminist and human rights activists, creating serious fragmentation among earlier united activists. The analysis shows that when young feminists saw former allies abandon the movement’s previously formulated objectives against sexual violence, their collective memory of past achievements bolstered their conviction that they should compromise neither on the definition of sexual violence nor on the ways to confront it. In fact, their careful adherence to the activism’s past principles and efforts serves as a mechanism for sustaining continuity in their feminist movement even as the political climate circumscribes opportunities for activism.
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