Maria do Mar Pereira

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Seminar Leader, Gi400

Profile

Maria is a doctoral student and seminar leader at the Gender Institute.

She holds an MSc in Sociology from the Lisbon University Institute (ISCTE-IUL), for which she undertook an ethnographic study of the negotiation of gender among teenagers in a school in Lisbon. Her current work analyses the epistemic status of women's, gender, feminist studies in Portugal. She has also published on, and presented conference papers about, feminist epistemologies and methodologies, masculinities and fatherhood, young women's participation in social and political decision-making, and issues of language difference and translation in social science research.

She has guest lectured at undergraduate and graduate level at several universities in Portugal and the UK, and was also a lecturer for "Practising Interdisciplinarity in European Gender Studies", a team-taught intensive graduate summer school co-organised by six European universities.
She maintains an active involvement in feminist movements at local and international, grassroots and policy levels, having coordinated a number of awareness raising projects aimed at young people and been a member of the executive committee of various Portuguese and European non-governmental organisations.

Current Research

Thesis title: The Epistemic Status of Women's, Gender, Feminist Studies

Maria's current work examines the epistemic status of women's, gender, feminist studies (WGFS), i.e. the degree to which knowledge produced in WGFS is recognised as valid, relevant and authoritative in specific academic communities. Her PhD is an ethnographic analysis of the epistemic status of WGFS in Portugal, and its continuous negotiation in the multiple practices and sites of academic work. It looks at WGFS as an object of collective struggles over the definition (and the power to define) what counts, and can/should therefore be funded, certified and included in degree programmes, as "proper" academic knowledge. Using a combination of qualitative methods, it aims to map these struggles by characterising their protagonists and the sites where they take place, the resources deployed in them and their effects on research and teaching. It focuses on Portugal because as a site where WGFS has been growing and changing significantly in recent years, issues of epistemic status are currently very central and explicitly addressed in several (con)texts. Through her doctoral research, Maria hopes to make useful contributions to transnational debates about the institutionalisation of WGFS and about the politics of knowledge production and legitimation.

Selected Publications

Monographs

Pereira, Maria do Mar (forthcoming), Fazendo Género no Recreio: uma Etnografia da Negociação do Género na Escola (Doing Gender in the Playground: an Ethnography of the Negotiation of Gender in Schools), Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais.

Book Chapters

Pereira, Maria do Mar (forthcoming), "Os Discursos de Género: Mudança e Continuidade nas Narrativas sobre Diferenças, Semelhanças e (Des)Igualdade entre Mulheres e Homens" ("Discourses of Gender: Change and Continuity in Men's Narratives about Differences, Similarities and (In)Equality between Women and Men") in Sofia Aboim and Karin Wall (eds.), A Vida Familiar no Masculino: Novos Papéis, Novas Identidades, Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais.

Editorial Work

Pereira, Maria do Mar; Marhia, Natasha and Scharff, Christina (eds.) (forthcoming), Special Issue "Lost (and Found) in Translation", Graduate Journal of Social Science, 6 (2).
Pereira, Maria do Mar and Joaquim, Teresa (eds.) (2009), "Dossier: Women's Studies, Gender Studies, Feminist Studies in Portugal", The Making of European Women's Studies, IX.

Articles in Journals

Pereira, Maria do Mar (forthcoming), "Fazendo Género na Escola: uma Análise Performativa da Negociação do Género entre Jovens" ("Doing Gender in School: a Performative Analysis of the Negotiation of Gender among Young People"), ex aequo, 20.
Marhia, Natasha; Pereira, Maria do Mar, and Scharff, Christina (forthcoming), "Thinking through Language Difference and Translation in Social Science Research: an Interdisciplinary Approach", Graduate Journal of Social Science, 6 (2).
Pereira, Maria do Mar and Joaquim, Teresa (2009), "Women's, Gender, Feminist Studies in Portugal - Tracing Recent Changes, Challenges and Debates", The Making of European Women's Studies, IX.
Pereira, Maria do Mar (2008), "The Epistemic Status of Women's, Gender, Feminist Studies: Notes for Analysis", The Making of European Women's Studies, VIII.

Contact Details:

Office hours: Monday, 11.20 - 12.20, room H213, Connaught House
m.e.pereira@lse.ac.uk
0207 955 6442 (outside office hour)
0207 955 6972 (during office hour)