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This study argues for recognition of the constitutive role of context in shaping the dynamics of the policy-practice interface in the field of gender equality in universities. Using a comparative and reflective case-study approach, we draw on our experiences, as action-researchers, of developing and implementing Gender Equality Action Plans (GEAPs) in four universities in four different European countries and we explore the role of national and local context in the mediation and translation of the GEAP model. Drawing on the concepts of gendered organizations, dialogic organizational change, and policy mobilities, we argue for the need to be critical of approaches to gender equality in higher education (HE) that presume policy measures and good practice models transfer unproblematically to different HE organizations in different international contexts; instead, we draw attention to the contingent ways in which uneven gender relations articulate and manifest in different contexts, shaping possibilities for, and obstacles to, gender equality intervention. Thus, we argue that context plays a crucial constitutive role in the interpretation, enactment, and impact of gender equality policy in HE.

There is no all-in-one solution : The challenges of inclusive and sustainable innovation processes

Scholars have noted that there is hesitation to utilise findings from gender studies in engineering education. Issues within gender studies may be part of the matching problem. Debates concerning t ...

This research note deals with an innovation initiative involving women, reindeer herding and the Internet. It shows how women reindeer herders from a Swedish Sami village were a driving force in the development of several innovative, EU-funded projects focusing on information and communications technology. The article shows how the innovation initiative involved a wide range of actors, ascribing stakeholders from civil society important roles besides the public and private sectors. The innovation initiative involved several different strategies. One of these strategies was internationalization – both at the European and worldwide levels. This strategy was employed to prevent rigid political hierarchies blocking the prospects of gaining support from local and regional authorities. Another strategy was the continuous exchange of knowledge between engineers and potential end users, adapting the initiative results to the needs of the local context. As a result, the innovation initiative has produced several k...

Synopsis The article states that in order to be meaningful gender studies in engineering need to conceptualize feminist understandings into the web of routines created and maintained in engineering practice. Its theme is the area in-between laboratory settings and human–machine interfaces. This huge area includes civil engineering, energy production, mechanical engineering and more, but has hardly been addressed in feminist writing on technology. The works of Evelyn Fox Keller and Karen Barad are investigated. Their respective approaches to language differ, as do their stances with regards to the possibility of universal knowledge. As an experiment, agential realism is applied to a fictive case of a collapsing structure, and found to make sense as feminist conceptualization of such an event. But engineering takes place in complex and disruptive processes that produce situated experience. Therefore, feminist concepts of embodiment and plurality remain crucial. The author recommends a located realism.

The N4C project was funded by the European Union Seventh framework programme’s Future Internet Research and Experimentation unit and closed in May 2011. Its focus was communications for highly challenging scenarios, with sparse populations in remote and topographically complex areas. In this note the organization and work plan are summarized, together with some observations at detailed level. Combining front line technical research and development with socio-economic goals is a matter of several dimensions. The results confirmed the hypotheses that co-operating with actors in rural areas, targeting specifically challenging use situations can function as a driver for high-tech development.

From a distance, the Sámi Network Connectivity initiative (SNC) does not necessarily appear as anything but another technical research project with certain science-fiction (sci-fi) connotations. It is aimed to create Internet connectivity for communications-challenged terrestrial settings using a protocol currently being developed for communications in space. However, while being a highly technical project, SNC emerged from an unexpected setting: an Indigenous women’s initiative to save their traditional livelihood from threats of social and economic drain and to create better opportunities for women and youth to remain within the traditional community. The first step towards the formation of SNC was taken in June 2001 when a group of women reindeer herders in Sirges Sámi Village in Jokkmokk, Norrbotten County in northern Sweden decided to start a gender equality project, Kvinna i sameby (KIS).1 To the Sámi, reindeer herding serves not only as an economic base but also as a foundation for reproduction of cultural values. Already in the KIS planning stage, Susanne Spik, the project leader, contacted the Division for Gender and Technology at Luleå University of Technology (LTU) to invite scientific assistance from the early stage of the project. LTU is the regional technical university for northern Sweden and is situated in the Norrbotten County capital of Luleå 200 km southeast of Jokkmokk. Promoting women’s possibilities to remain in reindeer herding and the traditional Sámi community, especially social and technical conditions for work and business development, were the focus in the discussions. An associated but separately funded project was subsequently formed by LTU researcher Maria Udén. A solution to the project requirements came from a guest researcher at the computer science department, Avri Doria, an Internet systems architect. In spring 2002, after initial discussions with members of the Interplanetary Networking Research Group (IPNRG) at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, she contributed the proposal that came to be referred to as Sámi Network Connectivity. With a decision to accept this project, the establishment of SNC as both a technical idea and a concrete gender-based project became a prime goal for the cooperation between the women in Sirges and the scholars at LTU, and continued after the KIS project ended in December 2003. The SNC objective is to provide connectivity where other sources are not available, while making the local population part of the development of the technical system. To develop the technical solution space of SNC, the Sámi Network Connectivity proposition gained research funding from the Swedish national agency for innovation systems, Vinnova, for the period 2004 to 2006. This funding is distributed through the Vinnova program “New communication networks.”

In this paper we use the case of an internet connectivity project in Scandinavia, Sami Network Connectivity (SNC), as a means to investigate the impulses which designing a network for a semi nomadic population, gives to network design, and to policy making. Thus, we regard the diffusion of innovations as something, which affects not only the culture of technology users but also that of technology producers. Manuel Castells argues that the cultural heritage imprinted in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector's technical design and social organisation has developed as a result of interaction between large, hierarchical institutions on the one hand and the radical thinking of the 1960s on the other and. The conceptual congruence between internet experts and the user community displayed in SNC may so be explained. We suggest that due to discourses that surrounded senior ICT professionals during their youth, there is a preparation for a nomadic scenario within the ICT sector as such.