Gender is considered one of the most salient social categories and therefore can have a strong influence on how children see the world and themselves. Research shows that children from early ages immediately and implicitly classify unknown individuals by their gender even in situations in which the gender is not relevant.
I am in a seminar called “Where am I in this? Roles, goals, and reflexivity in the (queer) research process”. In this virtual room of young people in academia, we discuss impostor syndrome and how many of us feel it in one way or another.
Categorization is a process that helps people simplify their perception of the social and physical world. With categorization, a perceiver of the world groups many individual cases (called exemplars in Social Psychology) in one overarching category. For example, let’s think about a parrot called Mindy. We can imagine Mindy as a blue and yellow parrot, shy with strangers, and quite talkative when she hears the shower in the other room.
As part of our e-learning journal club during spring and summer 2021, we critically discussed the review article “Masculine Defaults: Identifying and Mitigating Hidden Cultural Biases” by Sapna Cheryan and Hazel Rose Markus (2020). The authors describe a cultural bias called “masculine defaults”. Masculine defaults imply that characteristics or behaviours associated with men’s gender role are culturally valued, rewarded, or regarded as standard, normal, neutral, or necessary.
Keynote lecture by Professor Mieke Verloo, Radboud University Nijmegen during the G-Versity Summer School in Berlin
Keynote lecture by Prof. Emer. Angela McRobbie
Starting your PhD during the midst of a global pandemic is not exactly ideal. I imagine the angst associated with starting the 3-4 year project that is a PhD is usually difficult to cope with at the best of times, without adding government restrictions, health concerns and almost complete isolation into the mix. Despite this, I decided to start my PhD in March of 2021.
