Irina Schmitt

Associate Professor

Background
I defended my PhD thesis on young people’s negotiations of national belonging in Germany and Canada at Bremen University, Germany, in 2007 and joined the Department of Gender Studies in Lund as a postdoctoral researcher in 2008.  October 2010, I was Visiting Associate Professor at the Centre for Women and Gender Studies, University of British Columbia. 2011-2014, I was employed as Assistant Professor, and served as Director of Undergraduate Studies. I have been employed as Associate Professor since 2015.

The focus of my work is the analysis of power relations and experiences in the intersections of gender, sex and sexuality with understandings of national ascriptions and belongings. I locate this work in organizations of knowledge production and national inscription such as schools and universities.  In my earlier research, I have worked on negotiations of national belonging, children with LGBTQI+ parents and their experiences at school within a European project, equity work in academia and strategies for LGBTQI+ justice work in schools.

Currently, I am working in the field of trans- and queer-feminist education research, with an interview study with young and young adult trans people about their experiences and analyses of school.

Research areas

• Queer-feminist studies
• Trans-feminist studies
• Feminist methodologies
• Justice, law, nation
• Justice and LGBTQI+ in schools and higher education

Ongoing research and teaching

Currently I am working on a project on young and young adult trans peoples’ experience of school. How do trans young people negotiate their understandings of self with normative, nationally coded demands in schools? What kinds of support do they experience as useful or would they have expected to find? With this study, I aim to contribute to the growing field of trans_intersex studies in Sweden and to local and international trans- and queer-feminist education research. I am also reflecting about the seeming universality of the terminology of trans, noting the mounting frustration with the persistent whiteness and racism in queer communities, and to question Eurocentric genealogies of theorizing bodies and identities, in a society informed by both internal and external colonialism and migration. How is cis-normativity co-produced through not least racism, and norms around class and ability?

Being a teacher in gender studies, and a gender studies teacher in other areas, is a great privilege and a pleasure. I teach and have taught on the Department of gender studies’ bachelor and master courses, in courses of the international master program at the faculty of Social Sciences and in teacher training. I also teach on Gender and diversity in higher education. At the PhD-level I serve as second advisor.