Yves Mény Annual Lecture: Why does intersectionality matter?

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies

There are various success stories about Germany since 1945, including welfare states promoting equality, liberalisation, democratisation, and the peaceful revolution in 1989.

Historians examining transformations since the boom and far-right violence have challenged such happy narratives. This talk complicates the accounts further. It zooms in on the biographies of people who continued to be confronted with a thicket of racist, classist and cis-heterosexist discriminations. And it looks at how some of these people forged alliances across identity-political divides to struggle for better futures.

The lecture thus argues that intersectional approaches help us to better understand the recent past and the present of European societies.

The event will be live-streamed. Information about online attendance will be provided closer to the date.

Since 2014 the Robert Schuman Centre honours its first Director, Yves Mény, with its annual lecture to mark the beginning of the academic year and to launch the Schuman Centre's Seminar Series. Watch here lectures from past years.