Held as an open online event for the EUI community, the live episode featured EDI Officer Giuseppe Zago in conversation with Konstantinos, concluding with a Q&A session that allowed participants to ask questions and engage directly with the speaker.
The discussion delved into the complexities of working in EDI, where Konstantinos, leveraging his own personal and professional experience, which brought him from academia to consultancy, introduced the European antidiscrimination framework, whose compliance with it kickstarted the process that then led to broader EDI policies in the workplace. However, in the past year, political tensions and resistance, especially from far-right governments in places like the United States, Hungary, and Italy, have pushed back against EDI efforts, leading companies and organisations to hesitate to take the extra step towards effective inclusion. The conversation reveals how these forces across Europe, and globally, are weaponising terms like 'diversity' and 'gender ideology,' turning human rights into ideological battlegrounds and creating scepticism even within progressive institutions.
Moving toward the academic sector, Konstantinos reflected on his own experience as a PhD researcher at the EUI in 2010, highlighting how the academic environment has changed during the past decade. Whilst universities are often idealised as inclusive spaces, they can perpetuate systemic exclusion. This was echoed in Kostantinos’s words, where he shared that his thesis on queer festivals, conducted using queer methodologies, prompted some of his peers to question his ability to carry out objective research based on his queer identity. However, even then, queer students carved out a pathway to resistance through the creation of interdisciplinary and intersectional working groups as spaces to challenge the dominant academic norms.
Reflecting more broadly on queer resistance and Pride, the conversation confronted internal fractures within the LGBTQAI+ community, where the progress benefiting some groups, like the achievement of marriage equality, has sometimes overshadowed the increasing marginalisation of others, such as trans and non-binary people. Konstantinos reminded all participants that true inclusion requires recognising overlapping identities and emphasised the importance of addressing all marginalised groups simultaneously, not through compartmentalised approaches, but intersectional strategies.
Listen to the episode on:
YouTube or MixCloud.
Episode details:
Host: Giuseppe Zago, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the EUI
Guest: Konstantinos Eleftheriadis, former EUI researcher, EDI consultant and founder of Prismata
This initiative was produced in collaboration with the EUI's researcher-led web radio, Radio Cavolo. Do you have a question about the podcast? Drop a line to [email protected].