Working Groups’ Panels at Conferences in June 2026

WG1 panel at the European Conference of Politics and Gender in Newcastle, UK, 15 June 2026

What's church got to do with it? Anti-gender mobilizations in the Orthodox Balkans

The panel examined the understudied role of Orthodox churches — as opposed to the more widely researched Roman Catholic church — in shaping anti-gender mobilizations across Eastern Europe, focusing on state-church relations in Romania, Serbia, and Bulgaria and asking whether these societies are undergoing a form of desecularization. Emily St Denny (University of Copenhagen) served as discussant. The panel featured presentations by Oana Băluță (National University of Political Studies and Public Administration) on the Orthodox Church as a political actor in anti-sex-education mobilizations and the making of an illiberal consensus in Romania, Ionela Băluță (University of Bucharest) on Orthodoxy and anti-gender politics in Romania ("The Garden of the Mother of God"), Adriana Zaharijević (University of Zagreb) on anti-gender mobilizations in Serbia contesting the concept of backlash and arguing for anti-gender mobilizations as deliberate project, Gergana Nenova (University of Sofia) on the Bulgarian Orthodox Church's shift from supporting to instrumentalizing anti-gender movements, and Kristine Margvelashvili (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) on a comparative account of contested national space, gender, and the Orthodox Church in Georgia and Greece.

WG4 panel at the European Conference of Politics and Gender in Newcastle, UK, 16 June 2026

Weaponizing Distrust, (Re)Claiming Resistances: Anti-Gender Struggles in the European East

The panel featured presentations by Julia Walczak (University of Silesia) on ridicule as a discursive strategy in Polish conservative media ("Gay Is Bad, Gay Is Dumb"), Tanja Vuckovic Juros (University of Zagreb) on the relationship between institutional distrust and the acceptance of anti-gender messaging (How Institutional Distrust Helps the Acceptance of Anti-Gender Messages), and Katerina Krulisova (Nottingham Trent University) and Sarka Kolmasova (Metropolitan University Prague), on the localization of anti-gender rhetoric across Visegrád Group countries (Misogyny Copy Paste: How Do V4's Anti-Gender Movements Glocalise their Messaging). The discussant for this panel, collectively situating the "European East" as a distinct site for understanding democratic backsliding tied to gender politics, was Adriana Zaharijević (University of Belgrade).

WG3 panel at the conference of the RESIST project "Intersectional Queer Feminist Resistances Against 'Anti-Gender' Politics" in Warsaw, Poland, 18 June 2026

Everyday LGBTIQ+ Struggle and Resistance under Political Heterosexism

While the entire conference focused on intersectional queer feminist resistance against „anti-gender" politics, the COST Action panel specifically addressed everyday LGBTQ+ struggles and resistance under political heterosexism. The speakers were Dr Michal Pitoňák (Charles University), Dr Shaba Darakchi (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) and Dr Veronika Valkovičová (Comenius University). The panel aimed to bring together three different perspectives by merging the voices of LGBTQ+ individuals, activists, and researchers working on LGBTQ+ issues and anti-gender mobilisation. One perspective outlined the concept of the „neoliberal utopian gaze", describing a certain „academic blindness" that often downplays and belittles the emergence and development of anti-gender/LGBTQ+ campaigns, thereby undermining the danger these developments pose to science and the democratic order. Another perspective drew on a nationwide study of LGBTQ+ people in the Czech Republic to challenge the national myth of tolerance, proposing a regime of conditional tolerance and belonging. In this regime, LGBTQ+ individuals are ostensibly accepted, but expected to remain unobtrusive. Meanwhile, structural cis- and heteronormativity, as well as violence, are individualised, with no appropriate institutional responses.