The Emma Goldman Award Ceremony honors researchers and activists for their outstanding work on gender and inequality. Since 2020, the FLAX Foundation and the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) have organized the ceremony in two categories: the Emma Goldman Snowball and the Emma Goldman Awards.
The evening will be opened by IWM Permanent Fellow Ayşe Çağlar and FLAX Foundation board member Mieke Verloo, who will also introduce the two keynote speakers, Adriana Zaharijević and Anna Carastathis. Their short lectures focus on addressing collective momentum during political crises.
Brave Bodies in the Street
In her personal reflection on 2025 in Serbia, a year of protest, Adriana Zaharijević examines a rebellion that challenges the Serbian political system. By focusing on the movement’s non-violent, grassroots organizational structures, she illustrates how collective exhaustion and individual anxiety are transformed into courageous action. Her talk explores the power of “Brave Bodies in the Street“ and the reality of embodied lives when confronted with naked force.
Interdependence in a World on Fire
In this talk, Anna Carastathis draws on her experiences to reflect on the positionality of the independent researcher, within and outside institutions, and on how we can collectivise the work of creating knowledge-making communities by shifting from independence to interdependence and to a struggle for epistemic justice.
Adriana Zaharijević is a principal research fellow at the University of Belgrade’s Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory. Her work combines political philosophy, feminist theory, and social history. She is the author of Život tela. Politička filozofija Džudit Batler (Akademska knjiga, 2020) [Life of the Body: The Political Philosophy of Judith Butler]; Judith Butler and Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Zaharijević received the 2022 Emma Goldman Snowball Award.
Anna Carastathis is a political philosopher and co-founder of the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research, where she currently works as a co-investigator on the RESIST project on resistances to “anti-gender“ politics. She is the author of Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons (University of Nebraska Press, 2016) and co-author of Reproducing Refugees: Photographs of a Crisis (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020). She was honored with an Emma Goldman Award in 2025.
Attendance by invitation only.
