Irina Schmitt

I am senior lecturer and work as researcher and teacher at the Department of Gender Studies, Lund, Sweden.

Both in research and teaching, I find inspiration in queer-feminist, anti-racist and post-colonial thinking and work, and also work at the intersection of academic and ‘everyday’ knowledge. I am interested in how people negotiate especially gendered, sexed and sexual belonging and nationally specific notions of ‘who we are’, and in the incongruences of legal statements and everyday experiences, the visible and the hidden workings of power.

Queer-feminist thinking has been an intellectual home for me for many years. More recently, I am learning from and in the field of transgender studies, while staying with my empirical interest in schools and universities as spaces of socio-political (knowledge-)production and – possibly, hopefully – change. I locate this work in organizations of knowledge production and national inscription such as schools and universities.