Kajsa Widegren
About Kajsa Widegren
I have a PhD in Gender Studies and finished my dissertation Ett annat flickrum: Kön, ålder och sexualitet i Maria Lindbergs, Anna Maria Ekstrands och Helene Billgrens flickbilder (”Another Girls’ Room: Gender, age and sexuality in Maria Lindberg’s, Anna Maria Ekstrand’s and Helene Billgren’s representations of girls”) in 2010. For some years I worked as a lecturer at the Department of Cultural Sciences at University of Gothenburg, teaching Gender Studies, Art and Visual Studies and Cultural Studies. I was also the Director of study for Gender Studies and participated in the development of the Master’s Program Gendering Practices.
My time as Director of study made me interested in the structures of academia and in 2015 I started working as a research coordinator at the Swedish Secretariat for Gender Research. During my time at the Secretariat I have among other things been part of the scientific and organising committees of the national g-conferences g16 and g19, as well as been a guest editor of Journal of Gender Studies for an issue on the “conditions for research”. As part the EU-project GENDERACTION I have cooperated with Swedish as well as international research councils with focus on gender and the UN:s sustainability goals.
The interest in the general conditions within academia as well as the development of Gender Studies and gender research in Sweden has resulted in the report Career paths and working conditions for Gender Studies PhD graduates and gender researchers (2023, together with Susanna Young Håkansson), the first survey of the continuing careers of graduates in the newly institutionalised subject Gender Studies.
Alongside the work as a research coordinator – and later senior analyst – I have continued to do research and to teach, but also to write for a broader audience. In texts on art and visual representations I often focus on the intersection of gender, age and sexuality. I have also cooperated in different ways with the director and artistic leader at PotatoPotato Performance Linda Forsell in her project “The best of all girl-worlds”. Our latest cooperation was in relation to her play The Vivian Girls (Gothenburg City Theatre, 2022) a dramatization of the artist Henry Darger’s peculiar story The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion and his likewise peculiar artistic production. In a research project I study the play and its representations of girls and agency as well as Darger’s gender-ambivalent visual work.