AtGender presents its Code of Ethics (this is the very first of the study association).

A pdf version of the Code of Ethics is available here.

Code of Ethics

Introduction

AtGender is a non-profit and membership-based study association. It is run by volunteers, including the board members and the co-chairs, who manage the association and organise events without any form of remuneration.  AtGender was founded in 2009 with the objective of fostering a vibrant intergenerational community of feminist and gender studies scholars, training postgraduate students and enabling critical yet respectful debates.  At time of global upheaval, AtGender wishes to restate its commitment to maintaining the study association, including all the online and offline events it organises and co-organises, an inclusive and accessible environment that supports all struggles against sexism and heteronormativity in their intersections with other forms of oppression.  AtGender also wishes to restate its commitment to guaranteeing the respect of individual members’ rights to meaningful participation and upholds their dignity in all circumstances.

To achieve these objectives, AtGender’s Code of Ethics articulates basic principles and values that apply to all members of its community, in all settings it promotes, and documents it produces.

These basic principles and values are:

A commitment to academic freedom, inclusion, and accessibility while ensuring intersectional and anti-colonial perspectives shape our engagement with each other at every level. 

A commitment to oppose any form of discrimination while maintaining an environment where all manifestations of harassment are rejected and all instances of racism, sexism, ableism, classism, or otherwise are actively challenged, in all actions and decisions.

• A commitment to create and maintain a self-reflexive community of knowledge and practices that acknowledge and challenge power inequities within and outside academia.
• A commitment to meet the needs of all members, including the provision of adequate support whenever necessary, to the best capacity of AtGender’s resources at a given point in time.
• A commitment to ethical knowledge production and transfer, including actively learning from past experience and striving to pass on institutional know-how to new and prospective members.
• A commitment to practicing an informed assessment of power dynamics within each and every specific socio-historical context, centering and building on local anti-oppressive scholarship and liberation movements.
• A commitment to acknowledge and uphold peoples’ rights to self-determination and to resist all forms of oppression, including  intrusions on their political and territorial sovereignty, along with any violations of their  human, civil  and environmental rights.

Owing to these values and principles, AtGender also reserves itself the right to exclude members from taking part in the activities it organises, or oversees, in the following circumstances: 1) in the case members are reasonably suspected of having been involved in committing or inciting to grave human rights violations, particularly war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide; 2) in the case members reside in, work in, or provide material support to colonial settlements in territories recognised as occupied by the United Nations; 3) in the case the scholarship of members or a public statement by members reproduces harmful or racist stereotypes and ideas about any oppressed group; 4) in the case the behaviour of members constitutes harassment; and 5) in the case members are official representatives of institutions/organisations that are implicated or complicit in grave human rights violations.

AtGender´s principles and values guide and shape all members´ actions and interventions, striving to promote inclusive, enjoyable, and productive interactions at all levels. 

AtGender´s principles and values are to be applied across three main areas:  Decision-Making & Event Organisation (see section 1); Event Participation & Communication (see section 2); and Knowledge Production and Transfer (see section 3).

1. Decision-Making & Event Organisation 

1.2 Adaptability and Openness to Change

Since its founding, AtGender has been committed to bridging existing gaps in the fields of feminist theory and gender studies. It has always been AtGender’s ambition to build bridges by designing events that travel, moving from one scholarly/geographical hub to another. In the same vein, AtGender has always been committed to an organisational structure that ensures equal participation in all the activities and decision-making processes of the study association. In detail, AtGender pursues the following goals:

• Uphold a non-hierarchical, transparent structure with clearly defined yet flexible roles and responsibilities.
• Recognise invisible labour and ensure that all contributions—logistical, intellectual, and emotional—are acknowledged.
• Ensure collaborative, consensus-driven decision-making that mitigates power imbalances.
• Maintain institutional memory through documented processes to facilitate continuity for future conference teams.

 1.2 Strand Organisation & Academic Programme

Moreover, AtGender is committed to:

Decentralise knowledge production by ensuring strand convenors and keynote speakers reflect diverse identities, disciplines, and geographical regions.

• Prioritise accessibility for precarious academics, early-career researchers, and independent scholars.
• Avoid tokenism and representational overburdening of marginalised scholars.
• Enable interdisciplinary and activist–academic collaborations while ensuring epistemic justice.
• Explicitly foreground anti- and decolonial feminist perspectives, especially critiques of Western and non-Western legacies of colonialism and imperialism.

1.3 Communication Channels

In the same vein, AtGender´s members involved in the organisation of conferences are committed to:

• Establish clear, inclusive, and accessible communication channels among the organising team, strand convenors, participants, and local partners.
• Orient our communication toward tools that do not nurture digitally supported power relations and exploitative data practices but enhance open-access and data-ethical digital tools.
• Strive towards making all official communication available in multiple languages wherever possible.
• Create a centralised, publicly available information hub (e.g., a website or shared platform) to streamline logistical updates, resources, and key contacts.

2. Event Participation & Communication

2.1 Anti-harassment

Event participation is usually the most important part of the institutional life of a study association. Taking part in an event should foremost be a positive and enriching experience for all members, besides an opportunity to critically learn from peers and senior colleagues. It is therefore important that all members take responsibility for each other’s well-being and strive to guarantee full participation for all members in all of AtGender’s activities.  Accordingly, in all circumstances, AtGender will not tolerate any of the following behaviours in any space related to an event it organises or co-organises:

• Derogatory or aggressive comments regarding an individual’s identity (including deliberate misgendering).
• Derogatory or aggressive comments regarding an individual’s lifestyle practices (including those related to substance use, employment, religion or otherwise).
• Personal contact (physical and non-physical) without consent and/or after a request to stop.
• Threats, intimidation or incitement of violence towards any individual.
• Sustained disruption of discussions or events consisting of non-constructive and abusive criticism towards any individual.
• Racist, sexist, ableist, ageist, classist, Islamophobic or otherwise oppressive, intentional or not, behavior in any form.
• Repeated or excessive communication within and outside established channels if it undermines professional courtesy and organisational processes.

We especially call on event organisers and moderators to uphold these principles and, when necessary, enforce them in accordance with AtGender´s  Participation Guidelines and any other relevant document. 

2.2. Accessibility & Inclusion

AtGender strives to guarantee full participation of all members. Our commitment might be constrained by limited financial resources and infrastructure provided by the host institutions it collaborates with. Nonetheless, AtGender strives to ensure that all events it organises and co-organises are as accessible as possible, with thoughtful consideration of physical, digital, and financial barriers. Accordingly, AtGender is committed to:    

• Provide clear and respectful channels for participants to request accommodations, and aim to respond to these needs within available capacities.
• Provide accessible venues in collaboration with co-organisers and a quiet room.
• Include hybrid participation options whenever these are viable.
• Offer tiered or subsidised registration fees for precarious and underfunded participants.
• Strive to enable multilingual engagement through the use of new technologies and live translation or interpretation whenever it is feasible
• Adapt to caregivers´responsibilities and needs, including offering childcare provisions whenever resources and capabilities are available.

2.3 Accommodation & Local Support

Concerning financial accessibility and inclusion, AtGender is furthermore committed to guarantee that:

• The on-ground team at the host location should support the organising team in identifying affordable and accessible accommodation options.
• Ensure transparency in cost breakdowns so that attendees can make informed choices.
• Establish host networks where local scholars or community members can offer guidance to international participants.
• Negotiate discounted rates for attendees at ethical and locally owned accommodations.

3. Knowledge Sharing and Transfer

3.1 Long-Term Network Building & Knowledge Transfer

AtGender is committed to nurturing an intergenerational community of feminist and gender studies scholars.  AtGender therefore strives to support postgraduate students and early career researchers based in Europe  and elsewhere. Because of this objective, AtGender seeks to:

• Avoid ´one-time´ networking and nurture, instead, long-term academic and activist collaborations beyond event participation.
• Set up a mentorship or peer support structure where postgraduate students and early-career scholars can continue engaging with senior academics post-events.
• Offer support for post-conference publishing or knowledge dissemination to ensure that postgraduate students and early career researchers feel part of a community outside conferences.
• Actively seek out ecosystem recommendations and practical pathways to ensure these commitments can be expanded and  feasibly implemented.

3.2 Ethical Engagement & Citational Practices

AtGender is furthermore committed to not perpetuating Eurocentric framing and unethical practices. In this regard, it endeavours and encourages its members to:

• Pursue non-extractivist and socially sustainable forms of engagement with knowledge, and ensure that any collaborations are consistently advantageous for all parties involved and that every contributor receives appropriate recognition and compensation for their intellectual labour.
• Always situate feminist histories and struggles and constructively engage with all the theoretical work  produced by scholars who belong to oppressed communities.
• Always acknowledge the source of the knowledge (whether academic or non-academic) that informs your scholarship, and make sure to properly highlight the liberation movements and socio-political contexts that provide the foundation for the knowledge you rely on.