Keynote Speakers
We are exicted to share the keynote speakers at the 12th European Feminist Research Conference 2025, with further keynote speakers to be announced soon.
Anna Younes
Anna Younes is a German Palestinian scholar that has also curated the first transnational and transdisciplinary month-long Palestinian arts festival in Germany in 2016. Her focus rests on what she has coined the "War on Antisemitism" in her 2015 PhD dissertation, which dealt with Germany's stance toward "fighting Antisemitism". Since then she has developed her concept further and places it within trajectories of counterinsurgency wars in a new post-WWII world order, framed by tactics used in the War on Drugs and most prominently the War on Terror. Younes thinks transnationally and transhistorically. Currently, she researches the afterlives of settler colonialism in the Dutch Caribbean and works with the ELSC - the European Legal Support Center defending pro-Palestinian activists and scholars in Europe. Her work zooms in on settler colonial theories, psychoanalysis and race critical theories and can be found on academia.edu or her personalised website: www.annaestheryounes.net.
Layal Ftouni
Layal Ftouni is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is currently working on a book project on the 'reproduction of life' in conditions of proximity to death and debilitation, both human and environmental, in the settler colonial context of Palestine. In 2021, she received the Dutch Research Council VENI grant to support this project. Before joining Utrecht University, she lectured at SOAS, University of London, and earned her PhD from the University of Westminster. Her writing is featured in a variety of publications, the most recent of which is: "They make death, and I am the labor of Life": Palestinian Prisoners Sperm Smuggling as an Affirmation of Life" published in Critical Times (2024). She is the co-editor of Arab Subcultures (2017) published by Bloomsbury Press and is on the Editorial Board of Lateral, a peer-review open-access journal of the Cultural Studies Association. As well as her educational and research work, Layal is also a founding member of Dutch Scholars for Palestine, a network of educational workers across Dutch Universities committed to the Palestinian struggle for liberation and self-determination.
Gražina Bielousova
Dr. Gražina Bielousova (Duke University, 2022) is an anthropologist of religion and politics working at the intersection of race, religion, and gender in east Europe. Her current project and forthcoming book (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026) focus on leftist feminists in east European countries that find themselves under the threat of Russia's military expansionist politics, with particular attention to Ukraine. Gražina's other academic interests include de- and post- colonial theory, global raciality, and socioeconomic inequality. She is currently a researcher at Vilnius University and a lecturer at Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania).
Hourya Bentouhami
Hourya Bentouhami is Professor of social and political philosophy at the University of Toulouse - Jean Jaurès (France). Taking both a conceptual and empirical approach, her work focuses on feminist politics critical of violence and injustice, which she approaches from a global, intersectional perspective, taking into account the history and memory of transatlantic slavery, (neo)colonial processes in Africa and (post)colonial Mediterranean migration.
Roundtable Keynote: Institutionalizing Feminist Struggles: Embodied Lessons from Within and Beyond
Encarna Bodelon Gonzalez
Encarna Bodelon Gonzalez is currently General Director of CEJFE, the Center for Legal Studies and Specialized Training, of the Department of Justice of the Government of Catalonia.​ She is a Doctor of Law and postgraduate in Common Study Programme on Criminal Justice and Critical Criminology (UB) and Associate Professor of Philosophy of Law at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). She has also been a professor of Criminology at the University of Barcelona and a Law professor at the School of Law of San Juan, Puerto Rico. She has carried out research stays in Rotterdam, London, New York, and Mexico.
​
Encarna is founder of the research group Antígona, Research Group on Law and Society from a Gender Perspective, at UAB (www.antigona.uab.cat) and co-director and founder of the postgraduate diploma in Gender and Equality (since 2007), the postgraduate diploma in Gender-Based Violence (since 2014), and the Master’s in Feminist Legal Studies.
​
For twenty years, she has collaborated with the Dones Juristes Association and is a board member. She is part of the group of professors who have promoted activities under the slogan "University Without Censorship".
She has published numerous books, including:
Equality and Difference in Feminist Legal Analyses (1999)
Tracing the Invisible: Incarcerated Immigrant Women (2005)
Women and Punishment (2006)
Gender, Law, and Equality (2010)
Gender and Domination (2010)
Gender-Based Violence and Criminal Justice Responses (2012)
Equality Plans in Times of Crisis (2013)
Almudena Rodríguez García
Almudena Rodríguez García is a committed intersectional feminist and anti-racist advocate dedicated to ensuring the real and effective guarantee of sexual and reproductive rights for women in all their diversity, as well as for LGTBIQ+ communities at both local and global levels.
​
For over a decade, she has focused her professional trajectory on transforming global agendas and policies within multilateral spaces of the United Nations to ensure they integrate and uphold the human rights of women and LGTBIQ+ individuals. She actively participates in UN processes related to women's rights, sustainable development, and climate justice, including the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), the High-Level Political Forum on the 2030 Agenda, the Conference of the Parties (COP), and the UN General Assembly, among others.
​
She is a member of leading international feminist platforms advocating collectively for systemic change, including the Women's Rights Caucus, Women's Major Group, the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, and the Feminist Response to COVID-19, among others.
​
She holds a degree in History, a Master’s in Fundamental Rights, doctoral coursework in International Human Rights Law, and a postgraduate specialization in Gender-Based Violence. An expert in women's human rights in all their diversity, she has a particular focus on advancing and securing the full realization of sexual and reproductive rights for women and LGTBIQ+ individuals.
​
Her expertise includes a deep understanding of violations of sexual and reproductive rights as a form of gender-based and heteropatriarchal violence, both locally and globally. She conducts in-depth analyses of institutional violence and the threats posed by anti-gender, anti-rights, and fundamentalist groups seeking to undermine sexual and reproductive rights.