Centar za zenske studije

Centre for Women’s Studies is the first non-institutional educational Centre in Croatia. It was founded by a group of feminists, scholars, peace activists and artists in 1995. The Centre provides an interdisciplinary program and expert knowledge on women’s issues (e.g. reproductive rights/justice, gender based violence, feminist political economy, women’s rights, LGBTIQ+ rights etc.) and is a meeting point for academic discourse, artistic practice, activist engagement. Our target groups are: women, LGBTIQ+, ethnic, national, gender and sexual minorities, students and other marginalized groups. The mission of the Center is connected to our regular activities; is to empower our target groups in political and civic initiatives through feminist education and to affirm democratic values of peace and solidarity, especially through international networking and exchange programs in the field of women's and gender studies, joint cultural and civic projects. Within its programs, the Center motivates students and other participants to think critically and to be aware of the importance of gender equality, thus acting on self-empowerment through taking responsibility for social change. The main quality of the Women’s Studies educational program is it’s interdisciplinarity. The program offers an insight into the diverse themes of feminism and gender studies, women’s culture and history, women’s rights, queer studies, feminist political economy etc. During its 25 years of work, the Centre has seen more than 800 participants complete the Women’s Studies, and more than 1500 participants involved through implementation of diverse projects. The Centre carries out research on educational and cultural policies to create recommendations for including the gender perspective with the intention to activate the transformative potential of educational and cultural policies in order to achieve greater gender equality in Croatia, but also in the region. The Centre have been granting the Award for Best Student Work on Women’s/Gender-related Issues, since 2009, with the goal of promoting and encouraging research on women’s/gender topics within the academic community. The award is intended for all college and university students and till today more than 70 students were awarded. The postgraduate seminar Feminisms in a transnational perspective is being co-organised by the Centre for the last 20 years. The seminar gathers every year international scholars, postgraduate students and activists, especially from Central and Eastern Europe, to critically examine and re-think different topics from a feminist perspective. The Centre has been organizing this annual course at Inter University Centre, Dubrovnik in cooperation with the Department of Comparative Literature – Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research. Published books as as result of international cooperation and research during the postgraduate course are: “Rethinking North and South in Post-Coloniality”, “Voicing Feminist Concerns”, “Spiritual practices and economic realities: Feminist challenges”, “Women Narrating their Lives and Actions”, “Feminist critique of knowledge production”. The Centre’s publishing program is focused on publishing the results of Croatian feminist research and theory, as well as translations of selected key feminist texts. To date we have published more than 50 titles. The Centre’s feminist theoretical journal Treća – [The Third] was launched in 1998 and has been published annually ever since. The library collection features books and magazines from the field of women’s and gender studies and it consists of 5000 volumes and more than 4000 titles forming a unique women’s library. The library also contains archival documents significant to the history of feminism in Croatia, materials resulting from the Centre’s research projects, the Marija Jurić Zagorka Collection, along with audio-visual materials. The libr