Lova Annual Report 2016

For printing

Board
Early 2016 the board consisted of Marina de Regt (chair), Natashe Lemos Dekker (treasurer), Dominique Voskuijl (secretary), Silvia Herrero (journal), Gisela Düting (representing non-academic anthropologists), and Julienne Weegels (PR). In March Silvia Herrero became paid designer of LOVA Journal in addition to her chief editorship, so she had to resign from the board. Her seat was filled in by Ina Keuper. In July Dominique Voskuijl transferred her secretary seat to Ana Filipa Oitavén who had responded to a vacancy announcement at LOVA website. Around the same time Natashe Lemos Dekker decided to resign from the board and Ina Keuper took over her treasurer job. As Ina has two tasks now in the board this is meant to be on a temporary basis as soon as a new treasurer or journal representative is found. Julienne Weegels was replaced by Irene Arends and Luisa Machacón for the PR work, while Gisela Düting’s seat was replaced by Roséanne Aukes in December. The current members of the board thank all former board members for their commitment for LOVA.

In 2016 we had four meetings: on February 2, March 25, September 14 and December 1. The General Members’ Meeting was held during the annual LOVA Study Day of May 20.

LOVA Journal
Further changes in the design and lay-out of LOVA Journal were made in 2016. We ended the cooperation with designer Fox &Hound and chief editor Silvia Herrero was asked by the board to create a new design which could be used for more than one issue and become our new lay-outer. This reduces costs and gives us more control over the design. We also returned to the VU for the printing.

In the March meeting of the board it was also decided to rename LOVA Tijdschrift into LOVA Journal and to write most articles in English, in line with the board’s aim to transform into a real international LOVA network. At first it was difficult to acquire enough contributions, but with more publicity via the website and Facebook page we succeeded well. We also decided to peer-review the research articles by expert scholars among LOVA members in order to ensure the quality of the texts.

Issue 37 was prepared by editorial board members Silvia Herrero (chief editor), Sofie Degenaar, Ina Keuper, Nikki Mulder and Julienne Weegels. Nigel Browne took care of the English editing. At the end of the process Marina de Regt took care of the proof reading as final editor and she received much help for improving some articles from Ina, Nikki en Silvia. The issue was sent to LOVA members in December 2016. 

LOVA Study Day
The annual Study Day was organised in cooperation with the Dutch Association of Anthropologists (ABv), and presented as the annual Anthropology Day of ABv, on May 20 in Utrecht  at the University of Humanistic Studies. Marina de Regt and Kathrine van den Boogert organized the day together with Eddy Appels and Roxanne Beumer of the ABv. ‘Understanding Migration: Hospitality, Home and Belonging’ was the central theme of the day and LOVA brought in keynote speaker Prof. Nadje Al-Ali from SOAS Londen. Her lecture was titled Gendering Migration: Home and Belonging in a Transnational Context. LOVA organised also one of the panels, called ‘Gender, Migration and Connectivity’. About 100 people attended the day.

Nine LOVA members participated in the annual General Members’ Meeting of LOVA in the lunch break. Despite this low number we look back on a very successful day. The cooperation of LOVA and ABv was experienced as very fruitful from both sides. 

LOVA International Summer School
This year the fifth edition of LOVA International Summer School was organized with a new name: LOVA SEE – School of Experimental Education. As before the organisers were Reinhilde Sotiria König as director, in cooperation with Carola Lammers and Nathalie Roos. We also continued the familiar format: easy entry, non-hierarchical, healthy food, and some participants could find a sleeping place in the homes of LOVA members. The venues of the sessions varied more than in the past. We had meetings in University of Amsterdam buildings at Oudemanhuispoort, CEDLA and CREA; next to that we also gathered two days at the interesting and innovative complex ‘De Ceuvel’ on a former shipyard in Amsterdam North. This was highly valued by the participants, but it also implied extra expenses.

War, violence, militarism and reconciliation: Ethnographies in Queer, Gender & Feminist Anthropology was this years’ theme of the summer school. We had 16 participants from 12 different countries, among whom two students from Italy, one from France, two from India, one from Pakistan, one from Rwanda. In addition to that we had a Korean student living in Switzerland, someone from the USA living in Qatar, and a student from Iran living in the Netherlands. 14 teachers were involved for the workshops, lectures and tours and all of them did a very good job. The students were very positive about the whole SEE programme.

As various participants could not pay the full fee we had to ask donations from LOVA members. That initiative proved to be successful; the SEE budget could be concluded with a positive net balance. We are really grateful for the gifts!

The aim of the LOVA Summer School has always been to collect and disseminate knowledge of and interest in gender studies and feminist anthropology and by doing so enhancing the reputation of LOVA within and outside the academia. We hoped to attract students and teachers who would become a member of the LOVA association and would become active in our network. We think that we were successful as LOVA Summer School is really widely well-known now. We already received applications for next editions of the Summer School. Unfortunately Reinhilde, Carola and Nathalie decided to end their work after five years. There will not be a Summer School in 2017, also because we will be busy with the International Conference. We hope to find people willing to take over the organization of the Summer School in 2018 and thereafter.

Seminar International Women’s Day 2016
In cooperation with We Women Foundation and OneWorldLove we organized a seminar ‘Global Voices in Female Leadership’ in a classroom of the Oudemanhuispoort building at University of Amsterdam. Three women representatives of respectively OneWorldLove, HIDRA and Dr.Monk gave presentations about ideas and experiences with leadership in international development cooperation organisations. This was followed by a dialogue with the public led by Kiza Magendane about questions like how to speak about solidarity when there is so much diversity among women worldwide and what could be gained by non-European female leadership in NGOs? The discussion with the large (around 80 persons) involved audience was lively. 

LOVA Photo Competition
LOVA organized its first biennial photo competition with the theme “Gender in the Field”. The activity was initiated by Gisela Düting in 2015, and continued by Irene Arends in 2016. The aim is to gain more publicity for LOVA and to attract a new audience. We were pleased to receive 17 photos from field research of nine different photographers. The jury consisted of Hanneke van Beek (photographer) and Reinhilde Sotiria König. Abu Ahasan won with his photo featuring street children train surfing in Bangladesh. The jury report was published on the website and in LOVA Journal 37.

The winning picture was printed on 500 postcards. They have been sent to all members together with the LOVA Journal, and they are handed out at LOVA events.

Besides the jury award there was also an audience award for the photo with the most Facebook likes. For the event, there was a special photo album created on Facebook exhibiting the participating photos with an explanatory text. The audience award was won by the NGO Women Win. The winners of both the jury award and the audience award received a two-year free LOVA membership and a publication in our journal. We plan to make the photo competition a bi-annual recurring event. 

LOVA Marjan Rens Master’s Thesis Award
As the Thesis Award is presented every other year we distributed in 2016 the call for submission of theses for the prize of 2017 via the LOVA Mail Service, as well as among the anthropology departments of Dutch universities, on the website and our Facebook page. The deadline was set on February 1, 2017. 

LOVA Mail Service
In the first months of 2016 we did not sent as much messages via the LOVA Mail Service, LMS, as usual. This was due to problems with introducing a new mailing system. We used to send LMS messages from the private e-mail address of board member Annelou Ypeij and we wanted to professionalize the LMS by sending the messages from the mailbox connected with the LOVA website. Ultimately we discovered that the mailboxes of our website could not be used for group mailings. As we were not able to solve the problem we decided to send LMS messages from the private mailbox of our new secretary Filipa Oitavén as long as necessary and to transform to a new website provider, as explained in the next paragraph.

Public Relations
Regarding our PR in 2016, the focus of attention has mainly been our Facebook page which was started in 2015. We have gone from 576 page likes in January to 813 page likes at the end of the year. We drastically augmented the number of posts we published on our Facebook page (varying from article links and vacancy announcements to the promotion of LOVA and non-LOVA events) to strengthen the interaction with LOVA members, but above all, to become visible to non-members with an interest in feminist anthropology. The average reach (the number of people that see a post) has increased over the year from 22 to 154. These numbers continue to grow in 2017.

We furthermore decided to redesign the LOVA website, which for a long time had been managed by Arjan Parie of Pardon as webmaster and Silvia Herrero as LOVA board member. When looking for possibilities to use the mailboxes of the website for the LMS (see previous section) it became clear that the Content Management System (CMS) of Joomla was outdated and we also wanted a more coherent presence linking the new website more directly with the activity on Facebook and also Instagram. At the end of 2016 four web designers were invited to present a plan with a budget of the costs for a new fashionable website with good working mailboxes. Luisa Machacón took responsibility for the contacts with the web designers.

In the spring a new PR flyer about LOVA was produced and distributed at the annual Anthropology Day of ABv and LOVA in May. It was also distributed among anthropology departments of Dutch universities and sent to all LOVA members in December together with the LOVA Journal issue 37.

Finances
In 2016 LOVA had a large loss because we did not receive much membership fees and had to pay higher printing costs than expected for issue 36 of LOVA Journal. After the failure of collecting most of the membership fees by a collective direct debit batch at the end of 2015 we decided not to use this system anymore in 2016. Only at the end of 2016 members were asked to pay the membership fee of 2016 and of 2017 directly to our bank account. The  budget of the summer school could be concluded with a small profit, while the annual LOVA Study Day had a loss as we paid 500 euro to ABv who took the responsibility for all other costs of the organization of our collective Anthropology Day of May 20th.  PR costs were largely spent on website hosting and for printing the PR flyer of May and the postcard of the winning picture of the LOVA Photo Competition 2016 in November. In the rubric of organization costs we ordered not only the costs of the ING bank account but also extra costs for help to set up the direct debit collection of December 2015 and farewell flowers for outgoing board members.