On the consequences of limited imaginaries: why inequality is still an issue in Belgian universities
(2025) State of the art - Gender conference SOPHIA — Location: Bruxelles (12.November.2025)
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- Notwithstanding the impressive amount of data, list of potential solutions, and attention that has been paid to the issue of inequality in Belgian universities, we witness but a slow diminution of inequality, limited reactions to sexually transgressive and other inappropriate behaviour, and increasing numbers of attacks on scholars in feminist, sexual orientation, transgender, migration and race studies, or members of the academic community who bear such socio-demographic markers. In this paper, we reflect on how it comes that the issue of inequality is still on the table. The paper contains three section. In a first section, we start from the premise that there often tends to be a conflation of the symptoms of inequality and the actual causes of the problem. Indeed, the problem is – for instance – not the underrepresentation of women and other social groups in academia. This underrepresentation is but the symptom of underlying problems. Based on this distinction, in the second section we unpack two mechanisms present in Belgian universities which we consider to cause above mentioned inequalities. These are the lack of recognition i) that who we are influences what academic knowledge we produce, and ii) how power and authority get (re)produced, work and play out at the informal (often micro-) level. These mechanisms can be related to the traditional focus on meritocracy in academia and its more recent neo-liberalisation. Unpacking them more explicitly allows for a better understanding of a set of perverse – because very efficient – strategies undermining efforts to promote equality in Belgian universities. In the third section we unpack such strategies, including the negation, silencing, ridiculing, bending, or minimizing of existing problems, and discuss how to detect and counter them. The conclusion wraps up the main findings and reflects on alternative imaginaries of academia.
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Degavre, F., Grandjean, N., & Petra Meier. (2025). On the consequences of limited imaginaries: why inequality is still an issue in Belgian universities. State of the art - Gender conference SOPHIA, Bruxelles. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/270082