School of Law

Second European Conference on Multidimensional Equality Law: Investigating the triangle between racial, gender and disability discrimination

23 March 2009 | 9.15 am - 5.45 pm | Conference

University of Leeds

Introduction

Following the first conference on multidimensional equality law in 2007, there remained an urgent need to critically reflect on the consequences of the proliferation of grounds on which discrimination has been prohibited in EU law.

One of the conclusions of the 2007 conference was that the demands of equality law must not be allowed to be trivialised by ever more multiplications.

Focus

The Second European Conference on Multidimensional Equality Law (SEMCEL) thus focused on a few grounds in order to investigate intersectional discrimination in more depth. Sex/gender, perceived race/ethnicity and disability - i.e., the differences that have been in the focus of UN and EU legislation - were the focuses of this conference.

The use of these categories is interesting from a critical analytical standpoint.

Racisms, sexisms and abilisms (engendering disadvantage through neglect of the different abilities of those labelled as disabled) suggests that narrow definitions of these "grounds", frequently to be found in case law, may not provide an adequate response to disadvantage on grounds of one's identity.

In social reality, it may not make much of a difference if disadvantage occurs because of an officially acknowledged disability or on grounds of prolonged illness. Also, discrimination on grounds of, for example, religiously motivated dress styles may well mirror societal racialisation of certain religions.

Finally, discrimination on ground of sex is difficult to disentangle from discrimination on grounds of gender roles. These gender roles include assumptions about life-styles, which makes it difficult to categorise discrimination on grounds of a lesbian life style (for example) as not gender related.

In sum, the three categories are imprecise, and the resulting "fuzzyness" around the edges has not yet been adequately addressed in socio-legal discourses.

Publications

A selection of conference papers will be compiled in an edited collection, due to be in print in mid 2010 (EU Non-Discrimination Law and Intersectionality: the triangle between gender, race and disability - Dagmar Schiek & Anna Lawson eds).

In the meantime, the collection of abstracts for the different panels still gives an overview of the content of the conference. To download the abstracts, please see panels and abstracts.