Parity Talks IV: Making 'Excellence' Work

Karin Gilland Lutz is Deputy Head of the Office for Gender Equality and Diversity, UZH. She studied Political Science at Queen's University Belfast (1995), and obtained her PhD in the same discipline from Trinity College, Dublin (2001). After some postdoc years in the UK and Switzerland, she moved gradually away from research and into research management/third space roles, including doctoral program management and eventually into her current role. Some of Karin's main responsibilities include the UZH Action Plan 2017 - 2020, the Inge Strauch visiting professorship for women, and representing UZH in the LERU gender group.

Jadranka Gvozdanović is Professor of Slavic Linguistics at Heidelberg University and Chair of the LERU Thematic Group on Gender. She published or edited nine books and over a hundred articles and book chapters. In LERU, she co-authored two advice papers and one position paper: (I) The European Research Area: Priorities for Research Universities (2011) http://www.leru.org/files/publications/LERU_AP9_ERA.pdf
Women, research and universities: excellence without gender bias (2012) http://www.leru.org/files/publications/LERU_Paper_Women_universities_and_research.pdf, and (II) Implicit bias in academia: A challenge to the meritocratic principle and to women’s careers – And what to do about it (2018) https://www.leru.org/publications/implicit-bias-in-academia-a-challenge-to-the-meritocratic-principle-and-to-womens-careers-and-what-to-do-about-it (lead author).

Natalie Lerch-Pieper is Equal Opportunity and Diversity Manager of PSI and Eawag. Ms. Lerch-Pieper has been a scientist in the humanities and a leader of a Peer Mentoring Group funded by the Swiss Federal Equal Opportunity at Universities Program before she changed into the institutional field of Gender Equality, Equal Opportunity and Diversity work, where she has been working in different areas in the administration and higher education sector. She has been delegate of the Gender Equality Commission at the University of Zurich (UZH). She obtained a further education in Gender Equality and Diversity Management and has experience in the development of strategies and programs to foster equal opportunity and diversity in the medical and the STEM field. She has teaching experience in higher education, gender equality and diversity training for leadership persons and the education of children. At PSI, where she works since spring 2017, she developed the Equal Opportunity and Diversity Strategy and implemented programs of the PSI Gender Action Plan.

Eliana Perotti, Senior researcher at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich. Principal Investigator of the Swiss National Research Project „Flora Ruchat-Roncati at ETH 1985-2002. Professor, Planner, Theoretician“, further co-director of the research project „History of Urban Design“ published as Anthologie zum Städtebau (5 vol. 2005, 2008, 2014). Core areas of her research are the history and theory of urban design, focussing on social and cultural aspects and on history of ideas. Main current research and publication topics are history of urban theory, the discourse on city and gender (Theoretikerinnen des Städtebaus, Reimer, 2015), image-production in architecture, biographic projects on women architects (Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture. 1960-2015, 2021), women exhibition history (SAFFA 1958) and colonial urbanism. Initiator of Interest Group „Gender in Architecture and Urban Design“ (EAHN) and founding member of the Parity Group and the Parity Talks.

Peg Rawes is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, and Director of the Masters in Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London. Her research focuses on social and architectural histories of wellbeing, especially in contemporary housing, ecologies and poetics. Her edited volumes, Poetic Biopolitics: Practices of Relation in Architecture and the Arts (co-ed., 2016) and Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity (ed., 2013) publish architects alongside arts, environmental, ethical, social and medical research. Recent publications include the film, Equal by Design (2016), 'Insecure Predictions', E-Flux Architecture, July 2018; 'Dissimilarity: Spinoza's geometric ratios and housing welfare', Spinoza's Philosophy of Ratio (2018); 'Housing biopolitics and care', Critical and Clinical Cartographies (2017) and 'Planetary Aesthetics', Landscape and Agency (2017); Her monographs, Space Geometry and Aesthetics: Through Kant and Towards Deleuze (2008) and Irigaray for Architects (2007), examine material spatial relations in philosophy.

Naomi Stead is Professor and Head of Department in Architecture at Monash University and Adjunct Professor in Architecture at the University of Queensland. Her research interests lie in architecture’s cultures of re/production, mediation, and reception. She is a widely-published architecture critic, and co-founder of Parlour, an activist group advocating for greater gender equity in architecture.