Nexus

I was fortunate enough to receive a bursary to attend the 2025 TASA Conference. As a current PhD student this allowed me to attend without concern for the financial impact.

My current research broadly explores “gender ideology” and anti-gender mobilisations in Victoria. While I presented on my Honours project that focused on the representations of trans children in gender-critical and mainstream discourse.

This was my first TASA Conference and the first time I had presented. I primarily attended the Gender and Sexualities stream of panels and sessions but also enjoyed the theory and media writing workshops. Along with being in awe of the breadth and depth of sociological knowledge on display, I was most pleasantly surprised by the collegial atmosphere.

I presented to an encouraging and warm room. I am grateful to the colleagues for their thoughtful questions and very constructive feedback. The PhD experience, to date, has been a fairly solitary pursuit, so to share my work with others was very encouraging and motivating.

The range of topics covered in the sessions, panels and workshops to listen, learn and engage with was impressive and I had to make some hard choices in deciding between concurring sessions at times. As an activist-researcher I appreciated the panel on academic freedom and Palestine. The panel spoke about the hard choices and ramifications of those choices within the neoliberal university. It was heartening to hear that other’s experiences are so similar to my own.



Finally, the chats over snacks, lunch and coffees with both my fellow students and more senior researchers from varied sub-disciplines were unexpectedly pleasant sites of knowledge transfer whether about the broader academy or specific topics. Thank you TASA for the bursary.