Keynotes

Marcella Corsi

Full Professor of Political Economy at Sapienza Università di Roma, where she teaches “Political Economy” at the undergraduate level and “Feminist Economics” in the graduate programme. She is among the founders of the web magazine InGenere.

Since March 2017, she has served as Editor-in-Chief of the International Review of Sociology and as coordinator of Minerva – Laboratorio su diversità e disuguaglianze di genere. Since July 2025, she has been President-Elect of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE).

Debora Spini

Debora Spini teaches at New York University in Florence and at Syracuse University in Florence. She taught at NYU Shanghai and at University of Florence. Spini’s current research focuses on religious groups in the public sphere, secularisation/post secularisation, monotheism and violence, and the rise of authoritarian populism, with a specific focus on gender issues as well as on the role of religion.

Among her more recent publications, the following essays and book chapters:  Gender, citizenship, religious identity: innovative approaches to autonomy and political agency, in I. Valenzi, a cd., Women, Agency and Religion. Social and Legal Issues in the Mediterranean Public Space, Routledge, 2025; The Religious Legacy of and within Populism in  M. Bernhard, A. Kreppel, C. de la Torre, eds  Still the Age of Populism? Re-examining Theories and Concepts, Routledge 2024; Decolonising postsecularization, in «Annali di Studi Religiosi», 21, 2020, 167-179.

Costanza Hermanin

Costanza Hermanin is an EUI Research Fellow and Fulbright Schuman Scholar currently conducting comparative US-EU research on equal opportunity policies at UC Berkeley and Harvard. Her academic work focuses on EU politics, justice, and gender equality, backed by extensive teaching experience at prestigious institutions like Sciences Po and the College of Europe. Throughout her career, she has held significant institutional roles within the European Commission, the Italian Ministry of Justice, and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She is highly active in the political and social spheres as a co-founder and former Deputy Secretary of the Italian party +Europa. She is the founder and president of the NGO EquALL, dedicated to promoting a plural democracy.

Rosemary Hunter

The gendered politics of judicial knowledge: Stereotypical reasoning as a prompt for feminist rewriting
This keynote speech will discuss the persistence of problematic gender and intersectional-gender stereotypes in judicial reasoning as evidenced, in particular, in the feminist judgment projects. Feminist judgments have identified numerous ways in which women as legal subjects are constructed as bad, mad, untrustworthy, scheming or, conversely, as helpless and in need of judicial rescue. While masculine stereotypes are also in evidence, they tend to be more positive and less damaging. The important contribution made by feminist judgments in these cases is to disrupt judicial assumptions, inject empathy, compassion and feminist understanding into decision-making, and demonstrate the transformative effects of doing so. 

Rosemary Hunter is Professor of Socio-Legal Studies and Founding Head of Law at Loughborough University, UK. She is also one of the founders of the now-global feminist judgments movement. She was involved in the organisation of the UK, Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand Feminist Judgment Projects and co-edited their collections of judgments, and has advised and supported numerous other projects. She is a well-known feminist socio-legal scholar, and former chair of the RCSL Working Group on Gender and Law and of the UK Socio-Legal Studies Association. Her current research focuses on family justice and judging and the judiciary.

Susanne Baer 

On Political Pirates, and why Democracy needs Equality
Clearly, democracies around the world are under pressure, confronted with a polycrisis as the new normal. But notably, democracies do not just die. If at all, they are murdered. But more importantly, the threat is less direct, coming from today´s political pirates. There is a widespread “Backlash against Equality”, which the opening keynote discussion of the Viterbo conference focused on. But when democracies are transformed into legalist autocracies, with a decidedly ethno-racist and antifeminist program, we need to better understand how these political pirates operate. These days, they employ a flexible arsenal of strategies and concepts to not just do away with democracy that deserves the label. Instead, they capture democracy, not least by capturing freedom, or liberty, as one of democracy´s cornerstones. Along these lines, equality is disregarded or downsized to a formality, and notions of equality are limited to not unleash its potential, as “a crack in the wall” of dominance. Therefore, to protect democracy, it seems quite urgent to insist on equality as another cornerstone of the triangle of fundamental rights that matter. A prominent conversation at Viterbo circled around the diversity principle as one possible approach, and several panels explored strategies, practices, and concepts, looking for equality in so many places. How, then, and why does, again, equality matter today, for democracy?