Focus areas

About us

Contestations of Gender and Democracy: Intersectional Perspectives on Experiencing Gender (ConGeD)
Interdisciplinary Gender Studies has been a unique feature of Bielefeld University since the 1980s and has an outstanding institutional location in the Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Studies (IZG). The interdisciplinary research training group GRK 2650 "Gender as Experience. The constitution and transformation of social modes of existence".
ConGeD builds on this and focuses on the current socio-political situation in which semantics of gender equality, democracy and plurality are no longer shared as a matter of course, but are contested.
The focus area combines empirical research on the transformation of gender relations (in the present and past, locally, (trans)nationally and globally) with the further theoretical and methodological development of interdisciplinary gender studies.

Starting point and research perspectives

The challenges to democracy, diversity and gender equality that can be observed worldwide pose new methodological and theoretical challenges for gender studies. The central question is how gendered modes of existence and their transformation have become a contested subject,
contrary to the assumption of a normative consensus on gender justice and plurality.
These contestations are examined by means of the body- and experience-based perspective on the constitution of gendered existence that characterises RTG 2650:
(1) ConGeD further develops the concept of embodied gender research by applying the physically anchored experience of gender and the transformation of social modes of existence manifested therein to new empirical fields. The aim is to further strengthen the impetus for interdisciplinary gender research already emanating from Bielefeld.
(2) ConGeD expands the research of RTG 2650 by relating the level of the bodily experience of gender to the perspective of global contestations of gender relations.
As a result, the changeability of forms of coexistence and social coherence - globally and locally - as well as changing modes of exclusion and inclusion of gendered existence are brought into focus anew. This includes interdependencies between the global 'North/South' and intersectional perspectives.

Cross-cutting issues

Intersectionality is a cross-cutting theme. Gendered modes of existence are considered in their entanglement with other dimensions of social inequality and discrimination,
for which there is particular expertise in Bielefeld inclusion and racism research, among others. Secondly, ConGeD has outstanding expertise in global, transnational,
post- & decolonial perspectives, including migration corridors in Southeast Asia, interdependencies in the Americas and global labour markets. The third cross-cutting theme is
perspectives on democracy research, including outstanding research on radical democracy theory and democracy in action.