Profile and research clusters

The Competence Centre for Gender Studies in Transformation continues the long tradition of gender studies at the University of Kassel and offers a platform for the further institutionalization and development of gender studies at the University of Kassel. It pursues three central cross-cutting themes: Research, Orders and Critique.

Gender research at the University of Kassel is characterized by its interdisciplinary, intersectional and international orientation. It combines perspectives from the social sciences, humanities and cultural studies with approaches from technology, law and economics. The research takes into account interdependencies between gender and other social categories such as class, ethnicity, sexuality or disability and is committed to transnational networking of scientific cooperation.

The competence center serves as an interface for researchers from various disciplines, promotes young researchers and contributes to the visibility of gender research within and outside the University of Kassel. It makes an important contribution to the analysis and reflection of social transformation processes from a gender studies perspective.

Research: The Competence Center examines gender as a category of knowledge and considers both individual and collective orders of knowledge that structure gender relations and are structured by gender relations. This includes cognitive processes as well as social structures and discourses through which gender is constructed and reproduced. The aim is to analyze in an interdisciplinary way how knowledge about gender is created, communicated and changed.

Orders: Gender is deeply embedded in social, political, economic and legal orders. The competence center researches how gender as a structural principle influences, stabilizes or transforms social and institutional processes. Historical and contemporary processes of order formation are analyzed, particularly with regard to their gendered and gendering mechanisms and normative effects.

Critique: Gender studies in Kassel pursues a perspective that is critical of power, domination and inequality. It not only examines the effects of gendered structures, but also reflects on its own epistemological constitution. The aim is to make social processes visible, to question patterns of interpretation and to develop emancipatory perspectives.