The GRADE Center Gender is an interdisciplinary center located at the (Post)Graduate Academy GRADE of the Goethe University. Since 2016, the center promotes and supports scholars who pursue an empirical and/or theoretical gender-related question in their qualification project. The program is planned and coordinated by the CGC.
The target groups of the GRADE Gender program are advanced Master's students, doctoral candidates, and post-docs at Goethe University as well as from the RMU network who conduct research projects in or related to Gender Studies. GRADE Gender provides researchers in the early stages of their academic careers with a platform for exchange and discussion at the highest international level. At the same time, it provides the necessary support required to successfully complete an academic qualification project.
With a wide range of thematic and methodological events and workshops, networking activities, and the regular announcement of target-group-specific funding lines, GRADE Gender promotes and supports the development and discussion of qualification projects in exchange with peers, members of the Cornelia Goethe Center, as well as researchers from within Germany and abroad. The events of GRADE Gender serve not only for scientific exchange and the systematic further development of one’s own research projects, but also offer the opportunity to build stable collegial and international networks.
Programmatically, the internationally and interdisciplinarily oriented GRADE Center Gender focuses on theoretical and empirical dimensions of gender differences, gender orders, gender regimes, and gender relations, as well as on queer transgressions and the critical questioning of binary gender orders. It is about gender as a societal structural category, about symbolic constructions and codings of gender, as well as about the social regulations and societal relations in which they are embedded.
One of the challenging questions in gender studies is the intersectional perspective. Intersectional research owes significant impulses to Black Feminism and Critical Race Theory and forms the basis for critical diversity research, whose concepts find application in many fields outside of academia. Another challenge are inter- and transnational perspectives that further revisions of hegemonic (Western) paradigms and narratives. The aim is to think from the margins, include perspectives that have been previously excluded, and from there reassess facts and data and establish different connections.