Focus areas

ConGeD: Contestations of Gender and Democracy - Intersectional Perspectives on the Experience of Gender

Increasingly, democracy, diversity and gender equality are being called into question by various actors in different national and global contexts and universal rights to freedom and autonomy are being contested. Gender is at the centre of these anti-democratic policies.

The focus area Contestations of Gender and Democracy (ConGeD) addresses the question of how and why gendered modes of existence and their transformation have become a contested issue. With the interdisciplinary and intersectional perspective that characterises gender studies, which has been a unique feature of Bielefeld University since the 1980s and has an outstanding institutional location with radiance in the Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Studies (IZG), gendered modes of existence can be considered in their entanglement with other dimensions of social inequality and discrimination.