Research Training Group

The main goal of the graduate school is to enable doctoral candidates to complete a high-quality and innovative doctoral thesis within a funding period of three years and to prepare them for national and international academic and non-academic careers in the best possible manner. To begin with, the focus is on the doctoral candidate’s excellent training in their academic discipline, which will be assured through close supervision by the PIs (Principal Investigators = applicants). Simultaneously, the graduate school equips the doctoral candidates with the tools to incorporate social and bodily experiences of being gendered in the world in their research by drawing on different disciplinary perspectives. Hereby they can incorporate the intersection of different dimensions of existence (class, ethnicity, citizenship, sexuality, health, age, religion) into their research and develop corresponding methodologically and theoretically inspired dissertations.

In this interdisciplinary network, junior researchers can explore the complex experiential space of gender in depth. To constructively deal with conflicts and contradictions that can occur when dealing with perspectives and materials/data from other disciplines, it is important to systemtatically link subject-specific approaches to the materiality of gender within the different teaching and research formats and within the network of fellow students and participating researchers. 

By considering the bodily-physical dimension of social modes of existence and their significance for the transformation of gender orders, the doctoral candidates and postdoctoral researchers address specific research questions that have received little attention within gender studies up till now. Central topics - such as socialization, care, family, school, vocational training, division of labor, violence, health/illness, sports, migration, organizations, art, literature, music - are to be fundamentally rethought and researched with a focus on bodily-physical experience.

The innovative insights into gender, gender relations, and gender orders that are to be gained through this approach qualify the young researchers for both academic and non-academic professional careers. Particularly in the fields of education, professional training, and in the health sector, but also in organizations in other fields, there is a demand for experts who know how to incorporate the bodily-material level of gendered experiences to solving social and political problems without falling back into an essentialist view (e.g., in human resources and organizational development). The competences of interdisciplinary and transcultural work, which are systematically taught in the graduate school, make a significant contribution to the competitiveness of Graduate School graduates in the job market. In addition to the doctorate within a discipline, the graduates will have interdisciplinary knowledge about gender, gender relations, and gender orders after graduating.