Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Zentrum für Transdisziplinäre Geschlechterstudien

Research Training Group: "Gender as a Category of Knowledge"

 

Our research training group for doctoral students, called the Graduiertenkolleg in German, was generously supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) from 2005 to 2013. Through the end of 2013, we were pleased to offer fifteen PhD students grants and two post-doctoral fellows support to continue their doctoral research at HU resp. additional projects. Moreover, the research group was able to include another 15 doctoral students as associates and to integrate them into the research program. Many of those sponsored have been able to advance their academic career and have started working at post-doc positions or as professors.

The research group understood gender as a category of central importance in the formation of the disciplines in the arts and sciences as well as in the knowledge those disciplines have to offer. The research group examined the relevance of gender for the production of knowledge, its role in the formation of concepts as well as its cross-disciplinary influence. The inclusion of disciplinary gender categories made it necessary to exercise caution in relying on the heuristic separation of "sex" and “gender.” The central endeavor was to pursue an approach that distinguished a cultural system of gender relations from the binary understanding of sex, typically found in biological and other scientific discourses. This was intended to examine the parallel growth and change of cultural, political, and social understandings of gender in comparison to biological understandings.

The research training group sought to identify common features in the history of science (especially the history of medicine) and the history of gender research. In the process, the historical dimension of gender in the history of knowledge was brought into focus. Neither a history of the sciences nor a history of gender can be told without mentioning the images of gender and gender codes embedded in the history of knowledge.

For further information about the research training group and individual research projects please consult the group's website:

www.gender.hu-berlin.de/de/graduiertenkolleg (English)