Gender in Motion.
Change and Persistence in Gender Relations

The Graduate Research Programme ‘Gender in Motion’ focused on current developments in gender relations in the mid-2000s. Although such developments have also been observed in other historical periods, their defining feature is a paradoxical coexistence of change and persistence.

The interdisciplinary nature of the Graduate Research Programme allowed for a variety of analyses: empirical and theoretical, historical and contemporary, across a wide range of subject areas and fields of research, such as family studies, sexuality, migration, theatre, and the sociology and history of medicine. The aim is to continually relate these different approaches to one another and to gain potential shared insights into both historical and contemporary processes. In doing so, it is also important to establish links with global processes of transformation. In view of the renewed popularity of certain sociobiological explanations regarding the immutability of gender differences and hierarchies, the sex-gender and nature-culture questions are also to be re-examined against the backdrop of current debates.

Events

2006

| Methods in Gender Studies
Summer School organised by the Swiss Research Training Groups in Gender Studies, University of Basel

2007

| Gender – Genre – Geschlecht: Travelling Concepts
Summer School, nationwide research training group event, University of Bern   

| Hegemonic Masculinity
Workshop with Raewyn Connell (The University of Sydney)

2008 

| Writing a PhD Thesis
Workshop with Otto Kruse  (Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Winterthur)    

| Future and Career Planning
Workshop with Lisbeth Hurni (Coaching Hurni, Bern) and Andrea Maihofer

| A la recherche du genre
International closing conference of the Swiss-wide research training programme, University of Geneva, Keynote: Veena Das (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore) “Violence, Gender and Subjectivity: Reading the Ethnographic Record”