Research and Research Development

The MvBZ supports interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, collaborative and networking research projects in the field of Gender Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. The MvBZ also develops and conducts research projects of its own. We develop plans for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary projects and networks in which Gender Studies researchers from various departments can participate. The center also intends to initiate international projects with the aim of creating a Gender Studies network within Europe and beyond. Prospective focus areas include:

  • Transnational, transregional, and transcultural gender relations
  • Bodies, sexualities, and biopolitics
  • Digital public sphere(s) and gender orders
  • Subjectivity, power, emotions, and affects
  • Feminist theory, theories of diversity/intersectionality

International Conference „Ecologies of Gender. Ecologies of Gender. Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn“

The international conference “Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn” brings together cutting-edge research on ecology and sustainability in both the social sciences and the environmental humanities. The focus will be exploring how the myriad theoretical approaches that merge in the titular “nonhuman turn” – such as the new materialism, speculative realism, object-oriented theory, and cultural animal studies – provide conceptual and theoretical means for understanding contemporary transformations of gender and nature relations.

Research Accompanying the German Research Foundation (DFG) Project “Gender Open, A Repository for Gender Studies”

The purpose of the GenderOpen project is to create an electronic platform on which Gender Studies publications and other sources of knowledge can be made permanently and freely accessible and stored for the long term. This will make it easier for researchers and other interested parties to find Gender Studies publications, view them in only a few clicks, and use them for their work. At the same time, it gives authors and opportunity to publicize their Gender Studies research findings on the platform, opening them up to more rapid and targeted academic attention.

Research into the Papers of Margherita von Brentano

The Margherita von Brentano Center is planning projects related to academically analyzing and publishing the papers of its namesake.

German Research Foundation (DFG) Project: “Genealogy and Belonging: Concepts of Reproduction, Descent and Kinship in Post-Kantian Naturphilosophie”

Relations of reproduction and kinship, which are constituted synchronically and diachronically and thus always have a genealogical dimension, structure the social world in a fundamental way. Thereby these relations are subject to cultural, social and political conflict and engagements. In particular, the decades around 1800 are shaped by an extensive problematization of relations of reproduction, descent/lineage and kinship. The aim of the project is to systematically reconstruct the philosophical and scientific articulations of the topics reproduction, lineage, and kinship in post-Kantian philosophy of nature, and to determine their impact for the epistemic, social and cultural transformations of the period.