The aim of this project is to give students themselves a voice and to collect and evaluate their statements regarding the current range and relevance of gender studies and intersectionality, as well as their wishes for these, and to make them available to the public. On this basis, we decided to conduct qualitative, guideline-based interviews with students from various departments at Berlin universities and then analyzed them based on Mayring's content analysis (Mayring, 2010).

The selection of our interview partners was based on our existing contacts in the various specialist areas. Methodologically, we used peer-to-peer approaches to conduct the interviews, according to which interviewees speak more openly and in greater depth about sensitive topics due to the perceived relative familiarity and shared experiences as if they did not perceive the interviewer as a peer (Byrne et al., 2015). In this respect, for our interviews we deliberately asked people from our circles of acquaintances with whom a peer relationship had already been established. Therefore, it is not an average group of interviewed students, but a clear bias is to be expected due to our circles of acquaintances.

In our interview requests and during the interviews, our interviewees were informed of the content and aim of our work. Each of them agreed to the interview voluntarily and was informed that they could stop and withdraw the interview at any time. Before publication, we provided the partners with the final work, including interviews and quotes, and obtained their consent for publication. To ensure the anonymity of the interviewees, we removed their names from the interviews and simply gave them numbers. For the quotes published on social media, we decided to use letters as quasi-initials instead of numbers and to mention the respective subject areas.

Originally, we had 13 interviews confirmed. One interview (no. 7, media and political communication) was only canceled late in the interview phase. However, we left it in the list of requested interviews for the sake of transparency. In the end, 12 interviews took place, each from one specialist area.

As with all qualitative surveys, it is not possible to draw conclusions about the general population due to the size of the sample. However, individual contexts and motivations of the students can be understood and therefore give us a deep and complex picture of their respective relationship to gender studies and intersectionality.

The guideline-based, written interviews were conducted via chat and then analyzed based on Mayring's content analysis. In order to identify similarities in the interviews, we inductively formed categories in several rounds and systematically analyzed them. As this work is not a completely scientific survey, but rather a flashlight-like illumination of the (interdisciplinary) significance and relevance of gender studies and intersectionality at Berlin universities, we decided not to link this survey to a theory. Rather, we used the categories as a basis for further discussion of this topic and hope to be able to contribute to the further development of gender studies.