Centre for Gender and Diversity

Founded in September 1998, the CGD has a nearly 25-year tradition of creating synergy between the Three As: Academic Research, Art, and Activism. Our research projects are interdisciplinary, embedded, and conduct knowledge creation with the participation of partners. CGD scholarship charts the symbolic systems of the arts, cultural production, and language use. It maps and transforms the interactions of schemata for masculinity and femininity with social difference categories of race, class, age, ability, sexuality, religion, residency status, as well as multitude emerging factors that influence personhood/subject positions. The overarching CGD intellectual mission is the historical and contemporary study of the complex interactions between these intersecting vectors of power differentials, in the tradition of feminist theories and methods of intersectionality.

In our research on a wide variety of minoritised subjects we do not lose sight of how intersectional approaches have been developed primarily by Black and of color feminists to account for multiple forms of oppression. In an interdisciplinary fashion, we seek to contribute to the development of intersectionality by combining empirical and sociological data and philosophies of embodiment with a humanities approach to the study of the arts: including literature, life-writing, performance, visual culture, digital culture, heritage, and cultural institutions.

Our theoretical ambition is to reassess the humanism at the core of intersectionality. We do so through the key question we ask of these art forms interfacing with society: what composes the Human? Here, there, now, and then? This brings our scholarship to debates in science (technicity), ethics of medicine and care (personhood), to the exigencies of enslavement (coloniality), and to the realm of nature (animality). Hence, we also contribute to Critical Life Studies that grapples with the multiple ‘turns’ (e.g. new materialism, Anthropocene, affective) and multiplying field ‘studies’ (trans, queer, critical race, postcolonial, animal, age, disability) in critical theory that interrogate the ontological hold of the Human in the face of global crises of climate and social justice.

Dear CGD members and invited guests,

We heartily invite you to the 25^th Anniversary Symposium of the Centre for Gender and Diversity! 

In recognition of reaching this institutional milestone, the theme of this jubilee symposium is Intergenerational Feminisms.
We are delighted to welcome you to our faculty in Maastricht over 21-22 September 2023 for an evening reception followed by a full day of knowledge sharing, panel discussions, and celebration. The full program will be posted online closer to the date, but already confirmed speakers include Iris van der Tuin, Payal Arora, Caroline Bassett, Looi van Kessel, Setarah Noorani, Garjan Sterk, Mineke Bosch, and Maaike Meijer. 
Please find the invitation on the right side, and share it with your networks. We welcome any past, present, or future CGD member and collaborator, and those who want to join a dialogue on intergenerational feminisms. 
At the bottom of the invitation you will find a registration link. Please indicate which events you will be able to attend so that we can make the necessary arrangements. Space is limited, so we ask you to also notify us if you have to change your plans.