International Conference „GenderChange in Academia“

Re-mapping the fields of work, knowledge, and politics from a gender perspective

International Conference at the Georg-August-University of Goettingen
13 to 15 February 2009

The conference invites international as well as national speakers and participants, from research, practice, and gender politics, to discuss new directions of research, knowledge, and gender politics and the intersections of these fields. The starting point shall be the current re-modelling of the European Academic space by the Bologna process, aiming at the homogenization of European Academia, and expressing itself in huge processes of re-structuring that differ between the national academic landscapes. From a gender perspective, relevant changes will occur in three dimensions:

First Dimension: Work and Careers
Working conditions and academic trajectories will be re-shaped for both academic and administrative staff. Entrepreneurial elements of steering processes, outsourcing, lean management, pervasive competition on all levels – between staff, scholars, students, universities, countries – and new patterns of acknowledgement and reward are currently leading to a thorough organizational change in Academia.

Second Dimension: Knowledge Production on Gender
These organizational changes will affect knowledge production on gender, as well as gender curricula. Criteria of evaluation, professionalization of gender competences, the relations of basic and applied research, increasing claims for inter- and trans-disciplinary research, and the struggles to integrate gender aspects into the newly shaped BA- and MA- Curricula are some of the aspects that will influence and characterize the future of gender knowledge and the ways it is produced.

Third Dimension: Gender Politics and Diversity Management
These organizational changes will provide a profound change for gender politics in Academia. Self-steering processes meet instruments of anti-discrimination politics; instruments of equality politics have to be adapted, re-shaped, or invented; complex processes of re-structuring afford an appropriately complex understanding of gender. Furthermore a shift towards diversity management challenges gender politics as well as organizational development.