What is Gender Studies?

 

What is Gender Studies?

Gender Studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines how gender operates on personal, political, social, cultural, psychological, and historical levels. Here you can find information about gender terminology, and places in Norway that do research on gender:

History of the NTNU GenderHub

 

History of the NTNU GenderHub

(by Elisabeth Stubberud and Sara Orning)

 

Sociology and Gender Studies are fields with much in common, for example, a focus on power relations with a particular view to social inequality. But even if many gender researchers have their background in sociology (as well as many other disciplines), there is not necessarily much gender research at the core of sociology today. And sociologists and gender researchers do not automatically communicate either - not when they belong to different departments and even faculties, as they do at NTNU. 

This was the backdrop against which the NTNU sociologists Ingvill Stuvøy and Jorid Hovden initiated a network for gender and feminist theory in the mid-2000s. This became a low-threshold, interdisciplinary network that ran for several years, until it became transformed in 2016 when the Faculty of Humanities financed a four-year network coordinator position at part of a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Gender Studies in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture.

Sara Orning, who filled the position as coordinator, took over the baton from Stuvøy and Hovden and, in cooperation with them and her colleagues at the Centre for Gender Studies, built the NTNU GenderHub. The thought behind the GenderHub was to create an interdisciplinary network for gender researchers as well as researchers and students who work with or are interested in themes, theories, or perspectives to do with gender. The aim of the GenderHub is to create a meeting place where we can build research collaborations, recruit students, exchange knowledge of gender research across disciplines, and develop ideas and inspire each other.