The Centre for Gender and Diversity

Centre profile

The Centre for Gender and Diversity is a research initiative of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Our primary mission is to develop research projects about gender as a symbolic, cultural system. Gender may be understood as a process in which cultural scripts of masculinity and femininity are enacted and performed. Gender strongly impacts on social processes of inclusion and exclusion, while intersecting with affiliated categories of difference such as age, religion, sexuality, disability, ethnicity and nationality. The scripts for the performance of social identities continually redefine each other.

The Centre for Gender and Diversity analyses these intersections, focusing on the arts. In our view, the arts vitally contribute to the recycling and transformation of behavioural scripts. We study art forms from high culture and popular culture, i.e. fiction, poetry, film, photography, life writing, the performing arts, and children’s media.

While we are a humanities group, our interest in art as a shaping social force implies that we cross the divide between the humanities, the social sciences, and the life sciences, not just in the formulation of our research questions, but also in the selection of our methodological tools and in our choice of research partners.

Besides engaging in innovative research, we also teach courses on gender and diversity at Maastricht’s University College (UCM) and in the FASoS BA and MA programmes in Arts and Culture.

You can access the website of the centre here