Our Key Measures

The Gender and Diversity Office (hereafter GDO) is situated at the interface of research and administration, in support of diversity in three arenas of action:

• The individual researcher’s needs will be a focus in order to promote equal opportunities and counterbalance disadvantages;
  
  
• Existing structures will be scrutinized regarding the situating of individual needs in broader systemic (in)equalities, so as to enable addressing changes in higher education policies;
  
  
• Developing measures in situating Critical Diversity Literacy and Intersectionality Approaches as part of good practice in the research and administration structures of the Cluster.

The two conceptual mainstays of the GDO are intersectionality theory and critical diversity literacy, which will be consistently mobilised as aligned with the Cluster’s principles (multiplicity, reflexivity and relationality) in its academic and political purviews of reconfiguring African Studies.

The GDO cooperates extensively with the different organs of the Cluster:  BIGSAS, the Bayreuth Academy of African Studies, the Cluster’s Research Sections and Knowledge Lab, structures for Early Career Research and to certain extents the Cluster’s Digital Research Environment. The Director of the Gender and Diversity Office also cooperates with the Institute of African Studies, the GeQuInDi Network and the Diversity Representative of the University Administration.

The Gender and Diversity Office is mindful of the heterogeneous African (continental and diasporic) contexts in relation to the institutional settings and research specificities at the University of Bayreuth. Hence the following are areas of scrutiny, reflection, liaison and action.

• Diversity parameters in the German university equity context are often chiefly concerned with gender and disability,
  while race is frequently side-lined and intersectional dimensions are eclipsed. These are assessed in the given institutional frameworks in order to cooperatively develop intersectional vocabularies and measures at the levels of administration, research cooperation and teaching.
  
  
• The university as an organizational space demonstrates an accretion of functions, people, discourses, histories, cultural perspectives, hierarchies, research interests and output which produce (and are produced by) knowledges (Mohanty, 2003 and Ahmed, 2012). Mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion have to be analyzed in intersectional and critical diversity literacy frameworks and potentially divisive boundaries identified in order to implement counter-measures.
  
  
• Intended measures include anti-discrimination training across status groups and events focusing on Critical Diversity Literacy and Intersectionality Theory (workshops, lectures series and conferences with connected output).