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.