Situated in the critical genealogies of feminist methodologies, research in the Department develops further the strong methodological traditions of intersectional feminist, antiracist, queer and trans ethnography. Using multiple methods, including but not limited to narrative methods, discourse-, image- and text analysis, archival research, quantitative methods and critical big data studies, research in the Department is able to capture how social experiences, power asymmetries, embodiment and action inform categories such as gender, femininity, masculinity, sexuality, race, ethnicity and class, as discourses, practices and relationships and as historicized and contextual phenomena.

Conversations and contestations around the very subject of gender studies have brought with them a field in constant and fruitful transformation. The Department of Gender Studies in Lund has had a crucial role in these conversations in a Swedish context – expanding and debating what it is that we study when we do gender studies; from contestations of the terms of sex and gender, to the intersectional invitation to include other processes of differentiation in our analytical frames but also in our problem formulations. 

Recognizing how the regulation of gender and sexuality is located at the heart of state and nation-building, today and historically, researchers in the Department bring forward critical cutting-edge explorations of the impact and meaning of gender(s) and sexuality/ies within and across situated contexts in both the global North as well as the global South, while being aware of the great heterogeneity within these wide categories. Engaging critically with binary understandings, enactments and experiences in everyday sites, as well as in norms and legislative frameworks, the study of gender(s) and sexuality/ies in the Department stretches from exploring subjectivities, relationships and knowledges, to studying gender and sexuality as modes of geopolitical boundary-making, (inter)national regimes, and as tools for connectivity in and across empirically distinct sites.

With a critical approach to borders of different kinds, both strict disciplinary delimitations as well as national and social boundary-drawing, researchers in the Department develop research agendas for conducting intersectional, transdisciplinary and transnational research. With a transdisciplinary profile, a mixture of different research topics, theories and methodologies is allowed to enrich and strengthen each other and approaches from the humanities fruitfully challenges and expands social scientific insights and explanatory models. Inspired by the critical traditions of exploring epistemologies of hope and change, research in the Department engages with the possibility of envisioning other futures by thinking collectively on how agency, power, and resistance shape the world here and now, through locally situated research as well as transnational approaches, nurturing collaborative networks.