Gender research in Norway has traditionally been strong on subjects such as the labour market and the welfare state, family and care, health, violence, education and rural development. Tromsø Public Library. Photo: iStock by Getty Images.
Gender research is an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field of research.
Research that studies the implications of how gender is interpreted takes many shapes and names; women’s studies, feminist research, critical men’s studies, masculinity research, queer, gay and lesbian studies, research on gender equality and more. In Norway there has been a shift from the concept “women’s studies" established in the 1980s towards “women’s studies and gender research", or just “gender research". The shift has come with the changing focus from women as an oppressed group to gender as relational, constructed and culturally rooted.
For the sake of brevity the concept “gender research” will be used on this website and will cover a large and diverse field.
Gender research in Norway has traditionally been strong on subjects such as the labour market and the welfare state, family and care, health, violence, education and rural development. It is well represented in disciplines such as history, literature, sociology, pedagogy, medicine, law, theology and technology. The interdisciplinary approach has been important from the beginning, and today questions of ethnicity, sexuality, and race are crosscutting issues. Gender research is also a set of various theoretical, ethical and methodological topics.
Most of the research and teaching in Norway is carried out in traditional academic departments and institutions within humanities, social sciences and other fields such as technology and medicine.
Here you will find an overview of the Norwegian infrastructure for gender research including research units, link to journals and publications on gender research, networks and gender researchers in Norway.
Read more about Norwegian gender research nationally and abroad at Kilden genderresearch.no.