Equal Opportunity

The Cluster brings together researchers from more than 40 disciplines consolidating and integrating expertise from different scientific fields. Just as people are different from each other, disciplines too differ in their knowledge production, working practices, transmission of knowledge, the type of data they value, thinking and communicating styles, and interpretations. However, it is precisely this plurality of perspectives based on individual and disciplinary diversity that is central to the research of »Matters of Activity«. The composition of research teams and the interaction and cooperation between projects and people promotes and requires a culture that lives intercultural and interdisciplinary competence, and relies on diversity. Sharing knowledge, diverse sets of experiences, ways of thinking, and approaches form the basis for more options and creative solutions to problems in the Cluster’s research of a new culture of the material.

Diversity includes, but is not limited to aspects such as education, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, work experience, regional culture, social background, mental and physical abilities, ethnic background and language. However, these aspects or characteristics do not act in isolation, but overlap and reinforce each other. The attribution of values to differences and similarities and their hierarchization leads to inequalities that produce disadvantages and advantages in social structures. In dealing with equal opportunities and diversity at the Cluster, it is important to ask what conditions can be created and what strategies can be implemented to promote diversity and individual potential in the best possible way, to improve accessibility and participation of disadvantaged groups and to contribute to the reduction of inequality structures.

MoA addresses equal opportunity and diversity on three levels: human resources, support measures, and research and teaching.

Human Resources

Gender and diversity aspects are explicitly considered in the Cluster’s recruitment and hiring practices. This concerns both the people involved in reviewing and assessing candidates and the pool of candidates themselves through active recruitment and international job postings, for instance. The Cluster pursues gender equality and participation of underrepresented individuals across subject areas, qualification levels, composition of research teams, committees, and memberships to name but a few.

Support Measures

The promotion of women at all levels of academic qualification and in management positions, gender- and diversity-sensitive development and empowerment, and compatibility of family and career for all members are at the core of the Cluster’s equal opportunity support measures. The Cluster allocates at least 1% of its annual budget to equal opportunity activities with the aim of:

• empowering individuals and reducing existing disadvantages
• recognizing and accommodating intersectionalities, individual differences and differing needs
• supporting a family friendly workplace through flexible arrangements on working hours, place of work and childcare, for instance
• increasing female and other underrepresented researchers’ involvement in collaborative research projects, publications and conferences to strengthen their national and international visibility
• creating and coordinating career counselling, specific training programs in leadership and management skills, grant applications, peer-to-peer mentoring and networking opportunities
• promoting the careers of female and other underrepresented researchers across all status groups and subject areas
• facilitating intercultural awareness- and skill-building measures
• encouraging participatory processes at all levels that contribute to a holistic and resource-oriented organizational learning

MoA is a partner of METIS that links research alliances with its information platform and supports women in academia and family-friendly working environments.

Research and Teaching

The reflection of gender and diversity in research and teaching is significant both in terms of content and methodology. This level asks, for instance, what impact gender and other categories of difference have on research questions, research materials, and research findings. To rethink matter as an active material provokes both a new theory and practice of the material. Focusing on the inner activity of materials with an interdisciplinary approach has the potential not only to reveal, but to alter historical dichotomies – nature/culture, body/mind, material/symbolic - and their prevalent gendered implications in the digital age: passive feminine material and active masculine virtuality. To enable dynamic and open intermediate spaces that transcend, rethink and de-standardize the dualistic logic and its legitimization. MoA’s research aims to make significant contributions to the contemporary fields of new materialism, agential realism, feminist technoscience, and Anthropocene criticism, which have all emerged from feminist theory and gender studies. The Cluster’s research asks and analyses how an understanding of active materials may break down such historical associations of passivized materiality, embodiment, and femininity.