Research
The Gender and Sexuality Research Centre is a collaborative community of social scientists researching the politics and sociology of gender, sexuality and sex across local and global contexts.
We recognise gender as expansive, relational and shaped by historical and geographical contexts, encompassing a diversity of identities, embodiments and expressions.
Our work advances critical understanding of how gender and sexuality both shape and are shaped by the social and political world we live in. Researchers in the centre draw on feminist, queer and activist methodologies to explore questions of power, inequality and lived experience across a wide range of contexts.
Key research themes
Drawing on intersectional, feminist, queer and trans theories and methodologies, our work engages with a wide range of key research themes:
- Social justice
- Global feminisms
- Bodies, identities, rights and mobilities
- Power, politics and everyday practices
- Digital lives and inequalities
Who we converse with
As a research centre we work in partnership with communities, policymakers and publics in all spheres committed to inclusive, feminist and queer futures. The Centre supports scholars across disciplines and career stages, and seeks to bridge academic empirical and theoretical research with policy engagement, community collaboration and public discourse.
We aim to act as a hub for gender and sexuality research across the University of Bristol and the United Kingdom. We are committed to creating an inclusive intellectual environment where complexity is welcomed, critique is generative and gender and sexuality are understood as expansive, situated and politically consequential.
Research methods we develop and deploy
Our research incorporates qualitative, quantitative and mixed methodological approaches. In particular, many of us use feminist and queer-informed approaches to develop intellectually rigorous work oriented towards gender and sexuality justice.
Our scholars’ work has been internationally recognised as world-leading and as contributing to different disciplinary conversations. We work on and publish journal articles, research reports, textbooks, monographs, newspaper articles and more, all with the aim of informing and shaping social understanding of gender and sexuality.
Find out more about who we are and what we work on.