The ZFG has identified for itself the central task of promoting international contacts and work relations between researchers with a focus on Gender Studies and Queer Studies. It is part of a diverse international network in the areas of research and teaching.

Since its inception, the ZFG has organized a loose series of English-language international conferences which engage advanced interdisciplinary problems in Gender Studies. The first was the 2001 conference “Societies in Transition – Challenges to Women’s and Gender Studies” (Conference Report, conference proceedings: Fleßner, Heike & Potts, Lydia [2002]: Societies in Transition – Challenges to Women’s and Gender Studies). This and the following conferences made a point of creating a discursive space for researchers, questions, and subjects outside of western discourses.

In recent years, conferences were organized together with international partners. In this way, the international aspect of the conferences went beyond the level of speakers and participants to become effective even during the conceptualization of the event.

New Borderlands or Cosmopolitanism from Below? (2012)
(among others with the African Centre for Migration and Society, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa)

Migrations of Knowledge: Potentials and Limits of Knowledge Production and Critique in Europe and Africa (2014)
(among others with the African Centre for Migration and Society, and the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, both at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa)

Queering Migration Studies (2016)

Kabbo ka Muwala (The Girl’s Basket) – Migration and Mobility in Contemporary Art in Southern and Eastern Africa(2016)
Traveling exhibition together with the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, the Makerere Art Gallery, and the Städtische Galerie Bremen

Find more events beginning in 2017 on the site of the lecture series “Gender on/ under Fire”

• University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
• Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman, Sudan
   
• University of Stavanger, Norway
• University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia
• University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic
• Cukurova University Adana, Turkey
   
• University of Kigali, Rwanda
• University of Nairobi, Kenya
• Makerere University, Mapala, Uganda
   
• University Mumbai, India
• Tata Institute for Social Science, Mumbai, India