GenderLectures

The winter semester’s GenderLectures series 2024-2025 focuses on the intersection of gender, AI, and language/communication. While the study of language and gender has been well established since the 1970s, exploring topics such as the grammatical encoding of gender in the world’s languages, the impact of biological and social gender in the use of language and, more recently, the appropriate linguistic strategies to achieve gender-inclusive/sensitive communication, recent advances in AI have added new layers of complexity. We increasingly and routinely communicate through and with AI-powered machines, from (gendered) robots, chatbots or dematerialized entities such as large language models (such ChatGPT). AI serves not only as synthetic communication partner, but also as a research tool to explore the relationship between gender and language in new ways.

    The GenderLectures 2024-25 will cover topics including: (i) AI's role in gendered communication across different languages and mediums; (ii) the gendered identities assigned to AI, such as their voices and appearances; (iii) the presence of gender biases in the data used to train AI and in their outputs; and (iv) the societal benefits and research value of AI in fostering inclusive communication and addressing gender bias in various contexts.
    Speakers will approach these topics from diverse disciplines, including linguistics, computational linguistics, translation studies, robotics, sociology, and psychology, with lectures in English and German. This series is organized by TU Dresden’s GenderConceptGroup and the Chair of Romance Linguistics of the Faculty of Linguistics, Literature and Cultural Studies.

You can find a detailed schedule here

This summer semester’s Gender Lectures series is dedicated to health as an overarching category. As is customary, this inter- and transdisciplinary lecture series combines talks in which speakers from a variety of disciplines explore the interconnections between earth, the environment, body, sex and gender.

The importance of such an approach is evidenced by ongoing findings and diagnoses on the so-called Anthropocene. Following state-of-the-art research, the present geological era marked substantially by human intervention, especially by the capitalistic means of production, extraction, and consumption of the global North’s industrialized nations is in a catastrophic social and ecological state of health. 

Global consequences caused by climate change in the form of extreme weather conditions like floods and heatwaves deprive different groups of people and entire species of their means of existence to varying degrees. They lead to a reduction in biodiversity and, on a social level, to distributional battles fought over inhabitable landscapes and still arable farmland; battles that disproportionally affect women living in coastal regions of the global South who are oftentimes simultaneously excluded from participating in society and making their voices heard.
The contamination caused by plastic waste in the form of microplastics that both visibly and invisibly accumulate and remain in the soil and varying bodies of water serves as another example. Having been ingested through food, such toxic plastic particles take full effect in our bodies and disrupt hormonal processes, leading to traceable negative consequences on the reproductive health of humans and animals alike. To explore and recognize the complex interrelations between earth, environment, body, sex and gender is critical to gaining a comprehensive understanding of what health means and to enabling the development of micro- and macro-social solutions to and treatments of the problem.

Our speakers and their contributions invite us to approach health and gender issues from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives and backgrounds: biology, Islamic theology and religion, environmental sciences, economics, public health and medicine, local and regional studies, anthropology, sociology, technoscience, design & engineering, intersectionality, xenofeminism, trans-, queer-, and posthuman studies, as well as the performative arts. They may even encourage us to develop possible scenarios for a socially and ecologically just health care system and to transform the inequal status quo.

This lecture series is organized by the TU Dresden’s GenderConceptGroup and represents a collaboration between our School of Engineering Science, our School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and our Faculty of Medicine. 

Click here for the lecture schedule.