1 JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE RESEARCH IN ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY Copyright © The Author(s), 2010 Volume 1(1): 1-10 ISSN 2068 – 0317 http://compaso.ro Gendering research: from skepticism to trust General contexts, local comments Laura Grünberg 1 Abstract The article presents the current volume in relation to the context of gender research and education in present-day Romania. The author discusses, from a participant’s perspective, the development and the state of gender studies in Romania, while addressing questions such as ‘why study gender?’ – and how should gender be studied. Keywords Gender, gender sensitive research, gender studies Introduction For more than 15 years I have « done » and lived feminism in Romania: as an activist within a Romanian NGO, as a teacher in Gender Studies, as a woman, wife and mother in post communist Romania. The years spent in reading and doing feminism(s) in Romania have been a long series of personal lessons about innocence and pragmatism, enthusiasm and bureaucracy, successes and failures, contradictions between theoretic and applied feminism, about women, femininities, women movement, Balkan and post communism transition specificities. It was not always easy, comfortable to call myself ‘feminist’ in Romania: ironical smiles, self imposed censoring when expressing in public feminist views (e.g. avoiding, when possible, pronouncing the term feminism, paying more attention than usual to ‘appropriate’ appearances), visible skepticism and marginalization within the academic community. Lately the climate has changed in Romania as it was already the case in many other parts of the world. From a stage of a 1 Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, University of Bucharest, Romania, lauragrunberg@yahoo.com