Academics
This program is built on the understanding that gender is a crucial category of human knowledge and action. Women's Studies recognizes the complexity of human lives as gender interconnects with sexuality, race, class, ability, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and age in the constitution of experience and identities. It, thus, seeks to provide insights which lead one beyond older and more exclusionary theories and practices.
The program is at its core interdisciplinary, integrating knowledge from different disciplines to encourage critical engagement with all forms of experience from a feminist standpoint. Interdisciplinary study leads students to question frameworks, concepts and methods, enabling them to understand better both the past and the contemporary world, while envisioning a future beyond traditional roles and inequities.
By emphasizing interdisciplinary, the program seeks to help students acquire the tools to analyze critically the societal, cultural, global and personal issues that shape their lives and challenge them to look at these issues from multiple perspectives. It also encourages them to reflect on the ways in which knowledge is produced in within different and oftentimes unrecognized systems of oppression, and to examine categories that are presented as natural and permanent in their cultural and historical context.
Finally, the program strives to help its students acquire the skills of critical analysis and imagine alternatives that challenge the naturalizing of inequalities.