What is Women’s and Gender Studies?

One of Albion’s three interdisciplinary majors, Women’s and Gender Studies examines gender as a social construction and a lived reality. Drawing on the knowledge and methodologies associated with a number of different disciplines, it explores how gender shapes and is shaped by history, culture, nationality, systems of representation, and institutions of knowledge. The program also focuses on the lives of women, both past and present, in the American and global context, and their active involvement in making the world.

  2007-2008 Women’s and Gender Studies Committee

Major in Women’s and Gender Studies.

 Carefully designed to develop students’ analytical skills, the major allows students a significant amount of freedom to pursue their interests and passions even as it trains them to be canny critical readers of gender. The major requirements ensure not only that students will have a solid foundation in feminist and gender theory but also that they spread their classes among five areas of concentration—Self Making, Historical Contexts, Representations, Global Perspectives, and Institutions or Systems of Knowledge. Each of these categories comprises classes from a range of disciplines from which students choose.

What do students of Women’s and Gender Studies do?

They do, well, anything. Equipped with the critical thinking, reading, and writing skills valued in any profession, students of Women’s and Gender Studies pursue, among other things, law, public policy, teaching, research, and medicine. Just this past year, we awarded the first annual Rees Fellowship, an annual fellowship intended to support female students interested in elected office, in order to cover the costs of sending a student to the Women’s Leadership Program in Washington, D.C.

For more information please contact us.

                                                                                                                                                                             Dr. Trisha Franzen