The Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Denison University takes its mission to be three-fold: to foster a critical awareness of, and intellectual sensitivity to, content, method and real-life implications of the field.
First, we aim to engage students in the intellectual content of the discipline: women’s issues, the role of gender, and the intersections of gender and other politicized aspects of “identity,” including race, class, age, religion, disability, and sexuality.
Second, we strive to instill in students an appreciation of the holistic and interdisciplinary character of Women’s and Gender Studies. This is not just a question of content but also of method; Women’s and Gender Studies scholarship uses methods that are inflected by interdisciplinarity and transnationalism. Students explore how Women’s and Gender Studies treats gender issues from the perspectives of different disciplines, such as anthropology and sociology, art, biology, Black studies, communication, global health, international studies, music, philosophy, politics and public affairs, religion, etc. and how these issues manifest differently in different national and transnational contexts. Students thus develop their understanding of these issues by taking into account the intersections among this array of disciplines and sociocultural and geographic locations.
Third, we aim to show students the real-life and everyday implications of their academic engagement. That is, we challenge students to see the relationship between theory and practice: to see how the academic study of race, class, and gender locally and globally is informed by and has the power to transform real lives, both others’ and our own.