Women’s and Gender Studies is an interdisciplinary program dedicated to enabling students to think critically about systems of power and to imagine and work to create alternative futures. In this program, students explore how intersecting ideas about gender, colonialism, race, class, sexuality and the body shape experience, ideology, institutions, and culture.
Our program is relevant to a variety of careers and will prepare you to find employment in community service agencies, health centres and non-governmental organizations; to work towards policy change locally and beyond; and to become human rights advocates and public intellectuals in a variety of media. They are also an excellent preparation for pursuing advanced degrees in the legal, teaching and medical professions. For more about careers look here.
Students will have an opportunity to pursue their own research interests through a variety of courses, and to gain experience with the theoretical frameworks and feminist methodologies that shape a growing field of study. Many courses have a seminar or lecture-seminar component, which encourages peer learning and the development of valuable transferable skills. We also provide an exciting practicum that offers students the chance to work with community organizations, gain experience relevant to future careers, and to reflect on how these experiences transform their thinking.
Overall, students are invited to develop a critical awareness of how power relations affect cultural expression, human interaction, ecological systems, and movements for social change and decolonization. With stimulating courses that range from critical analysis of beauties, bodies, and cultures, to scholarship on sexualities and 2SLGBTQIA+ experiences, to Indigenous self determination through film, to critiques of forced migration and displacement, to feminist perspectives on masculinities, our focus is on feminist explorations of the ways gender intersects with different variables to produce the complexity of lived experience.
The Centre of Women’s and Gender Studies is a diverse program, with courses taught by instructors with a variety of areas of expertise. Our classes are open to all students and encourage them to explore the ways gendered experience is produced as a culturally variable and historically contingent category. Many students find our courses among the most illuminating of all they take at Brock University.
