Education That Matters: Make A Difference with WGSS!
Dept. of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, 4300 Centennial Hall, (608) 785-8357. Or email Deb Hoskins, Chair of WGSS.
GENDER is a society's ideas about what it means to be male or female. Gender works with with other ideas like RACE, CLASS, SEXUAL ORIENTATION, to shape our lives. It influences how we think about relationships. It structures our decisions about work and determines how much money we are likely to make. It disrupts health diagnoses and treatment. It stigmatizes behaviors and actions. It even determines what we eat, wear, and buy.
And it has always generated action and organized movements seeking equality, worldwide.
The
Department of WGSS enacts
the Wisconsin Idea: that universities should produce knowledge
and educate students in ways that serve real people. We study and
teach on the lives of women, men, and sexual or gender identity
minorities. We examine the ways that race, social class, age, and
other socially constructed hierarchies connect to gender to
impact people's real lives. We study how social change works and
what social justice might look like. We use and teach students to
use academic skills to make social change. We maintain the connection
between theory and practice, issues and advocacy, throughout our
curricula and in all our programs.
Our programs include:
- our major in Women's Studies, designed to prepare you well either for graduate school or work in a range of fields, emphasizing collaborative leadership and problem-solving from the workplace and community level to international arenas
- our minor (opens in MS Word) in Women's Studies, emphasizing service-learning, internships, and involvement that puts learning into action
- on-campus events for students, faculty, staff, and the La Crosse community
- our student organizations, WSSA (wiss-ah), and Students for Choice, a member of NARAL's Pro-Choice Wisconsin
- the Self-Sufficiency Program that prepares low-income parents for college
- the Faculty Seminar on Teaching For Diversity (working with CATL's Inclusive Excellence)
- WGSS is a partner of the American Association of University Women. Benefits for students are many: see here.
- and this website, with links to a variety of resources for women faculty at UW-L
In the tradition of Women’s Studies and its sister disciplines, our courses approach problems and issues from interdisciplinary perspectives. They enhance courses on women, gender, and sexuality issues crosslisted in the traditional disciplines, and provide students with numerous opportunities to integrate their learning across their baccalaureate degree.
Dept. of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, 4300 Centennial Hall, (608) 785-8357. Or email Deb Hoskins