GWS commitment to diversity

GWS at Connecticut College is also deeply committed to diversity.

Women's Studies programs emerged in the 1970s to create spaces within the academy for the emergence of women faculty, the nurturing of women's education (and of young men's in their constructions of healthy masculinities) and the creation of feminist knowledge.

Equally important, in its serious engagement over the past forty years with complex questions of race, class, age, and religion, Gender and Women's Studies is a discipline that models the most advanced thinking about what we call "diversity," which encompasses the "pluralism" of represented groups, the differences of power and access between the most and least marginalized populations in the cultures, and the need for vital debates from a range of intellectual positions within the academy on the most pressing intellectual and ethical issues of the day.

GWS has increasingly drawn students of color and lesbian and gay students into our major and minor and has provided an intellectual home for faculty of color, lesbian and gay faculty, and women faculty on campus. In our core courses, GWS professors are committed to creating constructive spaces to discuss human differences, especially those embedded in systems of power, in ways that all students find liberating.

Last Modified: Wednesday, May 21, 2008 16:40