VICTORIA MARTINEZ
Associate News Editor
After 18 years as a department, women’s and gender studies is transforming into a program this year.
Students will still be able to take honours, four and three year degrees in WGST, but the courses offered have changed. The focus of the program will be separated into gender, sexuality and cultural studies and transnational feminisms.
To reduce overlap with courses offered by other programs, eight courses were replaced with more current topics. Popular courses will still be offered as humanities and social science electives to arts and science students.
“The new women’s and gender studies program will continue to explore topics that span a full spectrum of issues from the intimate to the international,” department head Joan Borsa explains. The traditional focus on examining human behaviour and culture will not be affected by the change to program status.
Otherwise, undergraduate programming will not see too many changes.
“A gender-based lens is relevant to all disciplines,” said Borsa.
The WGST department has existed since 1992, and has offered a major since 1996.
The program will be the first program offered by the newly formed Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and Creativity, which will be devoted to cross disciplinary study.
The transition will expand the pool of resources WGST can draw from in terms of faculty and research collaborations by sharing information across all the disciplines included in the ICCC. The centre will work with outside groups with more leverage than one department might be able to.
A large portion of WGST students already take minors in other fields, so the new designation will simplify that process. The program now contains seven specializations including English, economics and philosophy.
The ICCC move will also enable the program to offer a master’s degree taking advantage of other disciplines, which is scheduled to be offered by 2011. Research should benefit immediately, since the program will work more closely with other programs than the department could.
The main role of the ICCC is to encourage cooperation between fields of study, and will recruit on behalf of all the programs it contains. The defining quality of projects in the centre is social responsibility combined with cultural and creative work.
The next program to be added to the ICCC will be an MFA in writing, with reading French and courses specifically for first year Greystone scholars already included.
- -
image: Flickr
Comments are closed.