Advanced Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (AdWGSS) Graduate Certificate
I. The AdWGSS graduate certificate guides students to:
- Examine how gender, race, sexuality and other intersectional categories influence people’s lives across cultures and through time.
- Critique and analyze theories and assumptions about gender and sexuality in various disciplines.
- Contribute to the reformulation of social knowledge.
- Understand the usefulness of gender as an intersectional analytical tool in many fields.
- Apply feminist methodologies, analyses, and problem-solving to their academic fields.
- Integrate the rigors of the scholarship on gender and sexuality into their chosen professions as a means of enhancing their professional lives and opportunities for advancement.
II. The AdWGSS graduate certificate studies are focused in four broad areas under gender studies:
- Feminist modes of inquiry and theoretical analysis: Explore gender and sexuality as analytical categories.
- Feminist knowledge: Learn about feminist frameworks to examine the pervasive impact of gender relations on thoughts, actions, and prevailing constructions of reality. Become acquainted with an array of feminist theories and arguments about issues such as political action, reproduction, and sexual orientation. Apply a range of feminist methods to historical and contemporary issues.
- Sex and gender and social-political categories of power and privilege: Examine the interaction of sex and gender with race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, colonialism, and other primary vectors of power and privilege. Explore the dynamics of these interactions with emphasis on the evolving multicultural milieu of Hawaiʻi, Asia and the Pacific.
- Research and practice in cross-cultural and interdisciplinary scholarship: gender, race, empire, militarism, labor migration, anarchism, indigeneity, queer/performance theory, affect theory, transnational feminism, pop culture, and new media.
Certificate Requirements
The AdWGSS graduate certificate requires 18 credit hours, twelve of which must be 600-level or higher, including:
- WGSS 610 Faculty Seminar Series (1) - Seminar/ discussion to introduce students pursuing the Graduate Certificate to the Woman’s Studies faculty and their areas of research, and to initiate student’s graduate studies in a woman’s studies field. Repeatable one time. Pre: classified graduate status (or status pending) and consent.
- WGSS 613 Feminist Research and Methods of Inquiry (3) - Examination of an emergent body of literature about how to shape questions concerning gender, sex, race, class, colonialism, and other vectors of power. Includes methods from social sciences and humanities and debates in the philosophy of science. Repeatable one time. Pre: classified graduate status and consent. [Sample Syllabi]
- WGSS 615 Feminist Theory (3) - Selected ideas from contemporary feminist theory concerning power, knowledge, and self; articulating women’s voice; deconstructing gender. Repeatable one time. (Cross-listed as POLS 615C) [Sample Syllabi 1] [Sample Syllabi 2]
- WGSS 650 Research in Feminist Studies: Capstone Experience (2) - Provide women’s studies graduate certificate students with an opportunity to design, develop and complete a research project culminating in a publishable quality work and a professional quality seminar presentation. A-F only. Pre: classified graduate status and consent. In lieu of a comprehensive exam, students design, develop, and complete a research and/or community involvement project to culminate in a publishable quality work or comparable product, and a professional quality seminar presentation. The capstone (WS 650) is taken in the student's final semester in the program.
The nine remaining credits are chosen from a list of courses approved by the women, gender, and sexualities studies graduate advisor, and should best support the student's academic and professional goals and objectives. Up to six credits of approved courses may be earned in the student's home department. (Counting Credits / 300- 400- level courses)
