Faculty of Arts & Science
Women & Gender Studies

Welcome to the Department of Women & Gender Studies at the University of Lethbridge.

As a discipline, Women & Gender Studies tills the intellectual ground for a global movement for human rights, social change and equity.

Our Department draws on a vibrant community of scholars, activists and grassroots organizers, inside and outside the university. Our curriculum conceives how current and historical events, as well as ideas and institutions, have been structured by gender, ethnicity, race, age, ability, class, and sexuality. We are committed to diversity and welcome the participation of all students.

Introductory courses examine women's lives, bodies, experiences, and labour. Current and past scholarship in women, gender and feminist studies is also explored. Upper year courses reflect  the diverse research expertise of our faculty: the status of women in sport; the sociology of sport; feminist geography; the place and politics of identity; gender, migration and citizenship; women and religion; the impact of legal orders, health and social policy on Aboriginal women’s identity and well being; the transnational history of indigenous women’s labour and activism in settler colonies; women- directed transnational cinema; law, gender and sexuality; critical race feminisms; and, the politics of nationalism, multiculturalism and queer rights.

A force for change, Women & Gender Studies prepares students for the world beyond the classroom as one activist wrote “global feminism is emerging as part of a process in which women everywhere are demonstrating a growing determination to be actors who participate in shaping society rather than to remain victims” (Bunch)

Our students link with organizations in the immediate community and beyond. They emerge prepared for a broad and exciting range of opportunities including, for instance, in governance, social work, immigration and multicultural services, family services, historical research, policymaking, criminology, health care, science, education, law, non-government organizations, cultural activism, data analysis, and psychology. Women's Studies affords the critical tools to analyze lived experience and methodological and analytic thinking to prepare students for advanced study.

Dr. Carol Williams
Chair, Women & Gender Studies
University of Lethbridge