About
Founded in 1976, Appalachian State University's Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies (GWS) program is the oldest program of its kind in the UNC system and the second-oldest in the state of North Carolina.
We are a degree-granting program housed in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies. At the undergraduate level, we offer a GWS B.A., a GWS minor, a Girls' Studies minor, and an LGBT Studies minor. At the graduate level, we offer a 12-hour graduate certificate and a 9-hour graduate minor in GWS.
As a field of study, GWS interrogates the beliefs, attitudes, assumptions, and norms about gender, women, and sexuality and how they intersect with factors such as race, ability, nationality, and class. We train our students to be strong critical thinkers, adept researchers, and clear communicators with a deep understanding of problems focused on gender, women, and sexuality in national and transnational contexts and the analytical skills to offer creative solutions to them.
In GWS, we emphasize the following learning goals and outcomes:
- Students will demonstrate nuanced, inclusive understandings of gender, women, and/or sexuality.
- Students will explain how gender, sex, and sexuality are socially and/or culturally constructed in manners that confer power differentially.
- Students will identify how the construction of gender, sex, and sexuality is shaped by nation, class, ability, race, caste, religion, and/or other categories of analysis.
- Students will evaluate various theoretical frameworks for understanding women, gender, and/or sexuality.
- Students will conduct thorough, meaningful research on issues related to gender, women, and/or sexuality.
- Students will apply interdisciplinary methods to analyze social, cultural, and/or political problems centering women, gender, and/or sexuality.
- Students will design ethical and theoretically fluent research projects on women, gender, and/or sexuality.
- Students will evaluate the reliability of sources that shed light on questions about gender, women, and/or sexuality.
- Students will communicate effectively about issues related to gender, women, and/or sexuality.
- Students will generate defensible arguments about gender, women, and/or sexuality.
- Students will compose written texts with an understanding of disciplinary conventions.
- Students will produce accurate, clear, and correct academic prose.
- Students will apply academic study to public life.
- Students will synthesize the academic study of women, gender, and/or sexuality with community concerns.
- Students will articulate the purpose of their training in GWS to nonspecialists.
- Students will relate their studies in GWS to their future educational, professional, or personal goals.
We pride ourselves in engaged teaching and individualized student mentoring, and we are particularly proud of our alumni, who pursue a broad range of careers in law, advocacy, policy analysis, politics, social work, nonprofits, education, healthcare, and cultural institutions.
For more information about our degree programs, contact the GWS Director, Emily Lutenski (lutenskies@appstate.edu).