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The WGSS Department at WWU pursues critical inquiry through queer and feminist scholarship, teaching, and activism. We draw on intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches to study how sex, gender, and sexuality are shaped by race, indigeneity, ethnicity, class, age, ability, nationality, and religion. We interrogate the conditions that render specific populations vulnerable to violence in a range of local and transnational contexts. We also seek to study and cultivate strategies of resistance. In doing so, we address issues such as war and militarism, political and social policy, the environment, education, healthcare, economics, the media, art, literature, and popular culture. To achieve these goals, we foster multiple modes of intellectual inquiry and creative pedagogies to promote transformative thinking, collaboration, and activism that ends oppression and demands liberation and justice. 

WGSS prides itself on both the intellectual and experiential engagement of its students. The WGSS curriculum provides students with the skills to critically and actively engage with the world around them. Many of our courses look to connect academia to the material world by investigating the relationship between theory and practice — a central commitment of much feminist, gender, and queer scholarship. Our courses are characterized by rigorous and sustained critical thinking, inquiry, and analysis: skills central to the task of enhancing equality, dignity, and empowerment.

Drawing on the rich pool of academic expertise at Western, the program emphasizes theories and practices derived from feminist, queer, postcolonial, multiracial, and multicultural contexts. Our curriculum emphasizes scholarly engagement with a wide range of disciplines, including: history, fine and performing art, literature, creative writing, political science, communication studies, anthropology, sociology, psychology, environmental studies, visual culture, journalism, education, and science.

WGSS students enjoy small class sizes and close faculty interaction. Our community is intellectually challenging, supportive, and creative. Our diverse faculty encourages scholarship that is interdisciplinary and intersectional. Individual concentrations and senior projects evolve along with students' intellectual and experiential growth and academic expertise.

WGSS has identified a set of learning outcomes for its undergraduate curriculum.  Among an array of potentially valuable outcomes, the following represent especially important areas of expertise for each student who graduates from the program: 

• (SLO1) Demonstrates knowledge of WGSS as an interdisciplinary academic field focused on feminist and queer approaches to theory, research, and action. 
• (SLO2) Demonstrates knowledge and understanding of gender as historically changing and constituted by intersecting systems of power including, but not limited to, race, sexuality, class, nationality, and ability.
• (SLO3) Demonstrates an ability to implement WGSS’s critical approaches to one’s own listening, speaking, writing.  
• (SLO4) Demonstrates how to effectively advocate for social justice and respond imaginatively to social, political, and intellectual issues.  

WGSS students have conducted research/field internships that engage a variety of issues—political campaigns, safe sex education, domestic violence and sexual assault prevention strategies, queer aesthetics, women's health, post-colonial literature, transnational feminist practices, and feminist art and protest movements.

The WGSS Department prepares students with a solid foundation to pursue careers in fields such as law, social services, counseling, public policy, heath care, teaching, and the arts. We also give students a strong foundation for pursuing graduate work in women and gender studies, as well as in such disciplines as political science, communication studies, literature, journalism, history, cultural studies, law, education, policy, and social welfare.