Project lead: Prof. Clara Montague (Lecturer in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies)
Vivero Fellow (2023-2024): Cadence Chen
Women’s Studies Worldwide is a digital mapping project that documents the global history of academic feminism, specifically interdisciplinary research and degree programs focused on gender, women’s, and sexuality studies. Encompassing almost 1,000 institutional sites established over the past fifty years, WSW explores the factors that help create space for academic identity knowledge fields—improving higher education through research and teaching that better represents the students and communities we serve. Informed by transnational feminism, this project seeks to disrupt misconceptions about the location and circulation of movements for gender and sexuality justice. WSW also aspires to build local, regional, national, and cross-border solidarities among GWSS practitioners and develop the field’s capacity to resist anti-feminist backlash, which is especially pressing given the recent escalation of efforts to ban gender studies and related diversity and inclusion initiatives both in the United States and in other countries.
WSW would be a great fit for a Vivero Fellow with interests in GWSS, education, and/or cartography. Along with digital mapping, the Fellow working on this project would have the option of contributing through web design and app development or through research on the history and present-day distribution of gender, women’s, and sexuality studies. We will also monitor legislative efforts to restrict GWSS and related scholarly endeavors like critical race theory in K-12 as well as higher education.
