Author Archive | thomaspr

Ketner Scholarship Recipients for 2022-2023

By thomaspr on December 2, 2022 in Scholarships & Awards

WGS is excited to highlight the recipients of 2022-2023 Ketner-Crunelle LGBTQ+ Scholarship and Ketner Emerging Leaders Scholarship.

The Ketner-Crunelle LGBTQ+ Endowed Scholarship is the only one of its kind at the College of Charleston. It is offered to those who will contribute significantly in matters of concern to lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or queer persons, because they have worked to build coalitions that advance the full equality and dignity of LGBTQ+ persons, and because they are able to describe how they plan to help advance LGBTQ+ persons’ full equity, equality, and dignity during their time at the College of Charleston.

The Ketner Emerging Leaders Scholarship was established to reward students with a record of working to achieve social justice, to encourage students to become integrally involved in activities to promote social justice, and promote leadership that leads to social justice. The intent is to inspire and financially aid students who are actively engaged in creating and promoting social justice locally, nationally, and globally. It is the Donor’s wish that through this scholarship, and the experiences that recipients have at the College, that Ketner Emerging Leaders will be change agents who identify social problems and devise steps to ameliorate those problems. Ketner scholars are not simply volunteers. They are change agents that are committed to making a positive impact locally, nationally, and globally.

Scholarship applications are available from December 1st through February 8th every year. Learn how to apply through CofC’s Cougar Scholarship Awarding System (CSAS) here. Stay tuned for the 2022-2023 cohort announcement!

10 Years of Yes! I’m a Feminist is Great Success

By thomaspr on November 29, 2022 in Yes! I’m a Feminist

click through for the event photo album

Yes! I’m a Feminist celebrated 10 years as an annual event organized by WGS Community Advisory Board in support of the Women’s & Gender Studies Program at CofC.

We gathered in community to celebrate shared values and our hope for a feminist future. The work is far from over, but together we fight for justice and inclusivity and support the next generation of changemakers!

Thanks to YOU, our generous friends and supporters, YIAF was a great success! These funds support student scholarships, research, and activism.

We offer deep gratitude to everyone who made a financial gift and to our event sponsors – we couldn’t do this without you!

EVENT SPONSORS

Special thanks to the Band!: Marissa Haynes, Bridie Molen, Kris Manning, Kelly Sánchez, and Laurin McGee

COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON SPONSORS

Transgender Day of Remembrance

By thomaspr on November 20, 2022 in Announcements

Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) is an annual observance on November 20 that honors the memory of the transgender people whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence. Gwendolyn Ann Smith, TDOR founder, said “TDOR seeks to highlight the losses we face due to anti-transgender bigotry and violence. I am no stranger to the need to fight for our rights, and the right to simply exist is first and foremost. With so many seeking to erase transgender people—sometimes in the most brutal ways possible—it is vitally important that those we lose are remembered, and that we continue to fight for justice.” – From the Human rights campaign website

WGS Community Leader in Residence

By thomaspr on November 10, 2022 in Announcements

WGS is now accepting applications for our new initiative: The Women’s and Gender Studies Community Leader in Residence. Posting details can be found here: https://jobs.cofc.edu/postings/12982

The Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) Community Leader in Residence (CLR) position serves to bridge the College of Charleston and the greater Charleston community in a knowledge-based partnership. Recommended by the WGS Student Advisory Committee as a strategy to support student leadership development, the CLR will advise student leaders in WGS through workshops and one-on-one mentoring to develop strategies for disrupting and dismantling local systems of oppression. Through rotating one- year appointments, CLRs representing and/or serving marginalized and minoritized populations will help students apply the keystone concepts of the WGS discipline: intersectionality, power, resistance, equity, justice, and advocacy. We aim for this initiative to reflect sustainable, reciprocal partnerships, rippling out into the Charleston and campus communities, strengthening the College’s role as a vital source of ideas and partnerships in Charleston, and across the South.

Goals include:

Tangibly support a community leader – emerging or established – in ongoing efforts to advance equity and justice in a way that reflects a reciprocal partnership between the College of Charleston and the Charleston community;
Strengthen community engagement for students, faculty and staff within and beyond WGS;
Offer role models of inclusive and intersectionally-focused community leadership, activism, advocacy, and organizing on topics relevant to the field of Women’s and Gender Studies;
Develop students’ understandings of and skills in areas such as community organizing, political and policy intervention strategies, needs assessment, effective communication, evidence-based advocacy, inclusive strategizing/planning for community action, grant writing, and collaboration;
Advance the College’s 2020-2030 Strategic Plan in the area of Academic Distinction through innovations for sustainable solutions, commitments to diversity, equity, inclusion and justice, and impactful, strategic partnerships.

Read more at the link above, and please share this with folks in our community whom you think would be a good fit for this role. The posting will close on Monday 11/21.

Queer & Trans Studies

By thomaspr on November 10, 2022 in WGS Curriculum

This course offers a selective, interdisciplinary introduction to queer and trans studies within LGBTQ+ studies. Students will explore trans and queer history; theoretical and conceptual writing; auto-ethnography and ethnography; autobiography, memoir, creative writing, film/tv and art; political writing and documentaries. Drawing on the #TransJustice Syllabus and other sources, some focal areas of this course are QTBIPOC (queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and white anti-racist accomplice theorizing and feminisms, bodies and health, family and community building, nationalism and migration, criminalization and abolition, and, social justice organizing/movement work. Guiding questions that we will ask ourselves in this course include the following: What are some central concerns for queer and trans peoples/communities? How are visibility, representation, and inclusion problematic? and lastly, What do historic and contemporary trans and queer lived experiences and perspectives teach us all (those of us who are queer and trans and those of us who are not) about resistance, resilience, and futurity?

WGST 321.01

CRN 23237

Mondays, 4-6:45PM

Prof. Cristina Dominguez (They/Them)

Artwork by the amazing and fabulous Art Twink!

Intersections of Spirituality, Anti-Racism, Social Justice, & Practice

By thomaspr on November 10, 2022 in WGS Curriculum

Enroll in Intersections of Spirituality, Anti-Racism, Social Justice, & Practice!

This course explores dimensions of spirituality and healing in relationship with how we collectively meet the challenges of these times. Rethinking what it means to act for change, students will consider the limitations of modernity to determine how a relational approach to social transformation may be generative.

WGS 323.02

CRN 23244

TR 9:25-10:40

Prof. Dru McDaniel (She/Her)

Abolition Feminism(s)

By thomaspr on November 10, 2022 in WGS Curriculum

WGS is offering another great option for a special topics course in the spring: Abolition Feminism(s)!

As feminists around the world call for an end to police violence and gendered criminalization, their resistance could be understood as the formation of what W.E.B. Du Bois called abolition democracy. Through the lens of intersectional feminism, and the pedagogy of facilitated dialogue, this course will allow us to liberate ourselves from carceral ways of being and to imagine a world without prisons. We will witness the deeply intertwined Indigenous feminist demands for land sovereignty and an end to climate catastrophe, alongside the radical re-imagining of public safety and an end to the prison industrial complex. We will analyze movements to abolish slavery, lynching, Jim Crow segregation, mass incarceration, police brutality, abortion bans and other mechanisms of violence, containment, and forced assimilation. And we will uplift the work of survivors and organizers who are dismantling hetero-patriarchal domination, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism to build new arrangements for care and healing.

WGST 321.02
CRN 23238
Thursdays, 4-6:45PM (online synchronous)
Prof. Kristi “Kaj” Brian (She/They)

Cristina Dominguez Featured on The College Today!

By thomaspr on October 31, 2022 in Announcements, WGS Faculty & Affiliated Faculty

New WGS faculty member, Cristina Dominguez (they/them) is featured on The College Today, CofC’s information platform for campus news. Read more at The College Today – here – or the full Q&A below!

Cristina Maria Dominguez Assistant Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies

Background: While I was born and spent the first 15 years of my life in New Jersey, I came of age, came out, into consciousness and community, in North Carolina. I have my M.A. in women’s and gender studies from San Diego State University and just completed my Ph.D. in educational studies with a concentration in cultural foundations from the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Over the past decade, I have engaged in intersectional, critical, queer social justice education and action work through teaching undergraduate women’s and gender studies and education courses, and engaging in campus and community education and grassroots social justice organizing work.

Expertise: My areas of expertise and research interests include qualitative, auto-ethnographic, CAP ethnographic and post-qualitative research with a focus on liberatory pedagogies, critical community building and everyday, relational social justice work specifically within queer love, friendship, kinship/chosen family relationships.

Outside Interests: I enjoy spending time with my partner, our little one and our pups, especially outside when the weather is nice. I love to talk and connect with my chosen family, friends and given family however I can. I’m a fan of watching and critiquing TV/movies and talking pop culture and politics with loved ones who share my critical/queer analysis. I love to read creative nonfiction, poetry and fiction alongside articles, studies and research texts. I also love dancing and listening to music.

Looking Forward: The most exciting thing about the courses that I’ll teach at CofC is that, in both content and practice, they will be grounded in liberatory, intersectional, feminist, queer education that centers on the embodied, creative and relational. I’m excited to take up teaching and learning in ways that moves us toward interconnectedness and fosters collaboration with each other as well as the communities we are a part of.

Latin American Feminists & Human Rights

By thomaspr on October 26, 2022 in WGS Curriculum

Interested in Latin American feminist and human rights movements? Of course you are! Learn more about this topic by registering for WGS’ special topics course in the spring.

International human rights are designed based on the ideology that all people deserve basic rights because of their shared humanity. However, Latin American feminists commonly argue that the international human rights processes are rife with inequalities at the local, transnational, and global levels, are not effectively enforced, are resources for Western imperialism, and are Western and male centric. This class problematizes human rights failures. In particular, the class explores how human rights treaties and operations (in their present form) cannot adequately address the complexity of lived experiences, diversity, and intersectionality. This course documents how feminists throughout Latin America have mobilized against colonialism, poverty, gender discrimination, and other inequalities by engaging in domestic as well as transnational activism around international human rights. Latin American feminists have unrelentingly promoted equality and are transforming how human rights are understood throughout Latin America and the world.

Spring 2023 WGS Course List

By thomaspr on October 24, 2022 in Announcements, WGS Curriculum

WGS Spring 2023 Course Brochure

Need an advising appointment? Reach out to Dr. De Welde (deweldek@cofc.edu) or Dr. Ravalico (ravalicold@cofc.edu).

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