WGS Receives Grant to Send Students to DC
From Sara Hottinger, Women’s and Gender Studies:
The Women’s and Gender Studies Department recently received a generous donation from an anonymous fund at the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation.
The donation will be used to send Women’s and Gender Studies Capstone students to the National Young Feminist Leadership conference in Washington, D.C. in March of 2014. The Young Feminist Leadership Conference is sponsored by the Feminist Majority Foundation and provides students and young activists with a chance to develop their leadership skills and network with a variety of feminist leaders, activists, and policy makers on a national stage. In addition to two days of workshops, students will get the chance to meet with members of the New Hampshire congressional delegation as part of the extended conference Congressional Visit Day.
Women’s and Gender Studies Capstone students are expected to put their knowledge of feminist and queer theory into practice in an experiential project. The faculty member who teaches the course designs the project and the accompanying research assignment. In recent years, Women’s and Gender Studies students have worked on behalf of a college committee charged with revising the college’s sexual assault policy, and have also partnered with the Doris “Granny D” Haddock archive at the Mason Library and brought together a group of community members who had worked closely with Granny D.
This spring, Dr. Patricia Pedroza will have WGS Capstone students collect oral histories from the 20 extraordinary women of Keene profiled by the Keene Sentinel in August of 2013. Students will focus on what these women did to develop their leadership skills and how they envision their commitment to the community and to the state. Students will be able to connect what they learn at the National Young Feminist Leadership conference to the very real work that extraordinary women are doing in Keene.
In addition to adding their oral history projects to the Social Justice archives at Mason Library, WGS students will present the work that they do to the campus and community at the end of the spring semester.
