Department Of Women’s Studies And Feminist Research, Women’s studies is the interdisciplinary study of the world of women and the workings of gender as it intersects with race, class, colonialism, nationalism, and other vectors of power throughout history and around the globe. We practice and promote cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural feminist scholarship and teaching with a strong emphasis on the Pacific and Asia.
The Department of Women’s Studies and Feminist Research focuses on issues of social justice and equality. The Department’s expertise encapsulates a wide array of strengths across feminist theory and various feminist approaches to health studies, media studies, history, globalization and development studies, critical race theory, philosophy, law, writing studies and literature, and visual culture, as well as significant work in queer theory and sexuality studies.
Visit the Department of Women’s Studies and Feminist Research website for additional information.
Faculty
Our department boasts a faculty that have won all three of the most prestigious awards in the UH system in the areas of research, teaching, and service. Nationally, our faculty have won awards such as “most outstanding contribution to criminology” by the American Society of Criminology, awards from the Asia and Asian American Section of the American Sociological Association and the Association of Asian American Studies, and the “Okin-Young Award” for best journal article on feminist theory from the American Political Science Association.
WS faculty have always been noted for their research and service in the local community as well as on the campus. Some have provided pro bono legal services to victims of domestic violence and served on community boards and organizations relating to sexual and domestic violence, substance abuse, and HIV prevention, others have served on numerous community boards and organizations relating to girls, crime, and violence and work with the courts developing model programs for girls, including the path-breaking Hawaiʻi Girls Court. Some have taken part in national study groups for the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and currently sit on the Gang Study Group of the National Institute for Justice.
Research
WS maintains excellence in interdisciplinary and transnational gender scholarship. The Department of Women’s Studies was awarded a prestigious three-year Rockefeller grant on Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific ($250,000). The grant has led to visiting scholarship of more than a dozen intellectuals of diverse ethnic and national backgrounds as well as 4 volumes of working papers and a publication of an edited volume, Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific: Method, Practice, and Theory (2008, University of Hawaiʻi Press).
Our excellence in research is further supported by other indicators, such as applications for and receipts of external and internal grants, academic publications, academic presentations at local, national and international conferences, and collaborative and interdisciplinary research with other units and institutions. WS consists of a diverse faculty whose work closely reflects the mission of the department, CSS, and UHM. In the area of scholarship of application, WS maintains an excellent record. Needless to say, our research activities directly inform our pedagogical activities, which, as our evaluations readily indicate, is well appreciated by our students.
While women’s studies is a fairly new field, with the first programs appearing in the early 1970s, it has grown substantially in the last 35 years. Neither our disciplinary organizations nor the National Research council at present conducts assessments or rankings of women’s studies. However, a recent review by Academic Analytics (2015) reported that our department ranks among the top 25 women’s studies departments in the country.