News for Students in GWS and LGBTQ+ Studies

Join us for lunch and conversation with GWS alum, Erica Koepsel. Erica is the Program Implementation Manager for the PATCH Program (Providers and Teens Communicating for Health). PATCH prioritizes raising the voices of young people to build young advocates and improve health care communication and access.

Erica supervises a diverse group of high school students who help improve communication about a variety of health-related topics including sexual health, mental health, alcohol and drug use, and LGBTQ+ health.

Wednesday, February 1 from 12 to 1 pm in 3401 Sterling Hall

Join Kate Phelps for a conversation about what it is like to apply to, and survive, a PhD program. Kate Phelps is completing a PhD in Sociology this semester and teaches the wildly popular GWS 320: “The Female Body in the World: Gender and Body Politics in Cross-Cultural Perspective.”

Tuesday, February 19 from 12 to 1 pm in 3401 Sterling.

Are you interested in doing gender studies research? A senior thesis? Hear from GWS students who are working on year-long projects.

GWS majors Ashley Annis, Melady Elifritz, and Emma Morales Leslie are completing senior thesis projects this semester. Susan Maloney (GWS) and Abigail Sann (Community and Environmental Sociology/Legal Studies) are completing a Wisconsin Idea Fellowship on food insecurity at Madison College.

All of them will share their experiences and practical advice about how they got to their topics and what the research process has been like this year.

Wednesday, March 6 from 12 to 1 pm in 3401 Sterling Hall.

This is an opportunity to work together to build a more effective resume as you apply to summer internships and/or jobs after graduation. We will play with different formats and practice writing strong experience descriptions. Look for a sign up link in a few weeks. There will be snacks including gf and vegan options.

Wednesday, March 27 from 12:15 to 1:30 pm in 3401 Sterling Hall.

WI AHEC’s Community Health Internship Program provides students with a great opportunity for a PAID internship with a local department of public health in a WI community. When you apply, you rank your top sites/projects. Applications due February 17.

Planned Parenthood WI is looking for an intern to support community health education and outreach. Click to review the Planned Parenthood WI internship position description. To apply, submit a resume and cover letter to the Madison Public Affairs Organizer, Katrina Morrison, at katrina.morrison@ppwi.org

Applications due February 28.

The WI in Washington Program offers students the opportunity to earn course credit as an intern with a federal agency, an NGO, or a DC non-profit. This is like study abroad in DC (which is much, much warmer than WI). Successworks will host a Donuts and Discussion information session Wed. 2/20 from 10 to 11 am. Register online.

Applications due this March for spring 2020. 

Are you interested in spending time abroad during summer? Consider the International Internship Program (IIP). There are often internships with a focus on gender and economic development, education, or communications. IIP will host an information session on February 7 from 4 to 5 pm in 336 Ingraham.

This course explores the relevance of women and gender in the development, access, shaping and use of digital technologies from a global perspective. In particular, we will examine the role of women and gender in topics such as computing, videogaming, digital skills, internet use, mobile technologies, online participation, social media, and feminist activism. We will also explore how gender intersects with race, class, rurality and migration in digital media access and use. Finally, how the intersection between gender and digital media plays out in different cultures and contexts –i.e., Latin America, Africa, Asia– from the perspective of inequality, access, uses but also as an empowering possibility.

This course introduces students to the expanding interdisciplinary field of transgender studies by situating trans identities, experiences, communities, and movements in their historical and social contexts. The course examines how categories like “trans” and “transgender” have been shaped by political, medical, and community-based discourses and how these discourses continue to play out. Using a range of theoretical lenses, we’ll explore how trans lives and bodies are produced and experienced in and through systems of gender, racism, colonization, ableism, and medicalization. Key to our inquiry will be the implications of trans political movements, increased visibility in media and culture, and the institutionalization of trans studies as a discipline.

This course is appropriate for students who are new to trans issues as well as students who have academic and/or personal experience with the topic.

This course is on twentieth-century literature that portrays women who write and women who are creative. This course also includes visual art by women to compliment and complicate themes in literature about women’s creativity. We will look at how authors use female characters to address women’s artistic status in society. We will also examine different forms of creativity and different access to the creative realm among women in literature.

Throughout the semester, this course engages the following questions:

• How does the portrayal of writerly and creative female characters vary based on their author’s identity politics?
• How do female characters’ gender, race, sexuality, and locationality shape their creativity?
• What historical, institutional, and systemic obstacles have shaped what women write and which women write?
• How does visual art of and by women expand or re-see literary theories of creativity?

Readings consist of fiction written by women, nonfiction articles by women directly addressing artistry, and fiction by men on this topic. Visual art includes films, theater performance, art installations, and textiles.

Stay tuned for the GWS 533 course description….