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Overview

Women's studies offers a Graduate Certificate in Advanced Women's Studies (AdWS Certificate). This certificate program provides a rigorous, integrated and relevent educational experience for students whose education and career objectives will be enhanced through creative and scholarly feminist analysis of women's lives and visions. The program guides students to: examine the factors that affect the status of women across cultures and through time; critique and analyze theories and assumptions about women in various disciplines; contribute to the reformulation of social knowledge; explore institutionalizing social change that highlights and supports the achievements of women locally and internationally; and understand the usefulness of gender as an analytical tool in many fields. Graduate studies leading to the AdWS Certificate are focused in four broad areas under the general rubric of gender studies.

Feminist methods of inquiry and theoretical analysis
Students will explore sex and gender as analytical categories, asking what these categories mean, what purposes are served by the prevailing binary notions of gender, and how gender is constituted in past, current, and future social, biological, cultural, and economic contexts.

Feminist knowledge
Students will learn about the pervasive impact of gender relations on thoughts, actions, and prevailing constructions of reality. They also will become acquainted with an array of feminist theories and arguments about such issues as political action, reproduction, and sexual orientation.

Sex and gender and social-political categories of power and privilege
Students will examine the interaction of sex and gender with race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, and other primary vectors of power and privilege as relevant to nearly all domains of human experience. They will have opportunities to explore the dynamics of these interactions with emphasis on the evolving multicultural milieu of Hawai'i and the Asia/Pacific region.

Sources of sex and gender differences
Students will examine both the empirical and philosophical debates concerning sameness and difference as these relate to the topic of gender. Sources of gender and sex differences as well as the significance of these also will be considered.

Recipients of the AdWS Certificate must be classified graduate students and normally will be pursuing graduate degrees in other academic departments. The AdWS Certificate will help students learn to apply feminist methodologies, analyses and problem-solving to their other academic fields, and to integrate the rigors of the scholarship on gender into their chosen professions as a means of enhancing their professional lives and opportunities for advancement. Currently the graduate advisor is Meda Chesney-Lind.