Archive | Announcements

Inaugural WGS Community Leader in Residence

Mika Gadsden

Women’s and Gender Studies program at the College of Charleston announces its inaugural Community Leader-in-Residence

Charleston, SC – The College of Charleston’s Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) program is proud to announce its first Community Leader-in-Residence, an initiative to bridge the College and the greater Charleston community in partnership to advance equity and justice. The WGS program is honored to host Tamika Gadsden as its inaugural Community Leader-in-Residence (CLR), serving in this capacity from January through August 2023.

The Community Leader-in-Residence will support students in applying keystone concepts of the WGS discipline: intersectionality, power, resistance, equity, justice, and advocacy, in their 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, and grant writing. Finally, the CLR will help to 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.

This initiative is the culmination of years of critical dreaming by WGS students, faculty, and administrators. In 2018, Women’s and Gender Studies students were central to forming I-CAN, the Intersectional Cougar Action Network, which quickly became a voice for intersectional feminist student activism. Following the 2020 protests against the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many other Black and Brown individuals as well as sustained national attention to a racial justice movement, the WGS program formed the Student Advisory Committee (SAC) with intentional representation of students with AALANA (African American, Latinx, Asian and Native American) and other underrepresented identities. The SAC provides WGS students with opportunities for shared governance in the program. One of the Committee’s first actions was to detail the Community Leader-in-Residence proposed by I-CAN, as a strategy for developing student leadership capacities.

Embracing the idea, over the last two years the WGS Executive Faculty Committee developed the position description, taking care to ensure that the role is reciprocal and sustainable, and that the initiative honored students’ original vision while advancing WGS program priorities.

Tamika “Mika” Gadsden is a Charleston-based content creator, media entrepreneur and organizer. The daughter of Jim Crow refugees, Mika has built a significant digital presence as an activist and has built Charleston Activist Network Media, LLC. – an outgrowth of her work as the South Carolina leader of the state’s Women’s March organization. Mika also hosts Mic’d Up, a daily livestream show on Twitch.

While the role is continually being defined in collaboration with Gadsden, the WGS program invites student scholar-activist-leaders in WGS and at the College broadly to join faculty leaders in welcoming Gadsden and ensuring her time as the Community Leader-in-Residence is generative and transformative.

The Women’s and Gender Studies program explores the intersections of gender, class, race, ethnicity, age, religion, ability, and sexuality within different cultures, contexts and time periods, offering a Bachelor of Arts major and minor at the College of Charleston, introducing students to relevant social issues while fostering critical thinking, strong verbal, writing and research skills, encouraging social advocacy, emphasizing diversity, and giving invaluable, tangible experience.

For more information, quotes, photos, or to schedule an interview, please email Kris De Welde, Director of WGS at deweldek@cofc.edu.

Tamika Gadsden

Transgender Day of Remembrance

TDOR 2022

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

WGS Community Leader in Residence

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.

Cristina Dominguez Featured on The College Today!

Cristina Dominguez The College Today

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.

Spring 2023 WGS Course List

Spring 2023 Course Brochure Page 1

Spring 2023 Course Brochure Page 2

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

Yes! I’m a Feminist. is Back

Yes! I'm a Feminist

“Yes! I’m a Feminist.” is celebrating 10 years as an annual event and fundraiser organized by the WGS Community Advisory Board in support of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at The College of Charleston.

Today through Friday, November 4th – we are campaigning for feminist futures and a more just world for all! Donate and/or register to attend the event here: https://bit.ly/3RxqQgK

Why WGS? Info Session

Why WGS Info Session

Learn more about Women’s & Gender Studies!

Join us for an info session on courses, co-curricular opportunities, grad programs, career paths, & ways WGS can enhance a wide variety of career goals!

Wednesday, September 28

Stern Center, Room 205

4:00PM-5:00PM

 

WGS Student Opportunities Fund Recipients 2021-2022

WGS Opportunities Fund

WGS is excited to share the 2021-2022 recipients of the WGS Student Opportunities Fund. See what our amazing students have been up to thanks to this funding initiative!

In Spring of 2019, WGS launched the WGS Student Opportunities Fund so that students may apply for funding to support engagement in study abroad, internships, community-based learning projects, and research/scholarly activities. Funding for these opportunities is made possible because of our generous sponsors in the community and on campus.

2021-2022 Recipients:

Marissa Haynes (she/her)

Attended the 2022 Sociologists for Women in Society winter meetings as the social action committee intern.

Patrick Meyer (they/he)

Presented at the 2022 annual conference of the Society for Personality & Social Psychology, poster title: Breaking Down, Pushing Out: An Organizing Framework for Promoting Authenticity and Mitigating Harm Among Boys & Men.

Ahmira Lucas (she/her), Del Lamere (they/them), Jeronimo Ortega (he/el), & Keke Humphrey (she/her)

Organized body positivity event, Every Body Deserves Lovin’ Yoga Class and self-care discussion with Inner Work Instigator, Kennae Miller in April 2022.

Spring 2022 Semester Honors WGS Majors

 

Spring 2022  Semester Honors

Congratulations to our WGS majors who earned academic honors for the Spring 2022 semester!

 

Criteria and Lists (Effective Fall 2015)

President’s List (Highly Distinguished)

  • Student was enrolled in and completed at least 14 semester hours and earned a GPA of 3.800 or higher
  • A student may not have an “I” (Incomplete) or a grade lower than “C” to qualify. No president’s list is released for courses taken during the summer terms.  This honor will be noted on the transcript as “Highly Distinguished.”

Dean’s List (Distinguished)

  • Student was enrolled in and completed at least 14 semester hours and earned a GPA of 3.600 or higher
  • A student may not have an “I” (Incomplete) or a grade lower than “C” to qualify. No dean’s list is released for courses taken during the summer terms.  This honor will be noted on the transcript as “Distinguished.”

 

Statement from the College of Charleston’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program Faculty Executive Committee and the Women’s Health Research Team on the June 24, 2022 SCOTUS Decision

WGS Program Logo Women's Health Research

 

 

 

 

 

Statement from the College of Charleston’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program Faculty Executive Committee and the Women’s Health Research Team on the June 24, 2022 SCOTUS Decision

The Faculty Executive Committee of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and the Women’s Health Research Team at the College of Charleston strongly oppose and are outraged by the SCOTUS decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on Jun 24, 2022, which effectively overturns Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1993). This disastrous decision removes constitutionally protected freedoms, a first in our country’s history.

Our opposition is grounded in decades of empirical data and research that we have conducted in Social Science, History, Public Health, and other disciplines, as well as our lived experiences.

The premise is simple: People with uteruses do not have the basic freedom and fundamental human right to their bodily autonomy. What’s more, in what will soon be in a majority of states, if they (or we) attempt to exercise these entitlements, we will be criminalized.

Criminalization has never eradicated abortion. Abortion is and has been practiced in every known human society. It is an ordinary part of the reproductive lives of people who can get pregnant. The World Health Organization includes comprehensive abortion care on its list of essential healthcare services. It is a common medical procedure that will not go away even under the most draconian measures.

What confronts us now is what abortions under criminality will be like, what will happen to the people who need them, and who will be most affected by laws like this.

In the few hours after SCOTUS released their decision 13 states enacted their “trigger laws” and at least 13 more are maneuvering to make abortions illegal, including South Carolina. The cascade of restrictions is ballooning, including criminal prosecution of those who seek abortions, those who provide them, and even those who offer referrals. These laws effectively codify state-sanctioned forced pregnancies.

Poorer people, immigrants, and people of color already have decreased access to abortion. Many can’t take time off from work or don’t have access to childcare to be able to travel across state lines for abortions. Some will have to carry on with essentially forced pregnancies. This will perpetuate poverty for families across generations.

What anti-abortion advocates do not seem to realize is that abortion restrictions also increase the chances that all pregnancy loss – even unintended – will be surveilled, suspected, and potentially prosecuted. This is not a hypothetical situation as it is already happening, and has been for some time, in states such as Tennessee. There is no way to establish medically if someone had a miscarriage or induced an abortion with pills. People who miscarry will be interrogated and potentially prosecuted. People with very much wanted pregnancies who face health complications will be denied medically necessary procedures. People will die from pregnancies they are forced to carry.

We at the College and in higher education broadly will lose students facing unwanted pregnancies because of this decision. Women will lose educational and career opportunities; this too will perpetuate the cycle of poverty. Women will be less likely to leave abusive partners if they have to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. It is no coincidence that the economic, leadership, political and educational status of women in the U.S. has increased commensurate with the ability for them (us) to control our reproductive lives.

Forcing people to stay pregnant will result in harm and deaths. In South Carolina, maternal mortality rates are 26.2 deaths per 100,000 live births. For women of color, that rate is 42.3 per 100,000 live births compared to 18.0 per 100,000 live births for white women (SCDHEC). That means pregnancy is risky, and also not all infants survive. South Carolina’s infant mortality rates are far higher than the national average: 6.5 per 1,000 live births in South Carolina compared to 5.58 deaths per 1,000 nationwide.

The most vulnerable will become more vulnerable. But that’s the point, right?

We grieve with our community for what has been lost and for the tragedies that will come in the wake of this decision. We know that the inability to control one’s own reproductive decisions will impact many of our students and colleagues. This is why we unequivocally united in our opposition to this decision, and to the cascade of laws that will follow. We also are united in our continuing struggle for the fundamental human right to bodily autonomy.

We invite you to join us in our resistance to this unchecked and ideologically myopic power that seeks to eradicate our freedoms. We will not go back!

What do we do?

We can write our legislators to demand state-level protections for abortion, including comprehensive health care services.

  • Urge SC legislators to support the Reproductive Health Rights Act (S. 1348), which would ensure access to contraception, in vitro fertilization, sex education, and all forms of reproductive health care.
  • Follow SC WREN (Women’s Rights and Empowerment Network) for current information about how to get/stay involved in legislative advocacy

We can circulate information about organizations that support individuals needing abortions (and donate, if you can):

We can urge companies we support to move to abortion-friendly states or cover abortion-related expenses for employees who live in states where it is/will be restricted.

We can boycott companies and organizations that fund anti-choice/abortion politicians and movements.

We can get educated about the deeper context of these attacks on reproductive freedom as jeopardizing the very core of freedom for people with uteruses:

We can urge our leaders at the College of Charleston to follow the many other institutions that have declared their commitment to ensuring that all students will have access to reproductive healthcare. We can insist that current practices of CofC’s Student Health Services to offer no cost options for birth control become permanently resourced.

  • We can go further to financially support unintentionally pregnant students, as The Hope Center for College, Community and Justice states: “Pregnant and parenting students deserve nothing less than emergency financial aid to obtain abortion care when and wherever they may need it.”

We can share information about abortion access, legal rights, and self-managed abortions.

 

 

 

 

 

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