Women's Studies
at the UCD School of Social Justice

•What is Women’s Studies?
Women's Studies is one of the most vibrant international fields of study, producing its own body of scholarship, at the same time challenging and altering traditional disciplines and having a profound effect on the wider world.

One of feminism’s success stories over the past four decades has been the establishment of Women’s Studies programmes throughout every continent, and this expansion is continuing.
As a discipline, Women's Studies addresses issues previously neglected by traditional disciplines, and adapts and refines theories and methods from those disciplines.

Women's Studies is not simply the study of women and women's issues. It is the study of women that places women's own experiences at the centre of enquiry and looks at how gender is a fundamental structure in all societies. Gender is the term used to describe the relationship between ideas about masculinity and femininity; gender describes the system of rules by which males and females are encouraged to relate to each other. What other disciplines use as assumptions about women and men, Women's Studies poses as questions.

•Why Study Women’s Studies?
Feminist theory offers us the most sustained and nuanced understandings of how oppression works locally and globally and Women’s Studies offers rich insight into the intersections among sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, ableism, religious sectarianism and other forms of oppression.

Our classes are taught according to feminist teaching principles and so there is active student participation with a focus on empowering students to realise their competency. The classes are politically and socially relevant and students learn to think critically and develop a more open mind.

Because issues relating to women's roles and needs are surfacing within government, service professions, science fields, industry and academic institutions, the Women's Studies degree is increasing in social, political and vocational relevance. Our programmes have practical applications for a variety of professional fields and after completion of their studies our graduates find themselves at the heart, or the vanguard, of a wide diversity of institutions and movements.