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The University of Hawai'i at Mānoa (UHM) offers a graduate
certificate program in advanced women's studies. The program
provides a rigorous, integrated and relevant educational experience
for students whose educational and career objectives will
be enhanced through creative and scholarly feminist analysis
of women's lives and visions. The objectives of the program
are as follows:
- to examine the factors that affect the status of women
across cultures and through time,
- to analyze theories and assumptions about women in various
disciplines,
- to contribute to the reformulation of social knowledge,
- to explore institutionalizing social change that highlights
and supports the achievements of women locally and internationally,
and
- to understand the usefulness of gender as an analytical
tool in many disciplines.
Students enrolled in the program learn to apply feminist
methodologies, analysis and problem-solving to their chosen
academic fields. They also learn 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.
The certificate program focuses on four areas under the general
rubric of gender studies:
Feminist methods of inquiry and theoretical analysis
Students explore sex/gender as an analytical category. They
examine issues such as what this category means; what purposes
are served by the prevailing binary notions of gender; and
how gender is constituted in social, biological, cultural,
and economic contexts; in the past, present and future.
Feminist knowledge
Students learn about the pervasive impact of gender relations
on thoughts, actions, and prevailing constructions of reality.
They also become acquainted with an array of feminist theories
and arguments about issues such as political action, reproduction,
and sexual orientation.
Sex/gender and social-political categories of power and
privilege
Students examine the interaction of sex/gender with race/ethnicity,
class, sexuality, and other primary vectors of power and privilege
as relevant to nearly all aspects of human experience. They
explore the dynamics of such interactions, with emphasis on
the evolving multicultural milieu of Hawai'i and the Asia/Pacific
region.
Sources of sex/gender differences
Students examine both the empirical and philosophical debates
concerning sameness and difference as related to the topic
of gender. They consider the sources of gender/sex differences
as well as the resulting significance.
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Spalding 354