Department of Women's and Gender Studies Overview
Welcome to Women's and Gender Studies
The Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) Department is an inter-and transdisciplinary department that offers undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, and drives wide-ranging collaborative research projects with local and international partners. Although we consistently focus on feminist approaches to gender, our research addresses a wide range of subjects in the humanities and social sciences.
Students on the EU-funded Re-wiring project with Prof Tamara Shefer
Students in the critical food studies project with Project lead Prof Desiree Lewis
Our Department emerged out of gender and anti-apartheid activism at UWC in the 1980s and early 1990s. Pioneering important shifts in the South African academy on the eve of this country’s democracy, a cohort of feminist scholars in diverse disciplines as well as radical feminist andlgbtqia+students drove processes to establish a postgraduate programme offering Honours and Master’s degrees. By 1995, this programme was established, with this being followed by an undergraduate programme and a doctoral degree in 2000. By 2009, the Women’s and Gender Studies Programme was recognised as a fully fledged Department within the Faculty of Arts/Humanities. And in 2025, it celebrates its 30th anniversary.
Staff and students in the Department are particularly concerned with foregrounding and thinking with alternative knowledges, and the project of reconceptualising orthodox scholarly practices within the larger goal of decolonial, feminist scholarship. Our focus on systemic and structural expressions of power is undertaken through combining interdisciplinary research employing a feminist intersectional approach as well as through our pedagogical practices which employ innovative, critical and feminist pedagogies for social justice.
We position our scholarship within the socio-political, cultural and economic context of national and global change and through teaching and learning that contributes to the development of critically engaged and active citizens. Central to our work is the development of theory, knowledge and expertise for those already working in organizations directed toward gender transformation and sexual rights, as well as for those intending to work in such fields when they finish their degrees.
