Social Studies Degrees

Women’s Studies Program

The Women’s Studies Program is built on the understanding that gender is a crucial category of human knowledge and action. Women’s Studies recognizes the complexity of human lives as gender interconnects with sexuality, race, class, ability, nationality, ethnicity, religion and age in the constitution of experience and identities. It thus seeks to provide insights which lead one beyond older and more exclusionary theories and practices.

The program is at its core interdisciplinary, integrating knowledge from different disciplines to encourage critical engagement with all forms of experience from a feminist standpoint. Interdisciplinary study leads students to question frameworks, concepts and methods, enabling them to understand better both the past and the contemporary world, while envisioning a future beyond traditional roles and inequities.

By emphasizing interdisciplinarity, the program seeks to help students acquire the tools to analyze critically the societal, cultural, global and personal issues that shape their lives and challenge them to look at these issues from multiple perspectives. It also encourages them to reflect on the ways in which knowledge is produced in within different and oftentimes unrecognized systems of oppression, and to examine categories that are presented as natural and permanent in their cultural and historical context. Finally, the program strives to help its students acquire the skills of critical analysis and imagine alternatives that challenge the naturalizing of inequalities.

General Studies Programs

The Associate in General Studies degree is an attractive alternative for students to explore a range of subject areas without concentrating on any particular one or who are undecided about future educational or career goals. The program requires successful completion of a total of 60 semester hours of general education and elective courses with a cumulative grade point average of AC@ (2.00), in addition to the student having satisfied the Constitution requirement. The AGS is neither a transfer nor a career entry degree. While other colleges may accept credit earned toward this degree, no articulation agreements guaranteeing that the student will enter a Bachelor’s Degree program with junior standing has been established.