Kansas State University

By Tom Sarmiento

Students in my Advanced Fundamentals of Women’s Studies (WOMST 305) are excited about the Women’s Studies Department’s name change to Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS). Comprised of majors, minors, and students generally interested in Women’s Studies, my WOMST 305 students this semester (Spring 2016) have taken at least one Women’s Studies course prior to enrolling in my class. Their ability to critically analyze the intersections of gender and sexuality with race, class, and nation, for example, illustrates the expansive work our faculty are already doing in other courses and reveals why my students see the department’s transformation from WOMST to GWSS as a logical progression. Continue reading “Educating the Next Generation of Change Agents in GWSS Classes” →

By Gabriela Diaz de Sabates

Dr. Díaz de Sabatés has worked on issues of gender, race and ethnicity, and migration for several years. Recently, she has ventured into a new area of research that relates to her past. When she was younger, she spent most of her adolescence in Argentina, a country that was ruled by one of the most violent and bloody military regimes in the region. It is no surprise that the late twentieth-century history of Argentina has come to shape her research today.

Díaz de Sabatés believes that keeping memory alive and working through it is one of the main tasks of socially-conscious feminism. Because of this, she takes a look at the life stories of women who were immersed in the violent ruptures and continuities between democracy and dictatorship in Argentina from 1973 to the present. Her new research focuses on how women’s lives were affected then and now by the dictatorship. She uses knowledges that centers on women’s personal narratives of their life experiences. During the last dictatorship, just because of their gender, Argentinean women were particularly vulnerable. Therefore, they were subjected to all kinds of violence. Society’s gender expectations of women became combined with the military regime’s treatment of politically involved women activists. This created a straight jacket that confined women to traditional female roles. Continue reading “International Research by GWSS Faculty Member” →

Last year the Department of Women’s Studies and the Nonviolence Studies Program with Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work brought a governing member of the Omaha Tribal Historical Research Project (OTHRP) to Kansas State. While he was here, Richard Chilton spoke to two Women’s Studies classes and led an evening discussion about the Omaha Nation. When he came into our classes, he arranged the chairs in a circle and placed a couple of chairs in the center. Richard Chilton transformed the chairs in the center into a drum and beat out Omaha rhythms, telling the class about what holds the Omaha people together, and what they have faced. Chilton informed students that the Omaha Tribal Historical Research Project (OTHRP), the tribal-endorsed cultural arm of the Omaha Nation, was taking a major land claim to the U.S. Supreme Court. When they were doctoral students a number of years ago, OTHRP leaders Dennis Hasting and Margery Coffey documented the theft of a large piece of the Omaha Nation’s land and the U.S. government’s denial of a treaty. Their research on Omaha land and historical artifacts formed part of Hastings and Coffey’s dissertation for the Western Institute for Social Research in Berkeley, CA, where T. Dickinson has taught over a 30-year period. This archival dissertation research served as the basis of their court case, which led to an appeal that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Continue reading “Our Department Is Ahead of the Curve: Tracking Cultural Change” →