Reports

This report, supported by the National Women's Studies Association, addresses the current state of Women's, Gender, and Sexualities Studies departments and programs across the United States. In particular, the report focuses on changes in support, resources, and enrollment, as well as the impact of anti-DEI legislation being passed across the country at this time.

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Clark-Taylor, A., Regan, H., and Rotramel, A. (April 4, 2024). “Protecting Our Futures: Challenges & Strategies for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.” National Women’s Studies Association.

The COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a wave of draconian cuts to higher education: hiring freezes, faculty and staff furloughs and layoffs, benefit reductions, declarations of financial exigency and even outright department or campus closures. Various stakeholders are calling for initiatives, including greater federal investment in higher education, protections for contingent faculty and other academic workers, debt forgiveness and tuition-free college. The National Women’s Studies Association fully supports these initiatives and condemns the attempts to balance budgets on the backs of the most vulnerable academic workers, staff, and students. In the interests of compiling data, we have asked all WGSS faculty and administrators to contribute to a crowd-sourced google sheet on how your programs, departments, and centers have been affected by the crisis. You can find, and contribute to, the data project here

The Anti-White Supremacy task force has curated the following lists of resources for NWSA members to guide their professional work (research/teaching/work with students) as a starting point. In particular, we invite our white-identifying colleagues to engage in this reading. This resource list focuses on materials dealing with anti-white supremacy/anti-racism work, centering BIPOC voices. We encourage members to consult the rich body of materials BIPOC scholars have created as they seek additional resources beyond this list.

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During the summer of 2020, NWSA collected data from Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies programs and centers across the country to gain a better understanding of how the field was impacted by the COVID-19 Pandemic. We invite you to read and share our data brief titled, "WGSS Programs During COVID." 

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Nadasen, Premilla, Jen Ash, and Briona Jones. “WGSS Programs During COVID: A Data Brief From NWSA.” National Women’s Studies Association, October 7, 2020.

This work built on a 1999 National Women’s Studies Association publication, Defining Women’s Studies Scholarship: A Statement of the National Women’s Studies Association Task Force on Faculty Roles and Rewards (Pryse, 1999). Much has changed in the field since 1999, including strong growth at the graduate level, with more than 16 doctoral programs and 40 master’s programs nationally. The doctoral programs not only hire, promote, and tenure faculty – while educating future faculty members – but they also produce much of the field’s newest scholarship. Therefore, the time is right to take a new look at tenure and promotion in women’s and gender studies scholars may not fully reflect changes in the field nationally and locally.

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Discussions about the ongoing health of the humanities in higher education tend to focus on a single data series: the trend in undergraduate degrees. The American Academy’s Humanities Indicators (HI) developed and has fielded three rounds of the Humanities Department Survey (HDS 1/2/3, with data collected for years 2007, 2012, and 2017) to provide a fuller picture of the field and supply the data necessary for a more substantive conversation about the humanities in four-year colleges and universities. 

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The findings in this report are a portion of a larger national study on the state of humanities departments at four-year colleges and universities (which can be found at https://bit.ly/HDS3Intro). The American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators (HI) developed and has fielded three rounds of the Humanities Department Survey (HDS 1/2/3, with data collected for years 2007, 2012, and 2017) to provide a fuller picture of the field and supply the data necessary for a more substantive conversation about the humanities in four-year colleges and universities. In 2018, with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the survey was administered to a sample of degree-granting departments at four-year colleges and universities in each discipline by the Statistical Research Center at the American Institute of Physics. The center also performed the statistical weighting and analysis necessary to produce the national estimates for 2017, along with the comparisons with 2012 for disciplines that appeared in the previous round of the survey.

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Intellectual Genealogies, Histories, and Kinship Networks for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Beyond. A project of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies PhD Program at Oregon State University.

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