Student Experience

Gender and Women's Studies Students in Action

Over the past six years, students in Gender and Women's Studies classes have taken an active role on and off-campus. They have:

• Presented original research papers, documentaries, theses at Moving Worlds: A Colloquium (celebrating 100 years of women’s education at Connecticut College)
• Worked with incarcerated women at York Correctional Facility as part of GWS 295: Training for Transformation
• Organized a teach-in against bullying and homophobia on university campuses across the United States in collaboration with the LGBTQ center
• Taken a field trip to NYC to watch the Broadway play "In the Heights"
• Attended the Bryn Mawr international conference "Heritage and Hope: Women’s Education in the Global Context" to celebrate its 125 years in existence
• Joined in deliberations on Sustainable Development at the United Nations, expertly guided by noted Salvadorian human rights activist Marta Benavides
• Taken a six-day road trip with Professors Segrest and Walker-Canton from New London to New Orleans to study the effects of Hurricane Katrina close-up and to join in the rebuilding efforts
• Put in a garden on campus as part of Earth Day 2007
• Organized a conference applying human rights principles to campus sexual assault in a way that opened up spaces for dialogue and action (2008)
• Organized performances of The Vagina Monologues for consecutive years, raising thousands of dollars for women's causes and raising consciousness about sexual assault
• Used CONNSharp grant money to work with Professor and Chair Mab Segrest on her research on the state mental hospital/asylum in Milledgeville, Georgia, as it manifests the relationship between race/class/gender/sexuality, definitions of insanity, and practices of commitment of those genuinely mentally ill, and those merely socially deviant