Journal 1

What is your experience with women’s and gender studies at UNE?

Although I’ve always found myself to be very passionate about women’s and gender studies, this isn’t something that I commonly associate with UNE or with many of my experiences here. Unfortunately, UNE doesn’t always come off as being the most diverse campus, and from my experience (heavily influenced by COVID times), there isn’t a whole lot of activism that goes on here. Despite this, I know that there is plenty of diversity among the student body that often goes unnoticed, and I also know that many of the undergraduate students here feel passionate about making a change and helping to address social justice issues just as I do.

One thing that does easily come to mind when I think about WGST at UNE are the amount of people who identify with the term “female” who are also studying within the STEM field. As a Psychology major, in my experience it’s been very obvious whenever I enter a classroom, that there is a disproportionate number of female students to male students. Although this is not surprising given the number of female undergraduate students on campus, in a social science class you may expect to see the opposite. Not only this, but I have also noticed a surprising amount of female representation among the faculty at UNE, specifically within the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Although women may traditionally be seen as fulfilling roles in education, having a high number of female professors who represent various disciplines at the university is an aspect of my school that I am especially proud of. 

It also feels comforting knowing that I have a plethora of women in academia that I can go to as mentors for a multitude of different issues whether they be related to academics or not. Additionally, many of these faculty work interdisciplinarity with the women’s and gender studies content which helps them to take important issues into consideration when giving advice or when going about their daily lives within their chosen field. This aspect of UNE is very important in my opinion as we strive to talk about intersectional and interdisciplinary issues in any and every classroom here on campus. In this way, any class can and should feel like a safe space to speak up, and an open opportunity for learning beyond the content in the curriculum. 

Another specific event that comes to mind when I think of my experience with women’s and gender studies at UNE was the women’s march that took place in 2021. The event was fully student organized and to my surprise had a good turnout. Compared to the Black Lives Matter march that took place during last year’s academic calendar however, it makes me question the factors that played into people’s decision to attend one event and not the other. In only the first week of class we have already discussed the negative connotation that the names “women’s and gender studies” and “feminism” can have, and unfortunately, I see these things come up a lot at UNE. Taking a look at the makeup of our class alone, this can be used as an example to show that people who have the most misconceptions of what feminism means and what gender studies entail are likely also those who are the most resistant to learning about the subject and therefore continue to let their biases guide their lives.