Graduate Certificate in Women Studies

Certificate Application Form
You may download the application form for the Graduate Certificate and turn it in after you have completed all the requirements for admission.
Why a Graduate Certificate?

After looking over the information for the Women Studies Graduate Program at the University of Washington, you may decide that our department does not suitably match your educational goals. However, should you be accepted into a different graduate program at the University of Washington, you have the option of obtaining a Graduate Certificate in Women Studies.

The program seeks to enable U.W. graduate students to acquire skills and competencies in three general areas:

  1. General interdisciplinary knowledge of the scope of feminist studies
  2. Feminist theory and method
  3. Competence in feminist methods in a specific field

Certificate Requirements
  1. Selection of a faculty advisor, preferably a Women Studies faculty member who is not a member of the student's graduate committee. Exceptions will be considered.
  2. Completion of a two quarter sequence in feminist theory and method offered through Women Studies (WOMEN 502 and 503).
  3. Completion of two other graduate level courses related to Women Studies (total: 10 credits). Courses from within the student's home department are eligible. Independent study course work will not satisfy this requirement, and courses must be taken for a grade, not S/NS. Courses must be approved by the faculty advisor.

Course Descriptions

WOMEN 502 Problems in Feminist Theory (5 cr)
Raises questions about how feminism becomes theory and what the relation of feminist theory is to conventional disciplines. Readings exemplify current crises in feminism (e.g., the emergence of neo-materialism; critical race theory; citizenship; identity; transnational and MIGRANCY and questions of post-colonialism) to consider disciplinization.

WOMEN 503 Feminist Research and Methods of Inquiry (5 cr)
Explores appropriate research methodologies for interdisciplinary work. Asks how scholarship is related to feminism as a social movement and to the institutions in which we work. Focuses on how similar objects of study are constituted in different disciplines for feminist scholars.

Please Note
The Graduate Certificate is intended to facilitate and acknowledge intensive scholarship in an area of Women Studies. It will not provide student with an additional accredited degree. To sign up for the certificate program, see Virginia Lore in the Women Studies office, B110 Padelford.