Mission

Women's Studies is an interdisciplinary field of study that recognizes excellence in research, teaching, and service in three important ways:

• Intersectionality, an analysis of the intersections of gender, race, class, and nation.
• Interdisciplinarity, or skillful integration of methods from different disciplines.
• Social Justice, a commitment to dismantling sexism, racism, classism, and other oppressive beliefs and practices in our research, teaching, and service to different communities.

We adopted the following Mission Statement in 2002:

Women's Studies at the University at Albany has as its mission feminist undergraduate and graduate education and research for social justice. We seek to connect our work as academics with the social and political world outside the university; to educate our students about social inequalities that result from sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, and ethnocentrism; and to link knowledge, research, teaching, and activism. We seek to engage students in the discovery and production of knowledge that emerges from feminist perspectives on culture and society; on literature and the arts; on history, law, and public policy; on sociology, anthropology, and the social sciences; on area and ethnic studies; and on health, science, and technology; and that closes gaps in traditional higher education resulting from the exclusion of women and other marginalized groups. We seek to provide students with the analytic competency that results from engagement with a curriculum focused on the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and nation and that promotes responsible citizenship in a diverse global environment. We seek to empower students through a feminist critique of social, cultural, and institutional structures that enables them to think more critically about their own lives and that inspires them to work as active citizens for social justice.