The Women's Studies Program at

Northeastern Illinois University

Welcome to the Women's Studies Program website. This website is designed to provide information for Women's Studies Majors and Minors and students thinking of majoring or minoring in Women's Studies at Northeastern, as well as for people interested in Women's Studies. The program currently supports approximately 20 majors, 22 minors, and nearly 500 non-minor students, with 19 core faculty and 16 affiliate faculty.

The Women's Studies Program, established in 1971, is an interdisciplinary program, with an undergraduate major and minor, designed to address knowledge and praxis from intersections of feminist, anti-racist, multicultural, global, and ecological perspectives. Centering marginalized knowledges and practices, we critique and challenge the dominant social, political and historical production of knowledge. We examine how power is distributed and used along the intersections of race, class, gender, geography, age, abilities, and sexualities. Women's Studies curricula emphasize rigorous critical thinking, innovative scholarship, and creativity, to assist students and faculty to radically envision different bodies of knowledge and social change. This creates an environment of learning and passionate commitment to social justice. Through curriculum, pedagogical strategies, university transformation, and civic engagement, our community of learners takes up issues of oppression, resistance, and social justice to make connections between personal, state and global communities. As a community of practitioners, researchers, learners, leaders, and activists, we work to develop and implement meaningful social change within the university and beyond, to create the type of world where injustice and inequality are fought and to resist the daily oppressions of the current social order.

The Women's Studies Program sponsors many events that promote its mission and enrich the University community. During Women's History Month (March 2011) the Feminist Collective and Latinas in Power produced The Vagina Monologues which was performed in both English and Spanish this year at NEIU's Auditorium and the El Centro campus. The proceeds were donated to Young Women's Empowerment Project.

The Empowering Students Computer Lab is a supportive and comfortable environment for research and study, located in LWH 2096 and open during program office hours (M-F:  9:00am - 4:00 pm)