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Gender Studies Institute Receives National Award

The Gender Studies Institute is now in its fifth year at Trinity Western University. The commitment of the Gender Studies Institute to the formation and cultivation of restorative gender theory and practice has been recognized by the Canadian Association for the Study of Women in Education (CASWE) with an Award of Recognition.

Since 2007, the Gender Studies Institute at Trinity Western University has addressed a wide range of topics of cultural importance in their cafes, research symposiums, and lecture series.  These include gender and religion, gender, race and culture, gender and healthcare, gender and music, gender and media, pornography, romance, marriage, patriarchy and masculinity. Invited speakers have included nationally and internationally recognized scholars such as Rosemary Radford Ruether and Stephanie Coontz, and events have drawn as many as 200 academics and community members. The monthly gender cafes have outgrown their original location in a local restaurant, outgrown the church basement they moved to as their numbers swelled, and now challenge the capacity of collegium facilities.

The Award of Recognition also took into account the Institute’s development of an interdisciplinary Gender Studies Minor, intended to equip students to work on gender-related issues in the private and public spheres. Students work alongside professors who produce scholarship in the field. Recent publications by GSI scholars include: Kelsey Haskett and Holly Faith Nelson’s French Women Authors: The Significance of the Spiritual (1400-2000) (University of Delaware Press, 2103), Monika Hilder’s The Feminine Ethos in C.S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” (Peter Lang, 2012), and Allyson Jule and Bettina Tate Pedersen’s “Are We Doomed? Why Christian Colleges and Universities Must Lead on the Issue of Gender Equity and Why they Don’t” (in The Christian College Phenomenon, Abilene Christian University Press, 2011).

The plaque awarded at the national conference of CASWE in Ontario now hangs on the door of the Gender Studies Institute. It reads: “The Canadian Association of Women in Education adjudication committee recognizes The Gender Studies Institute Trinity Western University as an organization that has made an important and sustained contribution to women and education.”

The co-directors of the Gender Studies Institute are Drs. Allyson Jule, Holly Faith Nelson, Robynne Healey, and Bob Doede