Welcome to WGSI – Women and Gender Studies Institute

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We wish to acknowledge this land on which the University of Toronto operates. For thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land

About Us

For the past 50 years, WGSI has trained students to think about the entanglements of gender, race and sexuality. Our teaching and research is distinctive for its transnational feminist approach, critically addressing how national borders, colonialisms, labour, and migration shape life, knowledge, and politics.

WGSI Statement on Palestine

The Women & Gender Studies Institute has adopted the statement made by the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at UTSC. We are resolute in our support for all faculty who speak up about the current war in Palestine/Israel, who bring their expertise to bear on public conversations, and who refuse the Palestine exception. We also invite you to read the statement issued by the Women & Gender Studies Graduate Student Union.

WGSI also shares the National Women’s Studies Association’s (NWSA’s) initial statement of October 11 mourning the extensive loss of civilian life since October 7 and over the last 75 years, and its later call for an end to Israel’s war on Gaza, issued on October 29. Our joint efforts of preserving academic freedom, and naming the relentless humanitarian injustices being committed in Gaza and Palestine as a whole are a reflection of our transnational feminist politics as a department and community of scholars.

For staff, students and faculty, please do not hesitate to reach out to us if you want to check in, and here is a link to resources, that WGSI faculty and students compiled of on-and off-campus services that we know have been helpful.

News

Dr. Wafaa Hasan is the Recipient of ASSU’s 2025 Ranjini (Rini) Ghosh Excellence in Teaching Award

Please join us in congratulating Wafaa Hasan for being selected by the Arts & Science Students’ Union (ASSU) as this year’s recipient

The Technoscience Research Unit Stewards New Frontiers in Research Fund – Transformation Grant

We are happy to share that the Technoscience Research Unit is the steward of a New Frontiers in Research Fund –

A&S News Feature: Reclaiming dodgeball: At ‘Feminist Sports Club’, everyone’s a gold medalist

The WGSI’s Feminist Sports Club was recently profiled in A&S News. Read the story here.

WGSI is delighted to announce the creation of an Annual Public Lecture named after M. Jacqui Alexander, WGSI Professor Emerita

This annual WGSI lecture, which will be launched in 2026, will honour the incredibly generative contributions Professor Emerita M. Jacqui Alexander has made to the field of transnational women’s studies, as well as to Black

Upcoming WGSI Events

\r\n<div>\r\n<div>\r\n<div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\nThe Beautiful friend shows up unexpectedly and a worlding can begin. In this talk, we move from making friends on a quiet street in Denmark to friendships in Jordan and finally to friendship and the possibility of transformative solidarity in the research process. When invisible, affective gestures are captured ethnographically in all their singularity, can we be a researcher like a friend? One primary ethical demand in friendship is that you do not tell your friends\u2019 secrets, no matter what. When this demand is translated into being a researcher like a friend, it often leads to seemingly endless discussions about how to tell the story of what emerges in-between\u2014how to make that story both an expression of a relationship and a more general view of the world, without becoming a tell-tale, and how to best honor your friend\u2019s desires against powers that may seek to eradicate those desires altogether.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\nThrough the lens of anthropology, this talk examines how friendships\u2014often full of personal secrets and intimacies\u2014inform and complicate our positionalities and the purpose of the work we do. As illuminated by Leela Gandhi's work on radical possibility and the politics of friendship (2006), the talk considers the productive and at times frustrating tension between relational ethics of trust and intimacy, professional responsibility, and the potential for a radical politics of friendship that resists colonial narratives and embraces unfinished relations and transformative solidarity.\r\n\r\n<span class=\"OYPEnA font-feature-liga-off font-feature-clig-off font-feature-calt-off text-decoration-none text-strikethrough-none\">Marie R. B. Odgaard (Ph.D. Anthropology, Aarhus University (DK)) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Anthropology and WGSI at The University of Toronto. She has been focusing on artists and activists in Amman, Jordan, for almost a decade. Her work has spanned topics as gender and sexuality, ethics and morality in what she refers to as the arts of living queerly, the ethical dimensions of anthropology, and more recently, approaches to playfulness and world openings in both artistic practice and academic writing.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>","start":"2025-05-07 12:30","end":"2025-05-07 14:30:01","borderColor":"var( --e-global-color-accent )","textColor":"#ffffff","color":"var( --e-global-color-accent )","url":"https:\/\/wgsi.utoronto.ca\/event\/when-she-arrives\/","allDay":"","external":"on","nofollow":"on"}]" data-first_day="1">

WGSI at 50

The Women & Gender Studies Institute celebrates 50 years of feminist scholarship and organizing at the University of Toronto and beyond.