5th Global conference on women’s studies : knowledge, production, and representation in transnational women’s and gender studies

Abstract

Scholarly research on women as individuals and as a social category started emerging in the 1960s and 1970s (Phillips, 2015; DeVault, 1999). Women’s and gender studies has always been about analyzing and challenging power structures and assumptions about women, and understanding the social forces that shape women’s lives and that oppress them. Empirical research about women and gender helps to increase knowledge about marginalized groups, with the ultimate objective being social change through either consciousness raising, decolonisation, and/or policy recommendations on how to transform gender relations as well as societies (DeVault, 1999). This research maintains a political commitment to empower its subjects through work that combines analysis, theory, and advocacy with education (Cohn, 2013). [excerpt]