Department of Women's Studies Centre : Savitribai Phule Pune University

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Welcome to Department of Women and Gender Studies

Department of Women and Gender Studies

Department of Women and Gender Studies was established in 1987 in Savitribai Phule Pune University (former University of Pune) with the support of University Grants Commission (UGC). It is one of the four UGC sponsored Women’s Studies Centres with Advanced Status in the countryand the only one such Centre in state university.

The centre invokes the ideals set by Savitribai Phule after whom it is named and seeks to deal consciously with the interlocking issues of gender, caste, class and region in all its programmes. The Centre has developed a unique pattern of doing women’s studies with teaching programmes at its core, building upon which are its research, publication and extension programmes. Building reflexively on its social location as the first non-metropolitan Women’s Studies Centre in Maharashtra, programmes are initiated with the following explicitly stated aims:

To develop curriculum and pedagogies in Women’s Studies at undergraduate, postgraduate and research levels, and to introduce gender component in teaching at all levels

To engage in teaching in both English and Marathi

To develop resource materials in Women’s Studies in both English and Marathi for diverse constituencies

To develop research focusing on the ‘region’ and intersection of gender, class, caste and community

To build linkages with diverse regional, national and international organizations including academic institutions, women’s groups and voluntary organizations in development and media sectors

OUR VISION

Since the 1990s, higher education in India in general and social science and humanities in particular has been experiencing immense changes. A welcome development has been the increasing social diversity of students but the growing interrogation of the relevance and employability potential of social sciences and humanities is a matter of growing concern. The Centre seeks to encounter this challenge through efforts to research the policies and practices of higher education so as to re-imagine higher education for our times on the newly emergent field of Women’s Studies. Towards this end, the Centre has charted a road map of programmes for curriculum transformation, innovations in pedagogical practices and collaborative training programmes with organizations and practitioners in the field of gender, culture and development. Our research endeavours have also variously tried to map and understand these shifts in Higher Education, through study of First generation women learners, edcuational issues of the Denotified and Nomadic Tribes etc. A major research project taken up by the centre in collaboration with the University of MMassachusetts in on Mapping Teaching-Learning Environment, towards the creation of a more Inclusive University, as part of the prestigious Obama-Singh Knowledge Initiative.