The Gender and Women's Studies Program promotes engaged scholarship through our unique internship courses. Students commit to working with a community-based organization for a minimum of three hours a week for the semester. The hope and challenge of these courses is to go beyond standard educational models in which learning is bound by the classroom and confined to the University. This explicit effort to bridge the gap between the University - as a place of study - and community organizations - as agents of action, grows from the urgent need for a practice of praxis in which theory and action each inform each other.

GWS offers three courses with an internship component: Engaged Scholarship in Women and Gender, Women, Poverty and Globalization, and Queer Theories / Activist Practices. In forging a theoretical connection between class readings and the activist concerns of a particular community organization, students are given the opportunity to be intellectually rigorous and to explore their own definitions of activism, community engagement, and social transformation. Central to the courses are difficult questions concerning the ethics of help, the political economy of private volunteerism, and the limits and possibilities of different forms of social engagement. The courses interrupt the logic of service learning models predicated on hierarchal assumptions of who constitutes a helper and who constitutes the helped. This methodology of engagement challenges students to consider relationships of power produced and replicated in some popular models of volunteerism.

Professor Minoo Moallem received the Chancellor's Award for Leadership in Service-Learning in May 2010 for designing and teaching these courses. She has also been selected as a 2010-2011 Chancellor's Public Scholar to develop one of her courses as part of the ACES program.