About
Social Transformation Studies is a dedicated culmination of resources once poured into separate American Ethnic Studies and Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies departments.
The evolving Social Transformation Studies department is an answer to students wanting to learn more about gender, race, sexuality, equality, justice.
K-State's American Ethnic Studies program is the only of its kind in the state of Kansas. The program emerged as a response to community-based demands from civil rights movements to include the perspectives of historically erased, socially dismissed and institutionally underrepresented cultural groups. American Ethnic Studies examines the historical and contemporary experiences of African Americans, Mexican Americans/Latina/o, Native Americans, and Asian Americans in the context of U.S. society and institutions. These growing minority groups already constitute the majority population in many U.S. states.
K-State's Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies analyzes how and why gender and related institutions of inequality have been created and are being transformed in our local-to-global society. It examines the ways that gender as a social institution is one of the major ways in which society is organized and particularly focuses on understanding women's lives and status in society, attending to the ways that they are shaped by the major interlocking institutions of difference: gender/sexuality, "race"/ethnicity, class, and global inequality.