MA Women's and Gender Studies (GEMMA)

Year 1

You'll spend your first year in the 'home' institution, studying modules totalling 120 credits. You'll gain a solid understanding in the fundamentals of women's and gender studies.

Core modules

• Feminist Histories - Feminist Historiography
• Ways of (Feminist) Knowing
• Feminist Research Methodologies

You will also take a compulsory IT Session and Academic Integrity Module to ensure you have a basic knowledge of academic requirements and the digital literacy skills to optimise your learning and engagement with the course’s resources.

Option modules

You will also study three optional modules. Examples from previous years have included:

• Feminist Cultural Activism
• Gender and Violence
• Gender and Migration
• Feminism and Sexuality
• Women, Citizenship and Conflict

Year 2

You'll spend either one or two semesters in your selected partner institution - the 'mobility' institution. Alongside a Dissertation, you will study various option modules to the equivalent of 60 York credits undertaken as part of the study abroad mobility.

• Dissertation

You may return to your home institution in the fourth semester to complete your final dissertation. The dissertation should be 20,000 to 30,000 words long, and will be jointly supervised by the home and mobility institutions. Alternatively, you may choose to remain at the partner institution. The dissertation may be written in any of the three official languages of instruction (English, Spanish and Italian), depending on which is your home university for your dissertation.

Every course at York is built on a distinctive set of learning outcomes. These will give you a clear understanding of what you will be able to accomplish at the end of the course and help you explain what you can offer employers. Our academics identify the knowledge, skills, and experiences you'll need upon graduation and then design the course to get you there.

• Interrogate and explain key feminist ideas and the cultural, historical and inter/national contexts in which they emerge, with a nuanced understanding of the differences among women with regard to categories such as race, ethnicity, class, age, disability, sexuality.
• Analyse gendered lives and wider socio-political and cultural issues through the application of interdisciplinary feminist approaches to knowledge, with a nuanced understanding of the intersections between feminist thought and wider social and cultural debates.
• Recognise the complexity of power relations and how these inform one’s critical practice by demonstrating reflexive insight into the ethical and political issues inherent in scholarship.
• Apply and demonstrate sophisticated knowledge of interdisciplinary research methods, with a nuanced understanding of their strengths and limitations.
• Plan, design and undertake a substantial independent research project, through the application of appropriate theories and methodologies.
• Independently locate, manage, synthesise and present complex ideas from multiple sources through the use of digital skills.
• Communicate complex arguments cogently and with nuance in written and oral form to a standard expected of professionals and scholars.