It is a pleasure to welcome you to the Department of Gender Studies. Our thriving community of scholars, administrators and doctoral students is dedicated to delivering stimulating, challenging, and research-led education. LSE Gender was established in 1993 to serve as an interdisciplinary focus for gender research in the School, as well as nationally and internationally. Over the years we have grown to become the largest postgraduate teaching centre in Gender Studies in Europe, and we take great pride in our role in shaping an international Gender Studies agenda.
The field you are entering this year is an interdisciplinary and transnational one, and during your time with us you’ll become experts in that field. You’ll be introduced to a range of different theoretical approaches to gender, and you’ll also develop specialist knowledge in line with your degree programme and your own emerging research interests. As an active participant in the life of LSE Gender, you are expected to make use of the multitude of resources available to you. As well as formal teaching, the broad research and cultural life of the Department provides further opportunities to learn and exchange ideas. Research and social events offer an opportunity for more informal engagement with the Department as well.
LSE Gender’s intellectual life starts from the proposition that social, psychic and cultural processes are gendered, and that engaging with ‘gender’ is thus a crucial part of the social sciences and humanities. But what does ‘gender’ mean? How might we understand it, especially if we are interested in transforming the inequalities that continue to result from its naturalisation?
At LSE Gender we take an interdisciplinary, transnational and intersectional approach to the study of gender. Our faculty are global thinkers who are engaged in exploring the gendered nature of global power structures and in thinking expansively about how gender operates socially, economically, historically, culturally or inter-personally across transnational scales. We are concerned about how ‘gender’ can (or can’t) be translated across different contexts and times, and the ways in which we inhabit gendered relationships as well as subject them to analysis. And we are attentive to the ways gendered, raced, class and sexual axes of power and privilege intersect.
LSE Gender is an intellectual space of transformation, and we take this role very seriously. We believe that engaging gender in knowledge production raises particular questions of who we are in the world and what values we take with us into our work and into our relationships with others. It is a field that foregrounds questions of social and global justice.
Studying ‘gender’ is never only descriptive and description is never an unmediated or apolitical account of the social world. This means that theory is of key importance for understanding the world, and it is integral to the development and the outcomes of transformative projects. Much of what has happened over the past few years brings into stark relief the urgent need for transformation.
As a Department that invariably recruits the most talented and committed students from across the globe, you will find that our faculty and administrators have the very highest expectations of you as well as of themselves. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that teaching and learning in the current historical moment will be difficult at times. It will require, from everyone, a spirit of patience, solidarity, and care as we return to a less distant and less constrained way of teaching, but at the same time stand ready to respond and adapt to any future health-related challenges or restrictions. If and when such adaptations are required, I want to reassure you all that we will always be firmly committed to making sure that LSE Gender provides you with the support and encouragement you need to make this a truly rewarding experience.
Sumi Madhok
Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies and Head of the Department of Gender Studies, LSE.