Call for Proposals are invited at Dissertation Workshops on Gender Studies by The University of Michigan and Fudan University along with Joint Institute for Gender Studies, Shanghai. The workshops will be organized at Fudan University in Shanghai from early June to early July each year.
Funds have been received from the Henry Luce Foundation to continue our efforts to enable feminist transformation of knowledge production in China. The current program takes the form of a dissertation workshop on gender studies for 20 PhD candidates selected from universities throughout China each year. The funding will support three one-month workshops from 2012 to 2014, each co-taught by two U-M faculty members from humanities and social sciences.
The main aim of the program is to meet the needs for a cohort of young Chinese scholars who are interested in the emergent field of gender studies, but have no academic resources for advanced learning. Our previous efforts to enhance Women’s and Gender Studies in China have generated much intellectual interest among young scholars but institutionalized PhD programs for gender studies which are in the process of emerging. Because China adopts a system of PhD supervisors that makes supervising PhD students a privilege and bestows prestige upon a tiny group of academics at universities, young university faculty members who have received gender studies training in our previous programs have not yet obtained the status of PhD supervisors. Therefore, it is still very hard for a PhD student to find a professor at the rank of PhD supervisor who is able to support or supervise research on women and gender. The program is a crucial move to fill the gap between the intellectual demands generated by our previous efforts and the institutionally based talent that we are still in the process of building.
Dissertation Workshops on Gender Studies aim not only to promote a cohort of PhDs who are able to offer innovative knowledge on women and gender and enhance the capacity of young Chinese scholars to develop the interdisciplinary analytical skills but also to set a model for curriculum development of graduate courses on gender studies at Fudan University and further consolidate the UM-Fudan Joint Institute for Gender Studies as a leading academic institution at the forefront of the emergent academic field in China.
Faculty members from U-M and Fudan will work together to run three dissertation workshops for three years, starting in June 2012. The UM-Fudan Joint Institute for Gender Studies at Fudan University will be the physical site for the Workshops and provide programmatic support for faculty involved in the Workshops as well.
