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Join a diverse community of students and faculty committed to exploring how gender shapes our social and political lives. In the Women, Gender & Representation (WGR) program, students from across the country and world take transformative courses that tackle gender justice issues that matter to them! Courses include sexual health and rights, queer and trans lives, race and ethnic studies, gender in music and literature, gender minority histories, and practices of inclusive social change.

Program at a Glance

Dates

July 21–August 3, 2024

Cost

Tuition: $4,745
Deposit: $950
Application Fee: $50

Courses

Rebellious Women in History
Women in Rock
Play Like a Girl: Gender in Sport
And more!

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Learning in Community

Courses are discussion-based and focused on shared group learning. Faculty not only share their expertise and passion, but also model forms of inquiry, community engagement, and a commitment to transformative student learning. Students learn how to critically and creatively reflect on their lived experiences as they learn about new concepts, ideas, and cultural histories. 

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Program Details

Tuition

Tuition: $4,745
Deposit: $950
Application Fee: $50

To learn more, see the Apply to Summer Programs webpage.

Overview

The Women, Gender, and Representation program provides high-school-aged students with a life-changing experience! Students selected for this program demonstrated open-mindedness and commitment to exploring gender in history, contemporary social and political issues, and forms of cultural representation. By the end of the program, students will have a college-level experience that introduces them to future college, career, and personal pathways committed to gender-inclusive and just communities. 

Course material and topics range each year, but include the following: women’s histories; queer histories; sexual health and reproductive justice; gender in social spaces of athletics, politics, education, and other fields; and visual and literary art forms as expression and critique. 

Students receive important information, skills, and a network of friends and mentors as they return to their high school lives and prepare for their college experiences, including the opportunity to receive recommendation comments for college application processes.

2024 Schedule

Classes are held Monday–Friday.

Morning Classes

Afternoon Classes

Play Like a Girl: Gender in Sport

 

Making Your Sexual Ethics

 

#wholesome: Queer Living & Trans Representation

 

Rest as Resistance: Black Feminism and Radical Interiority

Forthcoming/TBD: Making Political Posters

 

Reproductive Justice & Post-Roe Worldmaking

 

Women in Rock

 

Forthcoming/TBD

“This has been a dream come true! from classes to campus to friends and teachers, everything about my experience at WGR has been lovely and I'll never forget it.”

2024 Courses

Instructor

Anna Baeth

Course Description

Playing Like a Girl: Gender in Sport explores questions around gender and the involvement of all women in sport, physical activity, and exercise in the United States. Drawing from various texts, podcasts, videos, current events, and our especially our own experiences, we interrogate the histories of women in sport and physical education and use critical feminist theories to decipher the ways sport creates, supports, and resists dominant ideologies of inequality. This course will focus on the creation and legacy of women's sports, patterns of inclusion and exclusion in sport with particular attention to women of color and gender-nonconforming athletes, and the social construction of gender, race, and sexuality in sport. This course is experiential and students may be asked to participate in some light activity that will be accessible and available for every body.

Instructor

Jen Berger

Course Description

Forthcoming

Instructor

Alyssa Bossenger

Course Description

In the post-#MeToo era, sexual ethics are in a state of flux, with gendered power dynamics coming further into view and definitions of consent shifting dramatically. Colleges across the United States—as well as some states like California—have adopted an affirmative model of consent (“yes means yes”), rather than the earlier model in which passive acquiescence signaled permission to continue (“no means no”). More recent scholarship in sexuality studies has questioned whether consent itself does enough to ensure that sex is ethical. For young people growing up during these debates, it is difficult to navigate the impact of these cultural conversations on the daily reality of their personal lives. This course challenges students to think critically about the ethics of sexuality, examining the norms of their peers, families, and communities and reading about historical and current debates on the topic. They will practice viewing their own identities through an intersectional lens to explore the ways that power plays a role in the ethics of sex. As a final project, students will synthesize these explorations of community, history, and identity to construct their own set of personal sexual ethics.

Instructor

Casey Anne Brimmer

Course Description

What does it mean to be whole? In this interactive class, we will discuss the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ people across time and space. We will incorporate our lived experiences in order to learn about queer lives and representation in (social) media, legislation, and the world. Grounded in queer and trans studies, we will ask about opportunities for increasing positive representation of the queer and trans people with whom we make and share communities from an intersectional perspective, including race, class, religion/faith, culture, and more. In this course, we will think critically and get creative!

Instructor

Sydney Curtis

Course Description

Forthcoming.

Instructor

Amy Howe

Course Description

What does it mean to live in a Post-Roe world? A world where many are actively curtailing reproductive rights and denying gender-inclusive education? A world that includes long histories of resistance, mutual aid, and organizing? In this course, we will examine histories of sexual and reproductive health movements. We will explore how the reproductive justice framework can offer us a space to hold conversations about gender, race, equity, community belonging, and human rights. We will also spend time working with the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History at Smith College. This collection is a rich archival repository and includes material such as the Loretta Ross papers, the Activist Life Oral History Project, the Black Women’s Health Imperative Records, the National Latina Health Organization Records, and a number of personal archives of well-known feminist thinkers and activists. Students will leave this course with curiosity about how historical conditions, social movement materials, and critically-informed questions shape the possibilities for critique and worldmaking.

Instructor

Tanya Pearson

Course Description

The cultural narrative of popular women musicians offers a unique view from which to study American history. In this course, students will explore the Women of Rock Oral History Project, a collection of digital interviews and written transcripts documenting the lives and careers of women-identified musicians, analyze their oral testimony, and identify emerging threads, topics and themes. Students will gain an in-depth knowledge of the history of women in rock, develop a greater understanding of their impact on culture, society and politics, gain a greater sense of women’s lives and the pervasive ways in which women musicians address societal issues, and develop and refine skills in critical thinking, discussion and writing. 

The tools we will be using are: Moodle, YouTube (Women of Rock Oral History Project YouTube channel), SquareSpace and a podcasting software. We will work individually and in small groups, and the class will consist of exploring the Women of Rock archive, outside research and Zoom visits with Women of Rock Oral History Project narrators.

Instructors

Anna Baeth

Women, Gender & Representation

Instructor in Precollege Programs for Women, Gender & Representation

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Alyssa Bossenger

Women, Gender & Representation

Instructor in Precollege Programs for Women, Gender & Representation

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Casey Anne Brimmer

Women, Gender & Representation

Instructor in Precollege Programs for Women, Gender & Representation

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Sydney Curtis

Women, Gender & Representation

Instructor in Precollege Programs for Women, Gender & Representation

Sydney Curtis

Amy Howe

Women, Gender & Representation

Academic Director for the Women, Gender & Representation Precollege Program

Precollege Programs instructor Amy Howe

Tanya Pearson

Women, Gender & Representation

Instructor in Precollege Programs for Women, Gender & Representation

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“These two weeks helped me meet new people and create new connections and also gave me a taste of how college life is.”

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