We bring together learners and researchers who are passionate about cultivating critical thinking, knowledge and skills, in partnership with diverse communities, to foster positive change and advance gender equality, women's empowerment and human rights. The Centre for Global Women’s Studies builds on a strong tradition of engaged learning and research in Women's Studies at NUI Galway and in the w
ider community since the original Women’s Studies Centre was established in 1988. It complements and contributes to existing strengths in the School, especially in development studies, international relations and human rights, social and political theory, and sociology of gender, sexuality and religion. Societies everywhere are being reshaped dramatically by globalisation, which can be seen in all aspects of everyday life - cultural, economic, political and social. The Centre for Global Women's Studies recognises that globalisation and global issues are always simultaneously local and gendered. Lived experiences of armed conflict, climate change, disease pandemics, forced migration and displacement, organised transnational crime and religious political authoritarianism, for example, are experienced as local realities, affecting women and men differently. To begin to address the inequalities and exclusions that go hand-in-hand with these and other global issues, it is essential to examine and understand how our local realities, global forces and gender power relations work together. In doing so, we learn how gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and other formative aspects of our identities and experiences play a very big part in determining our life chances in globalisation and in navigating related challenges and crises. The Centre for Global Women's Studies at NUIG is committed to community learning and research through the provision of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, applied and basic gender research, and community engagement that build cross-disciplinary knowledge and understanding of gender and global issues through a critical human rights lens.
