Studies in Women and Gender at VIU encourages students, using interdisciplinary approaches, to look critically at gender as it is constructed and maintained through cultural production, institutions, and ideologies. Gender functions as a marker of power alongside other categories of difference including race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, age, and disability/ability. Feminist understandings of intersectionality provide a lens for the exploration of gendered experience and tools for imagining resistance, activism, decolonization. The program is grounded in feminist theory and teaching/learning styles, and recognizes the value of a participatory classroom where diverse life experiences are included and recognized.