WOMEN’S STUDIES CENTRE

The UGC during the XIth Plan took a major initiative to create departments of Women’s Studies in educational institutions all over India to generate awareness and facilitate empowerment of women through education, research and targeted interventions. The Women’s Studies Centre, a product of this initiative, at Visva-Bharati was established in July 2009. The Women’s Studies Centre at Visva-Bharati focuses on interdisciplinary research on gender and development. The Centre also tries to organize extension works on women and gender questions which have a strong link with the research taken up in the department. Some of the thrust areas of research at the Centre are the following: empowerment of women, gender-based violence, gender and natural resource management,  labour market choices of women and the constrained optimums and so forth. Gender questions are global. We believe that understanding of gender relations is essential to comprehend the contemporary world which in turn is contingent upon the intricate interplay of social, cultural, political and economic factors determined in the past. Gender relations cut across multiple categories such as class, caste, religion and ethnicity. Without an interdisciplinary approach, thus, this analysis is not possible. Thus the Centre draws its membership from across the disciplines of academics inside and outside the university.