The B.A. major in gender studies encourages students to ask critical questions about how gender operates within the cultures of the world. Required courses explore the making and meaning of gender across cultures and social formations and analyze gender in institutions, practices, representations, and knowledge across a range of cultural frameworks. They may also interrogate the intersections between gender and systemic forms of oppression and/or difference, including those based on race, aboriginality, ethnicity, class, and sexual identity and desire. Students achieve a scholarly understanding of the options and situations of both women and men, in the past as well as the present, they are often encouraged to devise and execute original research projects.