The Wiley Handbook of Gender Equity in Higher Education

18Gender Centers in Higher Education: Spaces for Cultivating Critical Hope

Matthew Jeffries and Ashley S. Boyd

Historically, marginalized college students across the globe have feared for their safety and their rights both on and off campus. The current global political climate perpetuates these uncertainties, with individuals' statuses being questioned not only through harsh immigration policies but also through the growing emphasis on policing gender and sexuality in schools and public spaces (e.g. in Russia and the United States). In these turbulent times, campus centers focused on gender have a great opportunity to support students, faculty, and staff and to offer a platform for dealing productively with the social challenges at hand.

This chapter will first describe the history and evolution of university gender centers, connecting their development to political and social contexts with relation to the women's movement and the LGBTQ+ movement.¹ Historically, these centers are predominately located in the United States, with a few in Canada. It then posits critical hope as a framework from which to examine the work of gender centers and the actions of practitioners within them. It closes with a look at the implications for the future of such spaces, suggesting specific practices to cultivate and maintain university students' analytic yet optimistic stances in their current and future lives.

Women's Centers

Women's centers emerged on U.S. college campuses in the 1970s ...