GUWAHATI: The Centre for Women’s Studies, Cotton University has formally launched its new Post Graduate Diploma programme in Gender Studies for the academic session 2020-21 in Guwahati on Friday. During its official flag off ceremony, noted author and retired professor of English, Dibrugarh University, Prof. Tilottoma Misra congratulated the University for launching such a meaningful programme and remarked, “With the intervention of gender studies, multiple centres of power will become more accountable, as this discipline constantly re-examines, re-interprets and re-defines these structures.”
She further re-iterated that gender studies and its tools also provide adequate means to bust stereotypes and myths regarding women that have existed and are normalised through social attitudes and behaviours.
The Registrar of the University, Prof. Diganta Kumar Das who formally inaugurated the new academic programme expressed his sheer happiness witnessing the birth of this new centre observing that with the pressures of the new age, this centre will define the need to engage with newer complexities and issues outside of conventional norms and via new pedagogic tools.
During the event, the Academic Registrar, Dr. Sanjay Kumar Dutta underlined a trajectory of the events that led to the launch of the new programme. The head of the centre and coordinator of the programme, Dr. Rakhee Kalita Moral then presented on the syllabus design, course contents as well as the teaching methodology.
Speaking on the occasion, she reflected on the urgent need in academia to collapse boundaries between disciplines which such a programme is ideally equipped for and emphasised the inter-disciplinary thrust that gender and women studies bring into knowledge systems. A total of 17 students have enrolled into the newly launched programme to be taught by core and concurrent faculty of the centre. The event concluded with a vote of thanks which was offered by faculty of the centre and joint coordinator of the programme, Dr. Pooja Chetry.
