To encourage learning beyond the classroom, campus-wide, WGST frequently hosts events to promote gender equality on campus and in the community including academic lectures, panel discussions, film screenings, and student research presentations.
2024-2025 Events
Never A Spectator: A Disabled Activist Speaks on Justice over Comfort
Date: March 18, 2025
Time: 5:00-6:00 p.m.
Location: Reading Room, Humanities Building Room 243
Cost: This event is free.
In an era of increasing polarization and censorship, Elsa Sjunneson’s journey as a disability rights activist and censorship scholar reveals the transformative power of education and ethical commitment. Shaped by both Jesuit and Jewish traditions of social justice, she will explore how educational values of critical thinking, empathy, and moral responsibility can forge paths of resistance against oppression. Drawing from her experiences and her book "Being Seen," this talk will examine how disability rights intersect with broader struggles for free expression, challenging societal barriers through the lens of tikkun olam—the Jewish principle of "repairing the world."
Elsa Sjunneson is an award winning Deafblind author and editor living in Seattle, Washington. Her fiction and nonfiction writing has been praised as “eloquence and activism in lockstep” and has been published in dozens of venues around the world. In 2022 her book, Being Seen won the Washington State Book Award for biography and memoir. She has been a Hugo Award finalist nine times, and has won three Hugo awards, an Aurora Award, and and a BFA award for her editorial work. When she isn't writing, Sjunneson works to dismantle structural ableism and rebuild community support for disabled people everywhere. Her work includes her debut memoir , her Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla novel , and her episode for Radiolab “.”
2024-2025 Past Events
Book Talk with Dr. Alex Ketchum
Date: October 15, 2024
Time: 6:30-8:00 p.m.
Location: College Common, Humanities Building Room 153
Cost: This event is free.
Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies presents:
Serving Up the Ingredients for Revolution: The 50+ Years of Lesbian and Queer Labor Behind American Feminist, Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses (1972-2024)
Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the trailblazing restaurant Mother Courage of New York City, Dr. Alex Ketchum's book Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses is the first history of the more than 230 feminist and lesbian-feminist restaurants, cafes, and coffeehouses that existed in the United States from 1972 to the present. On October 15th, Ketchum will discuss how these eateries were and continue to be key sites of cultural and political significance. These institutions served an essential role for multiple social justice movements including women’s liberation, LGBTQ equality, and food justice, as well as for training women workers and entrepreneurs.
Dr. Alex Ketchum is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies of McGill University. She is the Director of the Just Feminist Tech and Scholarship Lab and the organizer of Disrupting Disruptions: The Feminist and Accessible Publishing, Communications, and Tech Speaker and Workshop Series. Her work integrates food, technological, queer, and gender history. Ketchum's first peer-reviewed book, Engage in Public Scholarship!: A Guidebook on Feminist and Accessible Communication (2022), examines the power dynamics that impact who gets to create certain kinds of academic work and for whom these outputs are accessible. Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the trailblazing restaurant Mother Courage of New York City, Ketchum's second book, Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses (2022), is the first history of the more than 230 feminist and lesbian-feminist restaurants, cafes, and coffeehouses that existed in the United States from 1972 to the present. You can find out more about her other writings, podcasts, zines, exhibitions, and more at .
