Our Mission
We founded the Gender and Women’s Studies Association with a strong desire to increase the visibility and reputation of the discipline of gender and women’s studies in Turkey. Despite the past 40 years, this field of study is not yet widely known and recognized . We are well aware of the fact that in some circles, this field is not considered to be a scientific field, that is, a discipline in which academic studies are carried out. There is uncertainty about what our field of interest is and the nature of our studies. The latter has long been an important problem of gender and women’s studies from the very beginning. In recent years, there have also been trends towards covering up, if possible completely removing, gender-related discussions. For this reason, our field of study to ensure its dissemination and strengthening by increasing its visibility it comes at the beginning of our goals.
Our association aims to establish networks that will increase communication, interaction, information exchange and solidarity among people who carry out scientific studies and has notable experience in the field of gender and women’s studies. We hope to carry out national and international conferences, congresses, symposiums and similar scientific activities, since they serve as the most suitable environments to establish the abovementioned networks. While organizing these, we will also increase the academic solidarity that will speed up the exchange of information and study various issues and areas of interest that concern us all through the working groups we plan to form. Within these working groups we will be able to discuss the change and transformation of feminist knowledge and the challenges related to it, especially in feminist theory, methodology and epistemology. We will also be able to establish groups in which we will transfer our feminist research experiences to each other.
The graduate and doctorate programs established in our universities are the most valuable academic environments for the development of gender and women’s studies. We believe that forming thematic groups on the educational goals of our programs, the variety of courses, their contents, outcomes and topics such as feminist theory, epistemology, feminist pedagogy, and discussing these issues in regional workshops will bring together universities close to each other and will significantly increase the quality of the training we provide.
Research, application, education and publication activities we aim to do it and encourage it to be done. The members of our association are highly specialized people in the field of gender and women’s studies. We hope that the educational programs such as courses, seminars, summer schools, distance education, computerized education, which they will contribute with their knowledge, will fill an important gap in this area.
The number of scientific peer-reviewed journals that focus entirely on the topic of gender and women’s studies is quite limited. For this reason, publishing a journal that will include the work of scientists working on these issues is a goal that we want to achieve as soon as possible. TOCIKAD’s publication organ “Theory and Practicethe aim of ”will be to ensure the publication of scientific studies in the field of gender and women’s studies, thus creating an environment where theory and practice will meet for readers. Theory and Praxis will be published twice a year as a scientific, peer-reviewed, open-access and bilingual journal.
As TOCIKAD members, we believe in the importance of intergenerational knowledge transfer and solidarity. We overcame the difficulties we faced in the past years, when the TC Area provided very limited opportunities for corporate information transfer, by helping each other. We think that this tradition formed in our field of study is an important legacy and we aim to support the work of young scientists who are pursuing an academic career, especially in the process of conducting and publishing their research. We will create for this ‘Group of Volunteer Academic Advisors’ in hopes of setting a good example of transferring knowledge and experience from generation to generation.