Diploma Requirements

Requirements for the GSJ Graduate Diploma are in addition to those of the student’s home PhD program.

Courses

Six units (i.e. two one-semester courses), one required and one elective. Courses cannot be counted towards both the Ph.D. degree and the GSJ Ph.D. diploma. Students will normally complete the diploma coursework during the second year of their PhD studies. In order to ensure timely degree completion, diploma students are encouraged to choose an elective course likely to directly enhance and move forward their thesis research.

Required Course

Gender Studies 700 Theorizing Gender and Social Justice

This is a one-semester course. Two sections of the course are offered, one in Fall 2023 and one in Winter 2024. You may register in whichever you choose.

Elective Course

One additional elective course in gender and social justice.

Elective courses, usually from the Faculties of Humanities or Social Science, should be of relevance to gender and social justice. The approved electives for 2023-24 can be found on the program website.

To register in a course offered by a program outside GSJ, contact the administrator for the relevant department, who can arrange the permission for you.

If you find a course not on the pre-approved list that you think is relevant to your studies, contact the Director to ask if the course can count as an elective.

Thesis

Students in the GSJ diploma program must write a doctoral thesis on a topic related to the broad fields of Gender and Social Justice.

You will first write your thesis proposal in accordance with the requirements and timeline of your home department. Once it is approved by your home department, submit your proposal to GSJ for formative feedback. There are two opportunities a year for proposal feedback:

• Submit by Nov 1 for feedback in late November.
• Submit by April 1 for feedback in late April.

The GSJ director, with support from the PhD Diploma Committee, will approve the dissertation topic’s relevance to the program’s interdisciplinary focus in gender and social justice and provide comments designed to strengthen the research as a contribution to this broad field. After this point, thesis evaluation for Ph.D. students is entirely at the discretion of the home department, i.e. the supervisor and thesis committee members appointed by that department. Faculty members in the Gender and Social Justice program may sit on doctoral thesis supervisory committees, or serve as external examiners of doctoral theses, but such arrangements are entirely at the discretion of the home department.

GSJ Symposium

Please see the next section.