Toplumsal cinsiyet ve kadın çalışmaları: konumlandırılmış akademik marjinallik.

Gender and Women’s Studies graduate program is an institution of knowledge production and an area of political action with an almost 30-year-history in Turkey.Different from the mainstream academic disciplines, GWS resides in an interdisciplinary vantage point which makes accounts of the patriarch al system and, in a wider scope, of the world from women’s lenses. Nonetheless, it advocates a shared political agenda needed in order to transform the personally experienced inequalities into politically acquired rights. As GWS has its origins in feminist thought and action,these programs are directly and naturally supposed to be involved with feminist epistemology and methodology. When the historical process of GWS in Turkey is considered, it can be seen that feminism and academia have mutually marginalized each other from the beginning. This thesis discusses the situation of GWS within academia with a critical Feminist Standpoint Theory approach from the aspect of academic marginalization and analyses how GWS graduate programs can be thought as a field with a twofold epistemic superiority with regard to “better accounts of social reality”,as an academic marginal of academia. In this regard, the findings of the field study based von semi-structured in-depth interviews with 17 academics of GWS programs from two distinctive universities are shared and discussed. M.S. - Master of Scienc