Schalk.S.2559_7.17.2025_Transcript

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0:05
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: All right. Could you state your name, age, and association with the GWS Department at UW-Madison, and how long you've been here?

0:14
Samantha Schalk: Yep, my name is Sammy Schalk, S-C-H-A-L-K. I am 39, I've been with the department for 8 years now, and I am a professor in the department. 100% in GWS.

0:27
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: What drew you to genuine Women's Studies initially? What was happening in your life, your family, your community, or the world at large that made this feel important to you?

0:35
Samantha Schalk: I first took what was, at the institution I was at, women's studies course, in my sophomore year of college and, for me, I was attracted to it because I had already been in some feminist spaces, I thought that I would be able to learn something. But what really drew me in and kept me there was how many times I would read thing in the assignments and realize, oh, there's a word for this thing that I was thinking about. There's language for this, there's other people who are thinking about it. And so it made me feel less alone in some of the things that I was thinking and feeling about the world around me as a black queer person that was being raised in, like, a very small Catholic town in Kentucky that other people around me growing up did not have language or did not necessarily feel and think the same things as I did, and so gender studies really gave me a space to realize that I wasn't alone in that.

1:22
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: The program and the department in general, or even gender and women's studies nationally, has faced criticism over being quite white in its viewpoint and its composition. How has the program here, in this department, been successful in becoming diverse over time, and how did those efforts change over time?

1:40
Samantha Schalk: Yeah, when I first got here, it was very white, unquestionably so. There was one other person of color in the department when I arrived. The department had not hired in several years, many years, when I first got here, and so it was still a very small department. Very few junior scholars, a lot of senior scholars. But we were able to use some of the opportunities at the university, like cluster hires and collaborating with other departments to hire more and more folks. And so suddenly we became a very, very diverse department by intentionally seeking out those kinds of collaborations with Asian American Studies and Indigenous Studies to make sure that we were growing the diversity inside of the department. And so now, it looks dramatically, dramatically different than the department that I started in.

2:25
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: I wanted to follow up on the point of diversity. How is the diversity of viewpoint evolved over time in GWS?

2:33
Samantha Schalk: Yeah, I think there's a couple of ways that I think it's evolved. One is that more and more of us are coming from a more specifically gender studies perspective, right? So we have more background in queer studies and trans studies than some of the folks that might have initially been starting the department necessarily, and so I think that has really expanded our understanding of what our department does, not just focusing on women, but focusing on gender more broadly as a system, as well as thinking about men and masculinity, thinking about trans folks. And then I would also just say that we have become more diverse in terms of our disciplinary viewpoints. So we have more folks who aren't just in the humanities, but are in social sciences and do more of a feminist hard sciences, feminist biology, and so I think in a lot of ways, because of the growth of the department and in a multitude of ways, we've become more diverse in terms of our identities, and as well as our perspectives and approaches to doing the work.

3:26
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: The department is known for having a strong focus on teaching and pedagogy. How do you think that teaching a feminist pedagogy has developed as foundational to the department's identity?

3:36
Samantha Schalk: I think some of this comes from just the history of feminist organizing and feminist consciousness raising, that we know that a lot of the ways that feminism has spread and that ideas have spread is through folks reading and having conversations, and sitting in circles with one another. And so that really influences the way that people inside of gender and women's studies run our classes. A lot of us do group discussions, even in classes that are labeled quote-unquote lectures or seminars, we are still encouraging group discussion, we're encouraging circle discussions whenever we can. And so, I think it's really influenced, feminist perspectives and feminist approaches have really influenced our teaching. And because we know that for so many of our students, this might be the first time they're getting this information. We might be the first person that told them that it is okay to be queer, it is okay to be trans. We might be the first person to talk to them about disability as an identity instead of as a stigma, and so because of that, it brings this political focus that influences the way that we teach, that we know it is not just something that's confined to the classroom, but it's changing our students' lives. And so, one of my favorite things about this department is how invested we are in our pedagogy and in our teaching. We win teaching awards on a regular basis, our teaching, like, evaluations are always very high, way higher than the rest of the university, because we genuinely value teaching, even though it's not necessarily a thing that we have to value at a Research 1 institution, but we do, because we care about the way it impacts our students.

5:05
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: The department used to have an MA program. What aspects of the MA program are you most proud of, or found most meaningful?

5:12
Samantha Schalk: I think one of the things I liked about having an MA program, first and foremost, is that it was a funded MA program, which is almost impossible to find. So it actually gave people an opportunity to extend their learning inside of gender and women's studies and decide, do I want to go on to a PhD program? Do I want to go into nonprofit work? And so I often saw it as kind of this finishing school, a chance to just extend that knowledge, practice research in a more deep way more than you would in an undergraduate classroom, but not necessarily have that full commitment of a PhD program and not go into debt to do it.

5:46
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: Speaking of which, how do you understand the gender and women's studies experience at UW-Madison today, compared to other institutions?

5:54
Samantha Schalk: I think one of the things I understand, just talking to my other colleagues in the field, around the country, is that our classes fill. People are eager and excited for our work here, and so I don't have the same fears that I think some of other folks have, because we have a really strong department. We have classes that fill over and over again. My classes always have a waitlist, and so there's such a demand and an eagerness, and that's one of the things I really love about our students, is that they are so eager and earnest to learn and to do better and to make the world a better place, and I think that that's not always the experience. I think it's much smaller and more niche in some other spaces, but to me, it feels like we have a very robust student body that is engaged in gender studies.

6:39
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: What has it meant to you personally to study and/or teach GWS?

6:43
Samantha Schalk: Yeah, for me, it's been great, because I get to feel like my full self. My first job was in an English department, and I did not feel like I got to be my full self in that space. I felt like there were aspects of my identity, aspects of just the things that I do in the world, particularly around my activism, that I just had to keep separate. Separate from my work life, separate from my research, and coming into a gender and women's studies department like this, teaching here, being a part of UW-Madison's department, it really made me feel like, oh, I can actually bring all these aspects of my life and myself into my teaching, into my work, into my research, and it will be accepted and lifted up, and it's not seen as somehow extra or problematic to be doing the kind of work that I do.

7:26
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: On that note, how do you think GWS faculty, staff, and students engage with the Wisconsin Idea?

7:33
Samantha Schalk: Yeah, I, when I first came, people talked to me about the Wisconsin Idea, and I didn't quite understand what that meant, but the longer that I've been here, the more that I see that it really does allow us to take our work into the world, right? If the point of what we do at this institution under the Wisconsin idea is to benefit the people of Wisconsin and the wider world, that means that we should be doing community-engaged work. It does mean that we should be doing political work, because that is what impacts the people around us. It shouldn't just stay inside of the walls of the academy. And so it's been really nice to be able to have that backing to support the kind of work that we do, to encourage our students to do community-engaged work, and that there's actually structures and funding to support that kind of work, it really makes a difference in terms of us being able to do truly feminist, transformative work that is not stuck inside of the ivory tower.

8:26
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: And is there anything we haven't covered that you find critical to the development of the history of GWS here?

8:32
Samantha Schalk: I just think it's really impressive that we have lasted as long as we have, and that we are as big as we are, and that genuinely it feels like folks are working together. Even when we have, you know, a bunch of people on leave, or whatever's going on, I feel like we work together really, really well. And there are not many places in the Academy that I think I would fit in, and that I would be able to do the work that I do, and be the person that I am, but here I can do that.

9:00
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: I had one final question. How prepared do you think GWS is to respond to this moment in time, politically and socially?

9:10
Samantha Schalk: I don't know. We'll see. Like, genuinely, I think we are in a moment where I don't think that we can predict exactly what's gonna happen. I think we are prepared to support each other, to protect each other as much as we can. But I think all of us in the academy need to know that big changes are likely coming. But I think we are at least prepared to protect one another and to continue to figure out how to do the work, no matter what, but we might have to shift the ways in which that happens, and I think, if nothing else, because we are mostly a lot of marginalized and multiply marginalized people, we know what it is to face oppression, we know what it is to face suppression and erasure and we'll be able to figure it out.