Rytilahti.S.2557_7.17.2025_Transcript

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0:01
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: Alright, could you say something, check one, check two?

0:03
Stephanie Rytilahti: Check one, check two. I'll leave my phone there and trust that the other parent of my children will respond if they're coming safe.

0:38
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: Much better. All right. Stephanie, could you state your name, age, and association of the GWS department at UW-Madison, and how long you've been here?

0:52
Stephanie Rytilahti: So, my name is Stephanie Rytilahti. And I am 43 years old. My relationship with the Department of Gender and Women's Studies started when I began my undergrad here in 2001, so I had a double major in history and gender and women's studies, and I graduated from the department with those degrees in 2005, and then I returned in 2008 as the second cohort of MA students. And in 2010, I received a master's degree from the department, and after that, I went on to get a PhD elsewhere, and then I returned as a lecturer in 2015. And then in 2018, I started the role as the director of the UW System Gender and Women's Studies Consortium, where I am employed at UW-Madison by the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, but I support gender and women's studies programs and departments on all 13 campuses across the state, and, um, co-convene an annual conference, um, that's hosted at UW-Madison focused on the analytics of gender and women's studies.

1:57
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: Stephanie, what drew you to gender and women's studies initially? What was happening in your life, your family, your community, or the world at large that made gender and women's studies feel important or close to you?

2:11
Stephanie Rytilahti: Yeah, so, I grew up in Wisconsin, and I grew up in a semi, a smaller area of the state, and I had no exposure to gender and women's studies or gender history before I started college, and I did my first year at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, and I had my first women's history class, it was women's history then, in my second semester, and I was just really immediately drawn in by seeing history from a different historical perspective by hearing narratives lifted and centered that I wasn't aware of before. And I transferred to UW-Madison the following year, and I continued to just find topics that I felt didn't relate to me or were not interesting, or that were inaccessible to me, become really vibrant and easy to understand in a way that hadn't made sense to me before. So, at one point in my degree, I picked up feminist biology class that was an advanced level class, and I learned how to analyze scientific data and perspectives and how research was done for racial and gender bias, and if you had told me when I started college that that was something that I would have been able to do with confidence, I would have never believed that. So, it was really just kind of a wakening for me as somebody who came from a predominantly white community that really didn't interrogate race or gender or identity or sexual orientation, to see how all these frameworks worked, and to find a supportive community to work through those ideas, as I was doing my degree and thinking about my next career steps.

3:40
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: What do you remember most vividly about the program here at UW-Madison during your early involvement?

3:49
Stephanie Rytilahti: Yeah, when I was in my undergrad, I just remember, like, a wealth of courses. I remember that there were topics in every area, and it was also the first time that I was exposed to an interdisciplinary department. So, my other degrees that I had or had considered, were all kind of in the same footprint, and there's definitely an analytical footprint that's consistent in gender and woman studies, but at the same time, like, the wealth of options and topics that I was able to engage with was really exciting for me. And then when I did my master's in 2008 to 2010, it was a really small cohort of students. I think there were only 4 or 5 of us. And the faculty were so supportive, and the cohort was so supportive, so I just remember an openness where I could get support from a lot of different areas, and I remember a lot of gatherings that were celebrating retirements of faculty, or achievements of students, and there was a really strong community feel to the department that really resonated with me at that moment.

4:50
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: So, the next set of questions I want to trace, how the department has developed, and over time, institutionalized, so, what were the main conversations and debates unfolding within the program or the department during your time here at least initially, and how has it evolved? And how did that change across your years here?

5:12
Stephanie Rytilahti: So the primary conversation that I remember. So as an undergrad, I don't think, I was so, there were so many things going on and sometimes it's hard to even, like, conceptualize what is happening in terms of, like, the institutional frameworks and the conversations animating the discipline. But when I came back for my master's degree, it was right when the department was doing a name change, like many across the country, from women's studies to women and gender studies, so that, that was a conversation, that in some meetings I sat in on, in department meetings, and was able to hear the different perspectives people were bringing to the table to discuss that transition, and ultimately, the department obviously decided to change to gender and women's studies, and now we're gender, women, and sexuality studies. And at that time, I think the big debate was how to have a name that reflected the type of work and methodologies we engaged with and the frameworks of inclusivity and equity that we used, but also how to keep the category of women legible within the context of that. So I think, in some respects, that's still a challenge and is still happening, but that, that felt like the crux of the debate that was happening. And as the MA program was developing, there was also a lot of conversations and debates of what that should look like. Like, should we follow the traditional path of becoming a PhD-granting institution, should our requirements for the degree be more flexible or allow more service or activist components than other departments required? And then, like, what would the model look like for advisees and students? So some of those things were still in flux, and I think they've been solidified by now, so there was kind of the disciplinary conversations around our naming and our legibility, that was part of a larger national conversation, and then as we built our graduate program, like, what did that look like, and how did it fit within current models, and how did we set our graduate students up to pursue other degrees while still maintaining the vibrancy of what gender and women's studies is and sets it apart from other disciplines at the same time.

7:15
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: I wanted to pick up on something that you mentioned. How has women as the subject of the then-women's studies, but now gender and women's studies involved?

7:25
Stephanie Rytilahti: Mm-hmm. I feel, as a historian, that the category of woman was always complicated by the field. And that there was always a push to expand the boundaries of what that meant and what expressions of gender identity and other factors intersected with it. But I don't think that all of those perspectives were amplified and made visible within the institutional structure in the same way. So, it is definitely a moment in the last several decades have made more visible queer and trans studies, have made more visible the need for there to be deep intersectionality at every juncture. There's been more visibility and global and transnational perspectives interfacing with work that's happening in the U.S. And then, in the last several years, there has been even more work with disability studies becoming a more visible component of our work. Masculinity studies is a field that's becoming more visible. There's some really interesting work on ageism that's, has happened before, but is reappearing and being interrogated in different ways. So I think the expressions of those different categories and their visibility has only continued to grow. But I think that the category was never just woman. I think there was always a lot of pushing and fungibility in terms of how scholars and students and activists were thinking through it.

8:47
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: What challenges did gender and women's studies face as part of the larger university structure, at least in the early days, and what has changed, what has remained the same?

8:57
Stephanie Rytilahti: Yeah, so I'm talking a little bit as a historian, because I wasn't here in the '70s when the department started, but I have done archival research, and I did oral histories. There's some fitting in a similar footprint of this conversation. And I think there are always, you know, the tension between the activist arm, and the pushing at institutional boundaries and the need to be institutionalized to be legible have always been, has always been a tension in gender and women's studies. There have always been tensions around the whiteness of the field and how to work beyond that, especially in predominantly white institutions. And I think with this department, a lot of the tensions have been generative, and have led to new movements of growth and new frameworks. And I think that gender and women's studies still considers itself a discipline that really pushes that boundaries and helps students and scholars to look at things in different ways. In some respects, I think that there's been, the early roots, there's been, it's the relationship with community members has attenuated a little bit, because as we became institutionalized, it was no longer acceptable to have community input in the same way in decisions of the department, because that isn't part of the institutional structure. But on the other hand, there are a lot of really strong alumni and community relationships that are in place, that are just, they're just iterated in a different way. So I think, you know, at UW-Madison, I feel like, there have always been visionary scholars and faculty and leadership that has helped to keep gender and women's studies not on the margins, but kind of pushing out all of the conversations. I do think nationally and on smaller campuses, gender and women's studies still gets marginalized, because it doesn't have the same amount of resources, and it's not seen as a central discipline in the same way. Even though the students and the faculty and instructors who are doing the work are pushing the same boundaries. So I think access to institutional resources, even though it involves some compromises, also helps to insulate from some of that marginalization and not having a seat at the table.

11:08
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: I wanted to follow up on two things that you brought up. Why, what is it about the department or the program wherein, when tensions came up, solutions-- the direction that it moved in was generative, was the word that you used. Why didn't think it's just collapse, right? Why weren't, why was the department able to move in a generative direction?

11:32
Stephanie Rytilahti: I think there's always been a really strong focus on relationships in this department, and I think that the relationships that colleagues have and that students have with faculty is based on a mutual respect and admiration for the work, but there's also a lot of friendships and deep respect. I also think it's always been a struggle for gender and women cities to be around, and when you struggle to get somewhere, there's a stronger desire to preserve things, but fundamentally, it is really a discipline and department that I feel like is built on respect and appreciation. And a strong desire to come to a solution, even if there's a long road to get there.

12:10
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: And another thing I wanted to follow up on, compromises. On that note, has the so-called infiltrative nature of the women's studies department, sort of been co-opted into the university, do you think?

12:27
Stephanie Rytilahti: So, like, the activist edge, has it been co-opted, or-- I really think that gender and women's studies, from my perspective, especially because I have a lot of national relationships and I work across the state, is still really pushing intersectionality and really interrogating current moments and asking questions with colleagues in other fields. That isn't happening elsewhere. So, I don't, I don't know that I would really frame it as gender and women's studies being co-opted. Instead, like, gender and women's studies students and scholars being really effective at working in multiple spaces. So, people who lead gender and women's studies departments or are placed in multiple departments know how to work within the frameworks of multiple disciplines and multiple leadership structures. So, I would frame it more in a positive light of really figuring out how to get the system to work to the benefit of the discipline and for students, ultimately, in a way that includes a lot of frameworks and research and values that we hold as really critical to our field.

13:33
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: I want to move in another direction. I want us to talk about what you remember about the department's now defunct MA program.

13:$2
Stephanie Rytilahti: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I talked about this a little bit. So I was in the program for 2 years. I wrote a dis-- or I wrote, my thesis was on the history of the department, so I did a lot of oral history interviews, and I remember that process similar to you reaching out, like, a lot of people responded when I had a hand recording device, and I would call people on speaker if I couldn't meet with them in person, and I would record the conversation on my recording device, so I remember, like, a collegial spirit in that sense, where even people who were no longer in the department because they had moved somewhere else, or they had retired, were really engaged. I remember working a lot. I was a TA for 103, which is one of our cornerstone, one of our cornerstone classes. And teaching a feminist biology class was a lot of work. I had a lot of students. So I felt like people worked really hard, but there was also an openness around writing that thesis that I really appreciated. And I really came to appreciate when I moved on to get my PhD how much flexibility I had to kind of develop that project in a way that made sense to me and that I wanted to pursue. I always felt extremely supported, and I was able to take my MA and go on to a PhD program, which had been my goal, and that was pretty easy to do, so the, you know, again, thinking about institutionalization, and is it co-optation? For me, the credentials and the placement of this department at UW-Madison gave me the legibility I needed to pursue career goals elsewhere, so that was a really important factor for me.

15:19
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: We speak quite a bit about the success of our undergrad courses, and I'm wondering if you could shed some light on how faculty approach designing graduate-level coursework. In what was then an emerging field, and some of that is still, perhaps, taking on new shades and lights.

15:38
Stephanie Rytilahti: Mm-hmm. I don't know that I have a tremendous amount of perspective on this. I do know that another-- gender and women's studies has been particularly attuned to the need to prepare graduates for multiple career tracks, so I know that part of the process of planning graduate courses has been thinking both about the professionalization to make yourself legible in institutions. But also how to prepare students to use their degree in alternative tracks that aren't a tenured position. I was in one graduate class where it was an interdisciplinary class, and the idea was to just really think through what it meant to be interdisciplinary and to put different fields in conversations with each other, and it was a class with MA students who are getting a two-year MA in gender and women's studies, and then certificate students who are coming from all kinds of disciplines. And we developed the syllabus as a course, or as a class. So the first two weeks were designed for people to understand the analytic of the class, and then bring several books where they wrote a quick synopsis and presented it to the class, and made their argument on why they thought it fit, and then we voted, and then every week for the rest of the semester, we selected one of those books. And we were really in dialogue and conversation of both, like, what was working in that book, what wasn't, and how it reflected the theoretical frameworks of gender and women's studies and interdisciplinarity. And I think that was a really unique approach, so I think there's a lot of thoughtfulness on how to challenge students and engage them, but also to really help them understand methodologically what we're doing.

17:15
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: So how do you understand the gender and women's studies experience at UW-Madison, and what makes it unique, as compared to other institutions?

17:26
Stephanie Rytilahti: So let me think for a minute how I want to frame that. This is a very well-resourced department. It's become a very big department. Our enrollment rates are extremely high, we have a lot of faculty, we have a lot of affiliates, we have representation in all kinds of different units and relationships across campus. So, I think, in terms of the departments, other gender and women's studies departments, I think sometimes that does happen, and that is able to happen, but the department here has been resourced enough to remain prominent and have the ability to build those relationships and have that visibility. So that's what I think is really exciting. I think gender and women's studies everywhere is a really exciting field, so even, like, the smallest programs that we have in the state and nationally still really have that energy and vigor and excitement, so I'll go to a smaller campus and there's really exciting conversations happening there that are different or overlapping than the ones that we're having here. So I guess I would reframe that a little bit, and more, it's like the excitement of gender and women's studies. Like, I think that this department has been here for a long time, and it's really exciting, but it's part of a larger network that it developed. You know, all of the programs across the state developed at the same time, and because we have a consortial network, the faculty and instructors and those students have always been in dialogue and conversation, and then we're part of a national disciplinary umbrella as well. So I think, like, what I actually see is kind of the overlap and vibrancy of how colleagues still work together and collaborate and are sitting in this footprint of, you know, pushing new ideas and thinking through new ways and sharing research. So, it's more like the network is really unique to me than, you know, there are certainly amazing things happening here. But it's happening in lots of pockets across the state and nationally, and it's really an honor, I think, for us to be part of that and to lead that in different ways.

19:25
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: One of those amazing things, so to speak, 50 years into the department's evolution is a brand new PhD program, which is entering its third year soon. What do you think is the promise and potential of a GWS PhD program?

19:41
Stephanie Rytilahti: I think it is so important right now that we are still training people who have the analytical frameworks to think critically, and intersectionally, and interdisciplinarily to analyze problems, to analyze social and cultural problems, to think through how we're using AI and all of the different digital spaces that are emerging. So I think it's extremely exciting that we have cohorts of students coming in that are being trained in these frameworks and can be part of these national and state networks that I've referenced. The peril is definitely, it's a moment where the context can be chilling, and we're also seeing a lot of departments and programs that have been around for a long time, no longer as prominent or being merged or shut down entirely, so I think that definitely creates a sense of disease that is impossible to ignore, but at the same time, it's really exciting and really encouraging to simultaneously see departments that are moving forward are still very leveraged institutionally, are accepting students, have engaged faculty, have staff that are supporting the programs, and are training students to take these frameworks in a multiplicity of different directions that will really impact the world in different ways.

21:02
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: On that note, what does it mean to teach or study GWS during these uncertain times, and how do you think GWS responds to a moment in time like this?

21:13
Stephanie Rytilahti: So, I taught the internship class, this last semester, and the internship class places a student in a different community organization or campus office where they're using the frameworks and analytics of gender and women's studies to work with communities in Madison or to work with campus communities. And it was definitely a challenging semester to teach, because there was a lot of executive orders and federal decisions that were happening that were directly disrupting through funding strings some of the internships that our students were at. But it was also a really good moment to see how those community organizations at the same time really relied on the analytics of gender and women's study to figure out what the disparate impacts would be on different communities if a specific funding stream was released, or we didn't have it anymore, or if a specific law or, you know, community resource disappeared, you know, what does it mean for a small county to lose childcare resources that supported 500 families that were of a lower income status. So it was also a moment to really boost the morale of students, and to show them that, like, the frameworks they have for analyzing problems and to being able to identify where there's immediately going to be a need to support a community or to have the legal skills or the policy skills to think through how things could be reworked, I think is really rewarding for the students, and they, we talked about that, and we talked about how their supervisors were thinking through those problems, and students were at the table contributing to those conversations. So, ultimately, you know, there was a lot of uncertainty for where higher ed was going and is going, where a lot of the community organizations that we work with, where they would land at the end of the semester, but almost everyone is still here and doing their work, they're just doing it in different ways. And it was so exciting to see how the frameworks we teach were, like, really critical to keeping that work going.

23:17
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: We've come to the last question. Is there anything that we haven't covered that you find critical to the development and history of GWS at UW-Madison?

23:26
Stephanie Rytilahti: The thing that I really wanted to emphasize, I think I just mentioned with the internship class, like, the tools that our students have, and that they walk away with, like, their critical reasoning, their ability to consider a multiplicity of perspectives, to engage with community members with respect and to be humble, and to think through ethical frameworks in really conscientious ways, are skills that really benefit this state and these communities and the families that live here, and I think our students are so passionate, and they come to the classroom with so much passion, and they engage with community partners who really value the frameworks and the work we're doing in gender and women's studies. So I don't know that the narrative has always supported, like, the strong relationship that specifically communities in Wisconsin have with gender and women's studies, but across the state, all of our departments and programs work really closely with local communities in just a variety of capacities, and the tools that our students have, and that the energy and engagement that they're taking from the classroom to spaces to advance research, to advance community support. It's just really amazing and exciting to see, and that it's something I continue to be excited about, even as the ground is shifting and we're thinking about new ways to utilize those skills.

24:49
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: I actually have a follow-up question. In light of what we're talking about, how does the department, or how do you think the department should respond, or does respond, to ongoing challenges around the idea of gender as a concept, and the sort of pushback against it?

25:11
Stephanie Rytilahti: Yeah, I think, we are an academic discipline with specific disciplinary standards, and it is really important that gender and women's studies, because we are placed within an institutional framework, is in alignment with all of the policies that are set by the University of Wisconsin system. And at the same time, we are also an academic discipline that has standards of our own, so I think ensuring that the rigor that was part of the founding of the field and worked through all of those moments where there's been shifts in what we call ourselves and what we study and what fields are most prominent, I think just remembering that there is an academic component of our work that has a long-standing institutionalized history, and even as that institutionalization has sometimes been maligned or critiqued because of the self-reflexivity that we have as a discipline, it's also really important to remember that we're part of a field, and we have specific standards in how we pursue and analyze topics and categories, and none of that needs to go away. If anything, it's more important to think about what's happening to gender and what gender can do at this moment, and what its limits are, and especially how intersectionality is core to that. So, I think continuing to push what has made us, you know, a top-ranking department, what has been, and what has made us part of conversations of these larger disciplines inour own discipline is really more critical than ever.

26:39
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: Thanks. And, any final words?

26:43
Stephanie Rytilahti: I don't really have any final words. I feel as the consortium, because I work with all of the campuses across the state, and I mentioned this a little bit earlier, it's really essential to understand how UW-Madison is really important as a flagship in us having a PhD and us having a well-resourced department is really critical, and at the same time, um, this program and then department grew up at the same time that the Office of Gender and Women's Studies librarian started, and that all of the programs and departments across the state on our four- and two-year campuses, so this is a huge celebration for Madison and its graduates, but also a celebration across the state as other programs and departments are coming along these same milestones. And just kind of lifting that we all did this together, and that these networks really sustained, and um… engaged and energized departments and programs at really critical moments when they needed it.