Ph.D. in Philosophy and Religion with a Concentration in Women's Spirituality

The Ph.D. in Women’s Spirituality at CIIS consists of 39.2 units and offers three different areas of emphasis: Women and World Religions; Feminist and Ecofeminist Philosophies and Activism; and Women's Mysteries, Sacred Arts, and Healing.

Students select their emphasis upon entry into the program and follow the coursework outlined in the Course of Study below.

Completion of coursework (33 units) is followed by comprehensive exams (6 units) then the completion of an original and substantive dissertation (0.2-0.5 units) that advances the field of women's spirituality. Doctoral dissertations provide advanced students with the opportunity to focus the breadth and depth of their understanding on a topic significant to them and the larger world, making an original, creative contribution of knowledge and insight in scholarship.

All students also participate in our required six-day residential fall intensives which allows students to meet their faculty and peers while enjoying the treasures of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Goal One: Make an original and substantial contribution to the discipline of women's spirituality

For their dissertations, students will engage with an original and substantive research question that advances the field of women's spirituality. Students will also produce a rigorous and critical scholarship that maintains currency with the themes and issues in the field. Additionally, students will demonstrate both independent and collaborative modalities of intellectual and practical work while developing capacities to work with diverse ways of knowing and multiple theoretical frameworks and methodologies, including those, like feminist, womanist, postcolonial, indigenous, queer, and critical, approaches, that contest dominant paradigms and theories.

Goal Two: Demonstrate advanced research skills

Our program prepares students to situate the transdisciplinary scholarship of women's spirituality in relationship to at least one other academic discipline, such as women's studies/gender studies, religion, philosophy, and/or ethnic studies, by engaging the knowledge of primary and secondary texts, voices, themes, and debates in the literature(s) and in the local and global social, spiritual, and political discourses and movements.

Through coursework and dissertation work, students will integrate traditional research/methodological approaches with feminist, embodied, critical, reflective, transpersonal, and/or collaborative community-based approaches. To complement these goals, students will integrate research from multiple spiritual/wisdom traditions, sacred knowledge, scripture, myth, ritual, and praxis, while critically analyzing and evaluating their own and others' standpoints, frameworks/worldviews, and findings. To prepare students to continue their contributions after their dissertation completion, our program emphasizes the importance of demonstrating an ability to communicate one's findings in both scholarly and public arenas, using complex and nuanced language appropriate to the venue.

Goal Three: Demonstrate a commitment to socially relevant scholarship

Students should be able to synthesize and evaluate multiple and diverse philosophies, theologies/thealogies, and theoretical frameworks in the field of women's spirituality inside and outside the classroom; students are thus expected to keep abreast of current advances within the field of women's spirituality and related areas. Through coursework, students will demonstrate an ability to connect their academic inquiry with the real-world concerns of communities outside academia.

Goal Four: Demonstrate the transformation of self and society

Students will be prepared to articulate, orally and in writing, personal reflections that exhibit growth in self-awareness (including in socio-political standpoint), emotional intelligence, and spiritual/philosophical/religious development. As is important in any field, students will also be prepared and supported to articulate, orally and in writing, growth in cultural sensitivity/humility, and in awareness of their relationship to other humans and to the rest of the natural world. This will also include demonstrating a complex and critical understanding of diversity and pluralism, including but not limited to diversity of gender, gender identity, sexual orientation; race, ethnicity, nationality, and culture; and ecological, spiritual, and religious identities. Lastly, students will be supported in their ability to critically evaluate multiple perspectives, including interconnected systems of oppression as well as practices of social transformation.

To complement work in an area of emphasis within the program, students will be expected upon completing the program to understand and apply one or more modalities of healing, creative production, and/or spiritual practice, as well as to consciously cultivate a career path toward employment and public praxis for an inspired vocation or calling.

Goal Five: Demonstrate Professional Skill

The Women's Spirituality program helps students develop teaching skills grounded in womanist/feminist and integral pedagogies, to be demonstrated through public presentations of scholarly papers or artwork at professional or academic organizations, art exhibits, and other public venues, in a style appropriate to the field or discipline and setting. To ensure that students are prepared to continue contributing to the field of women's spirituality after the dissertation is complete, students will develop a strong ability to articulate ideas in clear academic writing, to be communicated through research projects and/or publishing, and to connect academic studies to grassroots activism, the non-profit sector, and/or other academic venues through community service, internships, workshops, art exhibits, public lectures, and similar events.

Students will be supported in demonstrating leadership and facilitation skills; in facilitating and mediating difficult conversations that emerge through eco-socio-political diversities and/or at public rituals, workshops, and other special events; in developing proficiency in digital research skills as well as visual literacy, used for the presentation of their work; in cultivating good listening skills (online and in the classroom); and in learning to give and receive constructive feedback on academic work. Students will learn to responsibly embody the ethical standards of their profession.