The Adventure School for Ladies was founded in 2009 by Anne Elizabeth Moore as a means through which to explore gender, cultural production, political engagement, and social divisions with the top ladylike scholars in the field of adventure studies.

Potential scholars at the Adventure School for Ladies are advised to consider the name alongside such others as, “the Department of Homeland Security,” which despite having few locatable presences such as a department in an office might, little to do with “home” or “land” in the sense in which we usually use those terms, and a widely variant impact on our sense of security depending on who we are in our society, has still emerged as a vital political, military, and economic force.

Similarly, “ladies” is a self-adopted, although gendered term: we will accept your presentation of yourself as “ladylike” if you are willing to be defined as such and can respond to feminine pronouns. “Adventure,” generally applied to excursions of high physical or financial risk, here applies to information, experiences, conversations, or opinions traditionally unavailable to our students. Likewise, our “school” is the site of our pedagogical praxis: where both discussion and action occur will be our Main Campus. This, however, is subject to change without notice.

A wide variety of programs may take place at the Adventure School for Ladies, including field research in Dupree, South Dakota; a fellowship program; a distance learning program; and leadership seminars in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. These may also be “conceptual” programs, and therefore never come to fruition in the lived world, but we offer them to the popular imaginary as a Good Idea For Things That Should Happen In Schools.