To view GWS courses offered during a specific semester, visit the online University Course Catalogue. Select the semester desired from the drop-down menu, then type "GWS" in the Course Prefix box or select GWS from the drop-down menu. Note that actual course offerings are subject to change, but this guide will provide the most current information available.
SPRING 2023 GRADUATE COURSES:
GWS 595-201: ISSUES IN GWS: GENDER AND ACTIVISM
INSTRUCTOR: KAREN TICE
MEETING TIMES: ONLINE, SYNCHRONOUS, T 3:30-6:00PM
This course will explore historical and contemporary examples of abolition, indigenous, transnational, and intersectional feminist activism. We will analyze some of the frictions, splinters, obstacles, and cooptation/accommodations that have accompanied feminist initiatives/organizing as well as the affinities and identifications that have enabled and sustained feminist activism and collaborations. We will also consider the ways that feminist activists have related to issues of race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, religion, nationality, and capitalism as well as to other social justice and liberation movements. Finally, we will analyze attempts to undermine feminist solidarities and coalitions by examining internet trolling, the criminalization of protest/liberation movements, right-wing backlash, and cancel culture. This course counts toward requirements for the GWS graduate certificate, PhD, and other degrees as appropriate. This course can count toward the cross-cultural requirement for the GWS graduate certificate.
GWS 600-001: TOPICS IN GWS: POLITICS OF THE BODY
INSTRUCTOR: CHARLIE ZHANG
MEETING TIMES: T, 5:00-7:30PM
This course introduces students to theoretical debates over body, and helps them to develop critical understanding of embedded meanings of different forms of life and afterlife. We will address these questions: What bodies are deemed livable, productive, and why? How do capital and biopolitics/necropolitics energize each other? How are bodies gendered, racialized, sexualized, and classed in biopolitical systems? How do global economies work through disparately structured bodies? How do neoliberal ideas about individual sovereignty converge/collide with national and global and health legal systems that influence our perceptions of disease, virus, and pandemic? How do concepts of nation, border, and sovereignty animate lives and deaths of populations—human, non-human, near-human, and posthuman? How do organic bodies meet and interact with inorganic bodies to affect our co-existence? This course counts toward requirements for the GWS graduate certificate, PhD, and other degrees as appropriate. This course can count toward the cross-cultural requirement for the GWS graduate certificate.
GWS 600-002 (SAME AS ST 600): TOPICS IN GWS: DEBILITY AND AFTER/ALTERLIVES
INSTRUCTORS: ANASTASIA TODD (GWS), KARRIEANN SOTO VEGA (WRD), NARI SENANAYAKE (GEO), CRYSTAL FELIMA (ANT)
MEETING TIMES: F 2:00-4:30PM
In this course, we will engage in scholarly conversations about bodies and health through the frameworks of debility and after/alterlives. Reading across the fields of health geography, medical anthropology, decolonial feminist rhetoric, and feminist disability studies, the seminar will pay close attention to how race, gender, class, nation, sexuality, and ability shape which bodies (both human and non-human) are rehabilitatable, which bodies are marked as contagious or toxic and in need of containment, and which bodies are consequently rendered disposable. Students will also grapple with the liberatory work that emerges in the aftermath of mass debilitation and impairment. Through the course we will ask: What is the utility of debility, as a theoretical intervention, to conceptualize the ways in which the body lives, labors, and copes under the conditions of neoliberal capitalism and toxic pollution? How do race, gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship come together to create uneven access to “health,” both material and imagined, for some bodies more than others? How do the concepts of after/alter lives push us to think differently about how bodies might be re-capacitated or rehabilitated beyond the logics of neoliberal capitalism? This course counts toward requirements for the GWS graduate certificate, PhD, and other degrees as appropriate.
GWS 640-001: HISTORY OF FEMINIST THOUGHT: REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE
INSTRUCTOR: CAROL MASON
MEETING TIMES: R 3:00-5:30PM
This course will examine reproductive justice as an analytical framework and social movement that foregrounds the experiential knowledge of women of color. We will begin with US-based writings and emphasize transnational perspectives as well. Books may include Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body; Daisy Deomampo, Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India; Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire; Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger, Reproductive Justice: An Introduction; Brianna Theobald, Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century; Alys Weinbaum, The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of History. This course is required for GWS PhD students and can count towards requirements for the GWS graduate certificate and other degrees as appropriate.
ADDITIONAL COURSES FOR GWS CREDIT:
EPE 667: EDUCATION AND GENDER
INSTRUCTOR: KAREN TICE
MEETING TIMES: M 4:00-6:30PM, ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Using a variety of interdisciplinary theories, this seminar considers how gender and intersectional differences are formed, enacted, and resisted in formal and informal educational institutions and spaces across time and place. Using analytic frames such as intersectionality, this course will explore how historical and emergent socio-political processes, discourses, policies, and practices have shaped belonging/exclusion/silencing, equity, and social justice in education. Throughout the semester, we will consider the following questions: In what ways do educational institutional cultures construct gender, belonging, and “diversity”? How do students, teachers, and communities respond, resist, and remake educational spaces and experiences? How do educational spaces and experiences contribute to or undermine intersectional gender disparities?