Graduate Courses

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This course is intended to assist graduate students in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies with their professional development. The emphasis will be on developing practical skills for being successful as a graduate student, including developing pedagogical skills as a teaching assistant, literature reviews, grant writing, cv development, abstract writing and submission, knowledge mobilization, and the peer-review process for publishing in journals and edited collections. The course also highlights opportunities for alt-academic and non-academic career skill development.

In this course we orient our reading towards making sense of the worlds we live from feminist, decolonial, and queer theoretical perspectives. In these theories there is no theory/practice divide. Theories emerge out of lived experiences and evolve accordingly. Theories help us to make sense and help to guide us in our analyses. That’s why they need to come out of our lived experiences. They also need to come from listening to the experiences of others. Theories that are top down impose perspectives on others. Instead, theories are negotiations, questions, and queries. We dialogue with theories about our research questions. We will engage with readings that help us to ask meaningful questions about our own research and the research of others, and that will guide us in our own thinking and practices. Our primary goal here is to understand the texts and to find the voices that speak most saliently to our own research.

This essay, research, and presentation-style graduate seminar examine what Rinaldo Walcott describes as “the long emancipation” signaling the unfulfilled promise of freedom despite the legal end to Black people’s enslavement. It engages provocations and disruptions to challenge complacent readings of democratic liberalism – or what Charles Mills describes as “racial liberalism.”1 The seminar is informed by the structural violence of the transatlantic slave trade and its manifestations in what Saidiya Hartman signals as the afterlife of slavery - that is, skewed life chances for African descendants in the Black diaspora. We will examine contested ideas and arguments about freedom, rights, racial progress, and reparations, drawing on theoretical critiques from Black Studies. The seminar is divided into four interconnected modules listed below - in each we will think about how gender and other intersecting categories shaped slavery, freedom, law, liberalism and capitalism. The central goal of this course is to create a conversational space to grapple with ideas/readings in the Black intellectual tradition informed by feminist and queer critical traditions.

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TBD

This course provides an overview of feminist and associated critical research methodologies (anti-racist, anti-colonial, queer) from a variety of disciplinary traditions and theoretical perspectives. Students are encouraged to understand and engage with the core principles of these critically-oriented methodologies and their associated issues and tensions as relations of power/knowledge. Through guided discussion and critical reflection on course readings, students will articulate the assumptions that underlie and inform various critical research methodologies and understand their implications for their own knowledge practices and commitments. This course will not provide a step-by-step guide for how to conduct your research: the process of selecting and learning to implement a methodology that is consistent with your epistemological commitments and theoretical framing is a necessary part of the graduate student journey! Rather, emphasis will be placed on central principles, concepts, and issues that travel across methodologies, including, for example: critical reflexivity, researcher positionality, collaboration, research ethics, sampling, voice, interpretation, data collection, and reporting of findings.

This course will focus on the linkages between gender, economy, environment, race, class, sexuality, environmental racism, and environmental justice. We will examine key contemporary environmental issues such as climate change, food security, the “green” economy, low-carbon development and degrowth; access to water, sanitation, and energy; pollution; and biodiversity conservation from feminist perspectives. Feminist and queer theory will also be used to question and destabilize binary categories such as natural/unnatural, nature/culture, normal/abnormal as they relate to our understandings of “the environment.” The course will explore how racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, colonialism, imperialism, and other forms of oppression have shaped and continue to shape environmental discourses. We will also discuss emerging concepts such as solastalgia and ecological grief. Course materials will include academic and non-academic literature (including policy and journalistic literature), activist texts, case studies, fiction, and film.

This essay, research, and presentation-style graduate seminar examine what Rinaldo Walcott describes as “the long emancipation” signaling the unfulfilled promise of freedom despite the legal end to Black people’s enslavement. It engages provocations and disruptions to challenge complacent readings of democratic liberalism – or what Charles Mills describes as “racial liberalism.”

The seminar is informed by the structural violence of the transatlantic slave trade and its manifestations in what Saidiya Hartman signals as the afterlife of slavery - that is, skewed life chances for African descendants in the Black diaspora. We will examine contested ideas and arguments about freedom, rights, racial progress, and reparations, drawing on theoretical critiques from Black Studies. The seminar is divided into four interconnected modules listed below - in each we will think about how gender and other intersecting categories shaped slavery, freedom, law, liberalism and capitalism. The central goal of this course is to create a conversational space to grapple with ideas/readings in the Black intellectual tradition informed by feminist and queer critical traditions.

This course rests on the Indigenous wisdom that storytelling and relationships are central to our collective and individual self-understandings. As such, the course investigates how stories of the past constitute, justify, and make invisible the present-day systems of stratification; and conversely, it explores how stories are used to mobilize and sustain challenges and resistance to those systems. Drawing on political and critical theory, collective memory, political sociology and transitional justice literatures, this course examines how the present shapes the stories we construct, and how the past, and stories we tell about the past, shape the present.