Featured Courses

This interdisciplinary graduate seminar gives students an overview of the theoretical, epistemological, and methodological foundations of feminist pedagogy. We will examine theoretical frameworks of teaching and learning that promote justice and social change (i.e. praxis), as well as feminist pedagogical strategies that can be utilized within and beyond the classroom (i.e. practice). Students can expect to engage with various critical and liberatory pedagogies, pedagogies of identity and difference, and signature pedagogies. They will learn how feminist epistemologies shape (and are shaped by) ethical classroom practice, focusing on specific ways in which to cultivate and nurture feminist teaching and learning. In addition, students will also learn how to develop a syllabus and teaching philosophy.

Recommended Preparation: Prior coursework in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is recommended as well as familiarity with critical cultural and social theory. A history of transgender struggle has fomented intellectual formations that interrogate racial and gendered logics and proffer alternative structures of engagement, but commitment to any conceptualization of trans critique has often fallen back on assumptive ascriptions to non-racial analysis. Gathered at the concomitant study of race, gender, sexuality, class, and socio-spatiality, Trans of Color Critique provides an opportunity to (re)consider the analytical and material possibilities and tensions tendered by the articulation of transgender and non-white. Engaging with trans (and queer) of color theory as a particular approach to the political and as its own mode of knowledge production, we will not only take up the mutual constitution of race and gender, but center how whiteness has come to construct the burgeoning field of trans studies. In this graduate seminar we will consider the ways in which these multiply marginalized knowledges aim a critical challenge at our Western knowledge traditions. The course considers how race as a modality of analysis and trans of color critique as a praxis can in turn amplify, extend, and complicate the framework and analytical interventions offered by trans studies. Rather than attempt to be exhaustive, we will focus on the urgent interventions offered by trans of color critical theory, especially as it relates to foundational disruptions of Western epistemologies, medicalization, humanism, movement and displacement, decolonial critique, carcerality, violence and death, and futurity.

This seminar explores educational implications in popular texts created for and by girls across time and cultures. CI (WMNST) 542 Girls’ Cultures and Popular Cultures (3) The study of girls and their relationship with popular culture lies within the interdisciplinary field of Girlhood Studies which draws on established areas of Women’s Studies, Children’s/Childhood studies, Cultural Studies and Educational Studies. This seminar explores girls’ cultures in different textual and material forms including books, toys, magazines, and new media. Students will employ feminist cultural theories to compare historical and contemporary girls’ cultures in relation to educational research and practice. This will provide a framework to locate girls at the center of research and action in order for graduate students to engage in methodologies that are not simply about girls but “for” “with” and “by” girls. Key topics include the misperception of girls’ (popular) culture as only a contemporary phenomenon, the role of girls as consumers plus producers of culture, and recurrent issues in girls’ cultures such as sexualization and hyperfeminity.

This course aims at introducing key historical and contemporary Latina/x feminist theories, including Chicana/x, Afro-Latina/x, and diasporic Latin American feminist theories. Given that these theories are informed by a strong tradition of “theory in the flesh,” intellectual production informed by lived experience, this course highlights the relationship between experience and identity formation. Special attention will be given to writings underscoring the construction of identity at the intersection of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, and nationality. In addition, the course considers how Latina/x aesthetic production is connected to self-formation, transformation, and resistance.

This course is for graduate students and employs Indigenous, Black feminist, Chicana feminist, and decolonizing research frameworks to mediate and articulate ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies. These processes assist researchers in enacting and engaging critically conscious and humanizing research. We begin by “becoming” conscious through the specific naming of oppression(s) and the coming of voice. We then attempt to humanize ourselves as researchers through a process of self (re)discovery, recovery, remembering, and reflexivity as they relate to our approaches and attachments to various research projects and inquiries. Next, we interrogate ethical research engagements with vulnerable communities through the discussion and close reading of several research studies and perspective pieces. We then consider how these discussions show up in our writing, citations, and in our overall life’s work towards a more just world.

Care is a global issue of critical importance in the formation of identities. CareScapes will examine how to "decolonize" and "degender" care. This class will concentrate on the existing and evolving relationalities of care, emphasizing the places and scales of contemporary care to conceptualize care as a progressive action. In exploring mutual aid, carewebs, and carescapes, we will read texts that offer radical alternative understandings of care, including beyond human care. Despite care being framed as a universal benefit, care policies and government programs typically benefit the middle class. A significant consequence is the deepening of inequalities within a gendered, racist, capitalistic care economy. This class will engage a diverse range of theories, including gendered, raced, and other embodied theories of displacements, to reject exclusionary, colonial, and privileged understandings of care. We will read from a variety of theorists in geography and beyond, including Premilla Nadasen, Piepzna-Samarasinha, Geraldine Pratt, Lynda Jo

"Approaching the job market" is a one-credit course (OR, for those who are finished with course work, you can register as an AUDITOR). It runs the first half of the spring semester, and its objectives are: 1) to let you "under the hood" as it were with regard to the job-market process. By that I mean, we will talk about how a department decides to do a job search, how they write the ad, how you can "read" those ads (are they "coded"? Sometimes!), what search committees are looking for, generally speaking. Over the 7 weeks, you will work on each of the components of a job portfolio, so that you have a draft—however rough—of each document you will need. We will also talk about how to handle the dual-title degree — how do you pitch that for a strictly one-disciplinary position? How do you talk about your disciplinary major when applying for a WGSS position? The class is informal and informative! You may take the course in any year: you can take it early, to get an idea of what's ahead; you can take it in the year before you go on the market. Students who took this previously found it enlightening!

This course explores some foundational concerns within the nascent and trans/disciplinary field of feminist queer ecologies as it seeks to address some of today’s urgent challenges related to planetary wellbeing and social justice. Through readings and class discussion, we will trace this field’s emergence in relation to its cognate and generative fields of feminist/queer/trans, critical geography, critical race, decolonial, political ecology, and environmental studies. We will further examine queer ecology in relation to ecological activism and socio-ecological coalitional politics, beyond the human domain and at a transnational scale. Some of the questions we will consider ask: How do understandings of ecologies, habitats, and planetary sustainability engage with notions of embodied sexuality, gender, race, and belonging? How do discourses of “nature,” “native,” “indigenous,” “invasive,” “animal," “contaminant,” and related concepts shape understandings of environmental challenges and ways for approaching their study and resolution? What are the obstacles to overcoming binary conceptualizations of social and ecological processes, interdependencies, and ways of being and what is at stake in challenging them?  How can these theoretical approaches generate analytical and practical tools for fortifying trans/disciplinary and transnational environmental justice coalitions?

This course surveys the environmental rhetoric of Rachel Carson—both her published writing and more personal archives—through the lenses of feminist, queer, and disability studies.

This course is grounded in the critical sociolinguistic study of language, gender, and sexuality, which views gender and sexuality as (co-)constructed through language and discourse in practice, institutions, social structures, and more. The course begins by considering indexicality, the construction of the gender binary and heteronormativity, intersectionality, colonialism, and the meaning of identity, amongst other foundational texts. Then the course will move into new innovations in trans linguistics and intersectional language, gender, and sexuality research to question the constraints of binaries, boundaries, the racialization of gender, and more. Throughout the course, we will consider questions such as: What is “identity,” and what does it mean to “perform” identities? Who is afforded agency and subjectivity in the construction of meaning? How is this conditioned by various axes of oppression? What room is there for marginalized speakers to break free from these constraints? Student interest and research foci will drive various topics throughout the course.