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Posts under tag: classes

November 11, 2015

More new classes for winter!

Class names

WGS 101 – Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies – NO PREREQS!
WGS 199 – Art, Activism and Pop Culture – NO PREREQS!
WGS 321 – Feminist Perspectives: Identity, Race, Culture
WGS 331 – Rethinking Gender and Technology
WGS 351 – Intro to Global Feminisms – NO PREREQS!
WGS/QST 361 – Gender and Video games – NO PREREQS!
WGS 410/510 – Native Feminisms

See below for full descriptions. Registration opens next week, Monday, November 16th! Register early and secure your seat!

WGS Class Schedule

Class Descriptions

WGS 199: Art, Activism and Pop Culture
Professor Margaret Rhee

In this course, we will investigate how art and activism intersect to address pressing contemporary social issues concerning gender, race, and sexuality. In particular, the course focuses on how art is utilized as activism, and vice versa, to address social issues such as the prison industrial complex, sexual assault, and HIV/AIDS. The course takes on a special emphasis on how artist-activists-students have utilized art to organize and create change on the college campus. Along with rigorous reading and writing, students will also engage in the topic of art and activism through constructionist learning—learning through creating—in a special lab component of the class. In groups, students’ will collectively create art/activist projects that address campus, local, or national issues through a feminist lens. The class will conclude with a special symposium where students will present their work to the WGS department and larger campus.

WGS 321 – Feminist Perspectives: Identity, Race, Culture
Professor Lani Teves
! Fulfills Social Science group requirement
! Fulfills American Cultures requirement

This course examines the ways in which race, class, gender, and sexuality intersect to form systems of inequality, formations of identity, and sites for political agency. Multi-racial interdisciplinary feminist perspectives have interrogated the politics within feminist discussions to re-center intersecting identities to better understand the histories, experiences, and the contemporary politics of women of color. This challenge to both the academy and institutional systems has called for a complication of monolithic assumptions within the “study of women.” The readings emphasize theoretical dialogues confronting the complexities of inclusion/exclusion in feminism, first/third world constructions, and difference within difference that further complicate our assumptions of identity, community, and culture. Such frameworks through the course include, but are not limited to; indigenous feminisms, critical race theory, borderlands, and globalization. Through film and literary narratives students will have the opportunity to critically analyze the social positions, representations, and political projects centering the lives and experiences of women of color.

WGS 331 – Rethinking Gender and Technology
Professor Nadia Loan
! Fulfills Identity, Pluralism and Tolerance requirement

Do technologies shape the way in which we understand and enact gender identities or does gender influence the use of technologies? Starting with these questions, this course will probe deep into the world of gender and technology to critically examine the relationship between these two concepts. We will use a broad definition of technology so as to include computers, computer networks and digital media as well as a wide array of everyday objects and things (for e.g. the microwave oven). This course will highlight the social, cultural and political factors that influence the relationship between gender and technology and explore how the meanings and uses of technology are historically and culturally located.

WGS 351 – Intro to Global Feminisms
Professor Irum Shiekh
! Fulfills Social Science group requirement
! Fulfills International Cultures requirement

This course is an exploration of global feminisms, feminist activism, and women’s movements organizing locally and across borders. Through films, readings, and discussion, we will explore the varied expressions of women’s activism at the community, national, and transnational levels, considering how feminists construct diverse interpretations of feminism and how, in the era of globalization, feminist and women’s movements engage and challenge the state, civil society, international agencies, and corporations for a more just world. At the same time, we will explore the tensions, coalitions, and conflicts within transnational feminist theorizing and praxis using case studies from diverse regions around the world. This course meets the Social Science group requirement in that it will consider multiple examples of movements from all over the globe and therefore be broadly comparative in scope. It will also consider multiple different cultural contexts.

WGS/QST 361 – Video Games and Virtual Worlds
Professor Edmond Chang
! Fulfills QST minor requirements
! Fulfills Arts & Letters requirement
! Fulfills Identity, Pluralism and Tolerance requirement

Alexander Galloway in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture argues that play “is a symbolic action for larger issues in culture” (16) and that video games “render social realities into playable form” (17). Using a broad archive of “imagined worlds”–drawing on literature, film, television, digital games, and scholarship–this course will consider the questions: Why study these “imagined worlds,” how are they important, and what values do they have? In this course, we will look at and analyze texts of media old and new through the interdisciplinary lenses of cultural studies and comparative media and deploy virtual worlds and video games as theories about and to unpack and analyze the intersections race, gender, class, nation, sexuality, and technology, particularly in the US context.

WGS 410/510 – Native Feminisms
Professor Lani Teves

This course examines the foundational and aspirational trajectory of Native feminist scholarship. We will begin by questioning the usefulness of gender as a category of analysis within Native communities and how Native women have responded to feminism. We will trace the intellectual origins of Native feminisms, each week reading a key text in recent publication. With an emphasis on the praxis of Native feminism, we will cover a range of indigenous contexts, but focus primarily on the Americas and the Indigenous Pacific. Topics explored include cultural revitalization and gender roles, change and continuity under cycles of colonialism and settler-colonialism, the connection between colonialism and sexual violence in Native communities, debates over citizenship and sovereignty, and contemporary Native gender roles and identities.