Lower-Division

Introduces the core concepts underlying the interdisciplinary field-formation of feminist studies within multiple geopolitical contexts. Explores how feminist inquiry rethinks disciplinary assumptions and categories, and animates our engagement with culture, history, and society. Topics include: the social construction of gender; the gendered division of labor, production, and reproduction; intersections of gender, race, class, and ethnicity; and histories of sexuality.

Explores feminist theories from domestic U.S. and global contexts in order to ask how interventions of women of color in the U.S. and of radical feminist movements in non-U.S. locations radically re-imagine feminist politics. Rather than focusing on feminist movements that represent different regions of the world, course examines feminist theory through multiple histories of colonialism, post-colonialism, and globalization.

Introduces students to the basics of podcasting and guides students to become contributors to Feminist Files, a podcast that makes feminist scholarship and scholars accessible to the public. This course gives students the theoretical and practical framework to critique a variety of podcasts and engage in the podcast movement. Students learn how to conceptualize stories, research topics, interview guests, write scripts, host shows, records and edit audio. Students also build their collaboration skills by working in groups to produce segments.

Popular culture enables people to make sense of their modern selves and their place in the world. Focusing on South Asia, this course explores the region's rich and variegated popular culture forms, including film, music, television, the painted and printed image, and sport. It also investigates how the popular articulates with nation and global conjunctures and how it constructs hierarchies of class, gender, caste, and sexuality.

Examines migration as a mode of inquiry into transnational practices across geographic locales and temporal zones. Analyzes migration in relation to the transnational formation of gender, race, and sexuality as well as processes of neocolonialism, the state, and globalization. Taught in conjunction with FMST 115.

The news is a set of narratives that produce, maintain, repair, and transform reality. Using three events that brought together old and new media, this course traces how the interaction of new media with news has changed how we make sense of the world around us and our place in it.

Black feminist theoretical and methodological approaches to the dailiness of women's lives, which considers historical and contemporary Black feminist interventions and praxis that challenge ethnographic hegemony. Students revisit old and new debates to ponder questions of authority, genres, positionality, and citation politics.

Focuses on key issues, core concepts and debates foundational to Black feminisms. With some consideration from the Black diaspora, students examine processes of self-making from resistance to a history of violence, practices and strategies of creative survivalism, and the ongoing struggle to liberation.

Examines, and critically analyzes, select post-World War II movements for social justice in the United States from feminist perspectives. Considers how those movements and their participants responded to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. A feminist, transnational, analytic framework is also developed to consider how those movements may have embraced, enhanced, or debilitated feminist formations in other parts of the world.

Introduces dominant discourses about Christianity and Islam in the American public sphere, with particular attention paid to race, gender, sexuality, and class in thinking about religion. Visual and textual media, political commentary, and popular ethnographies are analyzed.

Explores questions of science and justice. Examines the nature of scientific practice, the culture of science, and the possibilities for the responsible practice of science. Rather than focusing on feminist critiques of science, the course examines how science and technology are changing our world and the workings of power.

Introduces students to the key critical concepts, debates, and questions of practice in the emerging field of disability studies, with a focus on feminist and critical race approaches to disability.

Examines the relationship between sexuality and the contemporary term globalization as a dense entanglement of processes that emerges from a history of U.S. empire. Sexuality cannot be separated from power struggles over the classification of bodies, territories, and questions of temporality. Examines how sexualized contact zones produce new knowledge, commerce, inequalities, possibilities, and identities.

Draws from representations of transgender/transsexual people in popular, biomedical, and political contexts. Examines the impact of transgender lives on concepts of gender, identity, and technology. Engages with biological and sexological frameworks of sex/gender, trans experience, and social movements and theories.

Centering Black feminist Toni Cade Bambara's existential question, "Are you sure, Sweetheart, that you want to be well?" this course puts the emphasis on transnational feminist praxis to consider interdisciplinary approaches and methods to living with inequity while pursuing wholeness and well-being. Considering notions of individual and community, care and personhood, environment and nature, self-love and happiness, and other themes, we find theoretical grounding in the concept of rasanblaj (the gathering of ideas, things, people, and spirits).

Why has the proliferation of research on prisons—demonstrating economic and racial disparities, as well as negative effects on individuals and communities—not led to more substantial questioning of public policy that treats imprisonment as a major solution to social problems? This course is an interdisciplinary inquiry into the role visual culture plays in the maintenance of the prison industrial complex and an introduction to artistic practices that challenge law and social policy; the course also introduces fundamental concepts to the study of art and visual culture in relation to the movement for prison abolition.