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 2025 GRADUATE COURSES:
GWS 600-001: TOPICS IN GWS: PREJUDICE & INEQUALITY
INSTRUCTOR: JENN HUNT
MEETING TIMES: WED 3:30-6:00PM
In recent decades, there have been marked improvements in attitudes toward many groups that are stigmatized due to race, gender, sexual orientation, social class, and other social identities. Nevertheless, considerable inequalities remain across social groups, subtle forms of discrimination thrive, and, in many cases, prejudice is still openly expressed. This course will attempt to understand this juxtaposition by examining theories of prejudice and inequality from different social science perspectives, including Psychology, Sociology, Gender Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Critical Whiteness Studies. First, we will consider theories on the nature of contemporary prejudice to understand why biases related to race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. persist, how prejudices against different groups are similar and different, and how intersectional oppression occurs. Second, we will consider how pervasive inequality and discrimination occurs at both individual and structural levels and how those experiences affect members of targeted groups. We also will examine how members of dominant groups, especially White people, form group-based identities and understand their experiences of privilege. Third, we will analyze different approaches – both good and bad – to reducing prejudice and promoting meaningful rather than rhetorical equality. This course counts toward requirements for the GWS graduate certificate, PhD, and other degrees as appropriate.
GWS 600-002: TOPICS IN GWS: FEMINIST DISABILITY STUDIES
INSTRUCTOR: ANASTASIA TODD
MEETING TIMES: MON 3:30-6:00PM
Disability activists, scholars, and advocates have long pushed back against a myopic understanding of disability as a pathologized condition, an individual deficit, and as a self-evident truth of the bodymind. Instead, they argue for the recognition of disability as multiplicitous: as an identity, as culture, and as valuable embodied human difference. This graduate level seminar takes up these arguments and critiques, but from a decidedly feminist perspective. Throughout the semester, we will traverse the field of feminist disability studies, paying close attention to how different scholars think and write about disability, pain, and chronic illness. We will also read scholarship from feminist authors who don’t always use the language of disability. We will think about care labor, mental health apps, the debilitating effects of academia, crip feelings, and how gender, race, and sexuality inform the experience and legibility of disability, pain, and chronic illness. This course counts toward requirements for the GWS graduate certificate, PhD, and other degrees as appropriate.
GWS 700-001: TOPICAL SEMINAR IN GWS: GENDER, LAW, COURTS
INSTRUCTOR: SRIMATI BASU
MEETING TIMES: THURS 4:00-6:30PM
This course examines gender and law in cross-cultural and theoretical context. In this course, we look at law not merely as being in the domain of legislation and adjudication, but as a cultural object, an important signifier in politics, a technology for people’s strategic use. We read some theoretical work on feminist jurisprudence that problematize concepts such as equality, difference, justice, and agency, applying them to contemporary debates. We will try to evaluate concepts that have proved useful over time and others which appear to have troubled legacies, seeking to map the complicated terrain through which legal remedies can be used. We will also read (and watch) several ethnographies of legal spaces such as courtrooms and informal dispute resolution venues, and other works of film and fiction and social science research, to concretely study the ways in which gender operates in legal realms. Critical Legal Studies, which studies the ways in which race, class and sexuality are embedded in law, is another significant strand. Other questions include: Is it possible to eradicate sexual violence through law? Can marriage/ domestic partnerships be inscribed outside the domain of exchange? Is human rights discourse the best solution for mainstreaming gender justice issues? This course counts toward requirements for the GWS graduate certificate, PhD, and other degrees as appropriate. This course also meets the GWS graduate certificate cross-cultural requirement.
ADDITIONAL COURSES FOR GWS CREDIT
PHI 537: PHILOSOPHY OF LAW: FEMINISM
INSTRUCTOR: NATALIE NENADIC
MEETING TIMES: TR, 11:00-12:15PM
This course focuses on feminism’s experience-driven multidisciplinary and philosophical work (a hermeneutical-phenomenological approach) in making visible the widespread sexual objectification, abuse, and violence that target mainly women and girls and are a central means of maintaining their social inequality. Through new concepts, feminism reframed these experiences in ways that recognized their multifaceted harms (e.g., physical, psychological, emotional, trauma) rather than covering them up as the prevailing understanding does. These new concepts have, in turn, guided efforts to change law so that it might be used to stop these abuses, offer remedies to survivors, and thereby provide justice that is more universally accountable to all citizens. We trace two main trajectories that yielded creative legal developments: reconceptualizing sexual harassment and pornography as sex discrimination. We also consider their intersections with today’s technology. We examine sexual harassment’s relation to the social media #MeToo Movement and pornography in the age of the internet and AI (artificial intelligence). This course counts toward requirements for the GWS graduate certificate, PhD, and other degrees as appropriate.