Critical Approaches in Social and Cultur

This course examines the conceptual foundations that support feminist and queer analyses of racial capitalism, security and incarceration, the politics of life and health, and colonial and postcolonial studies, among others. Open to all students; required for the major in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE).

• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Marisa Solomon
  Info
• 3 points

Intersectional Feminisms

PRACTICING INTERSECTIONAL

This introductory course for the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE) is open to all students. We focus on the critical study of social difference as an interdisciplinary practice, using texts with diverse modes of argumentation and evidence to analyze social differences as fundamentally entangled and co-produced. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this course, the professor will frequently be joined by other faculty from the Consortium for Critical Interdisciplinary Studies (CCIS), who bring distinct disciplinary and subject matter expertise. Some keywords for this course include hybridity, diaspora, borderlands, migration, and intersectionality.

• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Manijeh Moradian
  Info
• 3 points

WOMEN AND SCIENCE

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 18 students. History and politics of womens involvement with science. Womens contributions to scientific discovery in various fields, accounts by women scientists, engineers, and physicians, issues of science education. Feminist critiques of biological research and of the institution of science.

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Laura E Kay
  CULPA: 35 Info
• 4 points

GENDERED CONTROVERSIES

Investigates the significance of contemporary and historical issues of social, political, and cultural conflicts centered on womens bodies. How do such conflicts constitute women, and what do they tell us about societies, cultures, and politics? - D. Ko

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Janet Jakobsen
  CULPA: 6 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

FEMINIST THEORY

This course explores the formation of desire, sexuality, and subjectivity through the frameworks of feminist epistemologies (the question of what we can know) and feminist ethics (the question of how to be responsible within our relationships and local and global communities). We will reflect on the tension between the limits of what we can know about ourselves and others and the imperative to care for each other and remain accountable for our individual and collective actions and inaction. We will investigate how our deepest emotions, intimate encounters, and secret fantasies are formed by larger social and political contexts. In turn, we will also question how these intimate relationships with ourselves and our companions may be seen as feminist acts of resistance, disruption, and creation. Objective I: to closely engage diverse feminist perspectives in late-twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury phenomenology, existentialism, Marxism, queer theory, critical race theory, and psychoanalysis. Objective II: to begin to locate your own feminist perspective within the intersection of your unique experiences and the larger historical and social contexts that form you and which you may seek to transform.

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Marisa Solomon
  Info
• Instructor: Robyn C Spencer
  Info
• 4 points

CRITICAL ANIMAL STUDIES

"This course collaborates between students and professor, humans and animals, subjects and objects, to investigate the Animal Problem. What are non-human animals? How do we relate to them? How do we account for our animal nature while reconciling our cultural aspirations? What are our primary desires with respect to non-human animals?

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Janet Jakobsen
  CULPA: 6 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Senior Seminar I (Barnard)

SENIOR SEMINAR I

Student-designed capstone research projects offer practical lessons about how knowledge is produced, the relationship between knowledge and power, and the application of interdisciplinary feminist methodologies.

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Manijeh Moradian
  Info
• 4 points

FEMINIST MEDIA THEORY

The integration of contemporary media and social practices of all types is intensifying. This seminar examines media theory and various media platforms including Language, Photography, Film, Television, Radio, Digital Video, and Computing as treated by feminists, critical race and queer theorists, and other scholars and artists working from the margins. Prerequisite:
Either
one introductory WGSS course
or
Critical Approaches to Social and Cultural Theory
or
Permission of the Instructor.

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Jonathan L Beller
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 4 points

Independent Study

INDEPENDENT STUDY

• Instructor: Rebecca Jordan-Young
  Wikipedia Info
• 1-4 points

Decolonization and Feminist Critique

DECOLONIZATION & FEMINIST

This advanced seminar examines historical, social, cultural, and theoretical propositions for decolonizing praxis and their complex relations to feminist critique. How do we understand Western European colonialism and coloniality as modes, conditions, and institutions of power, dispossession, subjugation, and subjection continuing into the present? What are the methods, practices, and vision enacted and proposed by the colonized for undoing and radically transforming the determinate logics, instruments, and structures of colonialism as these persist in the present moment? We will consider how gender and sexuality as well as race – as technologies of social organization, codes of valuation, and modes of survival – shape colonialism and the struggles against it. We will inquire into their significance to projects of decolonization. How might decolonization envision and make possible other ways of life?

• R noon-1:50 p.m.
• Instructor: Neferti Tadiar
  CULPA: 10 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Planetary Questions

PLANETARY QUESTIONS

This advanced seminar examines important approaches, issues, perspectives, and themes related to planetary concerns of environmental crisis, climate change, life sustainability, and multi-species flourishing, with a focus on feminist, postcolonial, anti-racist, and queer perspectives. Topics for discussion and study include the global pandemic,  histories of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism, Prereqs: BOTH 1 WMST Intro course PLUS any WGSS 'Foundation' course, OR instructor permission.

• W noon-1:50 p.m.
• Instructor: Neferti Tadiar
  CULPA: 10 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points