Tag Archives | special topics course

Queer & Trans Studies

By thomaspr on November 10, 2022 in WGS Curriculum

This course offers a selective, interdisciplinary introduction to queer and trans studies within LGBTQ+ studies. Students will explore trans and queer history; theoretical and conceptual writing; auto-ethnography and ethnography; autobiography, memoir, creative writing, film/tv and art; political writing and documentaries. Drawing on the #TransJustice Syllabus and other sources, some focal areas of this course are QTBIPOC (queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and white anti-racist accomplice theorizing and feminisms, bodies and health, family and community building, nationalism and migration, criminalization and abolition, and, social justice organizing/movement work. Guiding questions that we will ask ourselves in this course include the following: What are some central concerns for queer and trans peoples/communities? How are visibility, representation, and inclusion problematic? and lastly, What do historic and contemporary trans and queer lived experiences and perspectives teach us all (those of us who are queer and trans and those of us who are not) about resistance, resilience, and futurity?

WGST 321.01

CRN 23237

Mondays, 4-6:45PM

Prof. Cristina Dominguez (They/Them)

Artwork by the amazing and fabulous Art Twink!

Intersections of Spirituality, Anti-Racism, Social Justice, & Practice

By thomaspr on November 10, 2022 in WGS Curriculum

Enroll in Intersections of Spirituality, Anti-Racism, Social Justice, & Practice!

This course explores dimensions of spirituality and healing in relationship with how we collectively meet the challenges of these times. Rethinking what it means to act for change, students will consider the limitations of modernity to determine how a relational approach to social transformation may be generative.

WGS 323.02

CRN 23244

TR 9:25-10:40

Prof. Dru McDaniel (She/Her)

Abolition Feminism(s)

By thomaspr on November 10, 2022 in WGS Curriculum

WGS is offering another great option for a special topics course in the spring: Abolition Feminism(s)!

As feminists around the world call for an end to police violence and gendered criminalization, their resistance could be understood as the formation of what W.E.B. Du Bois called abolition democracy. Through the lens of intersectional feminism, and the pedagogy of facilitated dialogue, this course will allow us to liberate ourselves from carceral ways of being and to imagine a world without prisons. We will witness the deeply intertwined Indigenous feminist demands for land sovereignty and an end to climate catastrophe, alongside the radical re-imagining of public safety and an end to the prison industrial complex. We will analyze movements to abolish slavery, lynching, Jim Crow segregation, mass incarceration, police brutality, abortion bans and other mechanisms of violence, containment, and forced assimilation. And we will uplift the work of survivors and organizers who are dismantling hetero-patriarchal domination, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism to build new arrangements for care and healing.

WGST 321.02
CRN 23238
Thursdays, 4-6:45PM (online synchronous)
Prof. Kristi “Kaj” Brian (She/They)

Fall 2022 WGST Special Topics in Social & Political Organization

By thomaspr on April 12, 2022 in Announcements, WGS Curriculum

WGST 321.01 Women, Globization, & Migration

CRN 16273, Online with Scheduled Online Meetings, Thursdays 4PM-6:45PM

Dr. Malia Womack

Women are vulnerable to poverty and commonly lack access to adequate social, cultural, institutional, and material resources necessary for survival. The collective identity “woman” comprises more than half of the world’s population yet is regularly marginalized in local, transnational, and global economies. The collective identity “woman” is also internally diverse. Many women endure compounded oppression (which makes them more vulnerable to impoverishment) related to identity traits including but not limited to sexuality, gender expression, sex, race, skin color, languages, age, geographic location, education, familial relationships, and gender-based violence. This course explores the experiences of diverse and intersectional women in an increasingly globalized world and in various geographic locations. In this class students will consider how gender discrimination, intersectionality, migration, economies, and globalization are deeply and intimately related. Students will reflect on their own positionality within global power hierarchies and will engage in the course material in a self-reflexive and investigative manner.

WGST 321.02 Latin American Feminists & Human Rights

CRN 16278, Online Exclusively

Dr. Malia Womack

International human rights are designed based on the ideology that all people deserve basic rights because of their shared humanity. However, Latin American feminists commonly argue that the international human rights processes are rife with inequalities at the local, transnational, and global levels, are not effectively enforced, are resources for Western imperialism, and are Western and male centric. This class problematizes human rights failures. In particular, the class explores how human rights treaties and operations (in their present form) cannot adequately address the complexity of lived experiences, diversity, and intersectionality. This course documents how feminists throughout Latin America have mobilized against colonialism, poverty, gender discrimination, and other inequalities by engaging in domestic as well as transnational activism around international human rights. Latin American feminists have unrelentingly promoted equality and are transforming how human rights are understood throughout Latin America and the world.

WGST 323 ST: Queer Friendship, Kinship, Comradeship, & Community as Liberation Praxis

By thomaspr on April 11, 2022 in Announcements, WGS Curriculum

This special topics course is an immersive and experiential study of the ways in which LGBTQ+ people engage queer friendships, kinship, comradeship, and community as liberation praxis. Centering WOC, QTBIPOC, and white anti-racist feminists and the traditions they have co-created including healing, disability, and transformative justice among others, we will explore theories, perspectives, and approaches to queer friendship, kinship, coalition, and community. Honoring our particular situatedness, a substantial portion of the course will highlight historical and contemporary examples of relational social justice work among QTBIPOC and white anti-racist LGBTQ+ social justice collectives and grassroots community organizations in the South. Lastly, we will take up somatic and relational culture informed community building practices as a part of in-class activities and outside-of-class assignments, experientially learning with one another and others ways of fostering and sustaining queer friendship, kinship, comradeship, and community.

Navigation

Tag Archives | special topics course