Summer 2018

How has current thinking about sex, gender, and sexuality formed our experiences and understandings of ourselves, the world we inhabit, and the world we envision? This course investigates basic concepts about sex, gender, and sexuality and considers how these categories intersect with issues of race, class, ethnicity, family, religion, age, and/or national identity. The course also considers the effects of sex, gender, and sexuality on participation in the work force and politics, on language, and on artistic expression. In addition to reading a range of foundational feminist texts, materials for analysis may be drawn from novels, films, the  news, popular culture, and archival resources. Open to all students. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Professor Gallagher
2A Hour

This course explores issues of social justice and cities in terms of the spatial unevenness of money and power within and among cities, between cities and their hinterlands, and between cities of the world. We will examine how multiple dynamic geographic processes produce spatial and social inequalities that make cities the locus of numerous social justice issues. We will also look at how urban communities and social groups are engaged in working for social change. Dist: SOC; WCult; CI.

Professor Ellison
2A Hour

Why are there so many people incarcerated in the United States and why are young people across the US calling for an end to police violence, some even for the abolition of policing? Is mass incarceration an inevitable product of slavery and Jim Crow? Why has prison expansion and law and order been a rallying cry make America safe (again) precisely at moments when violent crime rates were going down?

This course is designed to explore and explain the role of surveillance, criminalization, policing to historical and contemporary US state formation and global racial capitalism. This course proceeds from the idea that carceral geographies such as prison towns, detention centers, police departments, welfare agencies, and surveillance apparatuses are spatial fixes for social, economic, and political crises. We will engage scholarship from critical prison studies, geography, gender and sexuality studies, and critical ethnic studies to understand the different dimensions and question that emerge from thinking about space, race, gender, sexuality, land, labor, and state capacity together. Students will have an opportunity to build their understanding of the historical and contemporary organization of people, places, ideas and infrastructure that makes up US carceral geographies. Student will also have a chance to familiarize themselves with the history of resistance to penal democracy. This course requires dedicated and rigorous reading. Each week we will read an entire book and analyze it in depth to create shared language and understandings about carceral geographies.

Professor Ellison
10A Hour

This course introduces students to major contemporary racial justice debates. It also considers how theories of racial justice might better include the concerns of women of color as well as LGBT and trans persons of color. Throughout the course we will examine questions such as: What constitutes racial injustice? How is gender implicated in said injustice? What, if anything, do blacks and other people of color owe to one another? Should political possibility and pragmatism bound thinking regarding corrective racial justice? Dist: SOC.

Professor Threadcraft
2 Hour

This course examines the gendered and sexual politics of “The Global War on Terror” in post-9/11 worlds. We will critically examine how everyday people and feminist activists/scholars identify, theorize, and challenge the systems of value and power relationships that historically and presently structure the ongoing U.S.-led “Global War on Terror,” with a particular focus on the effects of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. We also explore how the “Global War on Terror”––America’s longest “official” war, which has been ongoing for sixteen years––is diffuse and continually changing as those persons deemed internal/external “threats” to national security shift over periods of time. In order to examine these relationships of power, we turn to the stories of women and men in the U.S. military, women in Iraq and Afghanistan, veterans, and de-militarization activists and artists in the U.S. and globally over the course of these sixteen years. Dist: INT or SOC; WCult: CI.

Professor Gallagher
10A Hour

This seminar is designed to provide a overview of significant themes and debates within feminist theory. It is organized around several topic areas - most centrally intersectionality and the Body (including the racially marked body, the covered body and the body in motion, across both national and gender boundaries). Dist: SOC.

Professor Threadcraft
11 Hour

Professor Rose
6B Hour

Professor Gomez
10A Hour