Women’s and Gender Studies Concentrations
Beginning with the students entering in Fall 2019 each major should select a concentration; Four courses must be taken from the list of courses in that concentration. Concentrations include:
Representations, Media, and Race. Courses in this concentration address various forms of representation, with an emphasis on media and representations of race. Courses variously address how complex issues of identity are represented across cultural productions and cultural icons. Courses encourage students to critically read cultural productions, trace popular tropes as well as images of resistance, and consider historical contexts of current representations.
Skills emphasized include critical analysis, discourse analysis, feminist theories of representation, comparative race and ethnic studies analysis, film and media studies, narrative studies, field- specific writing.
Feminist Science, Health and Reproductive Justice. Courses in this concentration examine science and technology drawing on feminist theory. Courses variously examine racial and gendered biases in science and technology; the representation of bodies across medicine, media and politics; how bodies are shaped in relation to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, technology, and power; social, economic and political inequalities underlying health and health care disparities; and health/reproductive justice, rights and equity movements. Skills emphasized include feminist theories, methodological emphasis on empirical data, digital media and data literacy, field-specific writing.
Labor, Families, and the State. Courses in this concentration address various forms of labor, including paid labor in the marketplace as well as invisible or undervalued forms of labor, such as sex work, domestic work and care work in families. Courses variously explore the ways that labor, family life, immigration, sexuality, motherhood practices and new family forms are socially constructed through government and social policies, economics, sexual and reproductive markets, structural inequalities, kinship, violence, law, and technologies. Skills emphasized include feminist theories, the analysis of micro and macro level empirical data including in-depth interviews, field-specific writing.
Transnational Feminism(s), Global Contexts. Courses in this concentration engage critically with a variety of transnational and global discourses on a range of topics that cross national, political and technological boundaries. Courses explore immigration, borders, and citizenship, and examine how global inequalities and ideas about gender, racial, sexual and economic justice travel across borders. Skills emphasized include engagement with transnational feminist theory, the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, nationality, and globalization, collaboration as a feminist method, field-specific writing.
Courses not included in concentrations: 108 Social Construction of Inequalities; 120 Introduction; 250/250H Research/ Individual Study; 313 Fieldwork; 350/350H Research/ Individual Study; 360/370 Senior Thesis; 312 Capstone Seminar.