Course Information

Elizabeth Cole, Women's Studies and Center for Afro-American and African Studies

Making Feminist Social Change (PPT; 229 KB)

Deborah Keller-Cohen, Linguistics, Women's Studies, and Education

Women's Studies Capstone Seminar (PDF; 107 KB)
This course is for graduating seniors in Women's Studies. Its aim is to examine your training in Women's studies and feminist theory and their relationship to your life beyond graduation. Included are such life topics as work choice and intergrating work and life outside of work, partnering, reproduction, parenting, and aging. (see January 25^th topic)

Dorothy Ko, Chinese History (Barnard College)

Advanced Topics in Women's and Gender Studies: Chinese Feminisms in a Global World (PDF; 71 KB)
This seminar examines the entanglements between discourses of feminism and modernity in China. The simple premise of this seminar is that these divergent conversations are worth listening to (one may even say eavesdropping,) but that to do so well we need to retrain our ears. Our reading list, therefore, is comprised almost exclusively of writings by Chinese scholars, some originally presented in English and others in translation. Our challenge is to confront their unfamiliarity or even illegibility, to place them in proper historical contexts, and to tune in to their absences (what they have deliberately or inadvertently left out.) As such, this seminar is an exercise in sympathetic listening coupled with analytic distance.

Jayati Lal, Professor, Sociology and Women's Studies

Approaches to Feminist Scholarship in the Social Sciences (PDF; 160 KB)
This course charts debates in and the development of feminist approaches to scholarship in the social sciences. It is designed to familiarize graduate students with the methodologies that have been deployed in the process of researching questions of gender across the social science disciplines, as well as to understand the linkages between core theoretical movements (such as poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism) that have affected feminist thinking over the past two decades, and the challenges that they pose for the practice of feminist inquiry in the social sciences. (see pgs. 4-5 for focus on Global Feminisms)

Wang Zheng, Professor, Women's Studies

Feminist Practices in a Global Context (PDF; 81 KB)
Without assuming a universal course of development of women's activism, this course adopts a comparative approach to the investigation of particular historical processes of women's movements in the three countries, the United States, India, and China. Focusing on the feminist activism in the three countries, this course attempts to ground our understanding of globalization in local history, and to present in a concrete way that feminisms have histories and meanings that extend far beyond the North American continent. By comparison, we also hope to illuminate the cultural parameters of each location that have shaped various feminist practices.