Global Arc

This course focuses on "bad girls" (and boys!): people who perform their gender and/or sexuality in ways that fall outside of the norm. We will examine how cultural meanings shape our shared understandings of what is "normal" or "abnormal," "good" or "bad," and we will regularly link our course readings to current events and elements of popular culture.

How has feminism "as a social movement" responded to globalization's challenges? What are transnational feminist networks? Does the very concept of "global sisterhood" need to be critiqued? Where do "local" feminist movements (cultural, national, regional) fit within the frameworks of an increasingly neoliberal global economy? What are some transnational feminist responses from around the world to conflict, war, religious fundamentalisms? Students will hone these and similar questions through multidisciplinary readings, film, and case studies for political debate.

This workshop rehearses the critical and compositional skills necessary for developing an accurate, contextualized, and compelling account of a woman's life. Course participants will engage a variety of critical and creative modes to research and compose original works of creative biographical non-fiction about a biographical subject of their choice. Throughout, the course will engage foundational methods and techniques of biographical storytelling as they also evince (and confront) the personal, moral, ethical and other questions emerging from the stories we choose to tell about women's lives.

This course critically examines the entanglements of gender, violence, and othering through the lenses of decolonial, Indigenous, and feminist thought and praxis. Exploring structural, direct, symbolic, and epistemic forms of violence, we will interrogate how Black, brown, Indigenous, and othered women's bodies become sites of regulation, resistance, and mourning under colonial, carceral, apartheid, and imperial regimes. This course centers thinkers and activists whose work refuses Western hegemonic modes of knowing and instead foregrounds epistemologies of survival, dignity, and liberation.

This course explores the body as a site of knowledge, power, and resistance. How have race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, and coloniality shaped the ways bodies are read, regulated, and resisted? From the scars of imperial conquest to the everyday negotiations of sexuality and power, we will engage with critical feminist, queer, and decolonial scholarship that foregrounds the experiences and epistemologies of Black, brown, Indigenous, and othered women and queer communities globally. We will critically unpack hegemonic constructions of feminism, health, sexuality, and reproduction.

This seminar explores genocide through the analytic of gender, with a central focus on the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Drawing on decolonial, Indigenous, and feminist thought, we examine how genocidal projects target reproductive life, sexual and familial structures, and community survival. Students will engage reproductive justice frameworks, survivor testimony, and Palestinian feminist critiques of colonial violence, while situating Gaza within comparative histories of the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and genocide against Black and Indigenous populations. Colloquium sessions feature leading feminist scholars.

What does climate change have to do with gender and race? Everything! This course explores the fascinating ways that the most urgent environmental issues of our time intersect with critical questions of gender, race and, yes, sexualities! Exploring films, images and creative writing, the course engages themes like the "invention of wilderness" and national parks; being Black in "nature"; Indigenous lifeways and land rights; feminist/queer ecologies; animal and plant intelligence; slow violence; masculinities; militarization and climate change; environmental justice, and how we can imagine life-giving strategies for change in a global era.

Let's talk about sex! In this course, we'll learn to view sex and sexuality through a sociological lens. The class is divided into three segments: theory, research, and topics in sex/sexuality. Topic areas include, but are not limited to, LGBTQIA+ identities, sex work, campus hook-up culture, and BDSM. We'll pay particular attention to ways in which sexual behavior is regulated, as well as social constructions of "the normal." While our course material will focus on the United States, students are encouraged to bring cross-national perspectives into their final papers and class discussions.

The four-course sequence ISC 231-234 integrates introductory topics in calculus-based physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and scientific computing with Python, with an emphasis on laboratory experimentation, quantitative reasoning, and data-oriented thinking. It best suits students interested in complex problems in living organisms and prepares them for interdisciplinary research in the life sciences. The fall courses ISC 231 and 232 must be taken together. See ISC website for details on course equivalencies and recommended academic paths from ISC.

The four-course sequence ISC 231-234 integrates introductory topics in calculus-based physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and scientific computing with Python, with an emphasis on laboratory experimentation, quantitative reasoning, and data-oriented thinking. It best suits students interested in complex problems in living organisms and prepares them for interdisciplinary research in the life sciences. The fall courses ISC 231 and 232 must be taken together. See ISC website for details on course equivalencies and recommended academic paths from ISC.