Fall 2013
The Graduate Center
The City University of New York
Course Descriptions
Fall 2013
Women’s Studies Certificate Program
Coordinator: Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Room 5116 (817-8896, 817-8905)
The Certificate in Women’s Studies is available to students matriculated in the Ph.D. programs at The Graduate Center. Women’s Studies is an interdisciplinary approach to research and scholarship that draws on various disciplines, while challenging disciplinary boundaries. The general aim of the program is to offer critical reflection on the experience of both women and men in terms of gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, and nation. Students are prepared to teach courses and to do research in Women’s Studies and related critical approaches to the disciplines, such as those developed in Queer Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Cultural Studies. Besides focused course work and guidance in research, Women’s Studies offers participation in a wide range of graduate students and faculty activities, including lecture series and forums. Students are also invited to participate in the research programs and seminars at the Center for Women and Society at The Graduate Center.
WSCP 71700 - Global Feminisms
GC M 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Rupal Oza [21994]
Transnational feminisms will explore the gender dynamics of racial, ethnic, and economic relations of power in domestic, international, and transnational settings. We will examine feminist scholarship produced by and about American women of color, Third World women, and other social and political actors whose experiences and thinking have shaped contemporary ideas about gender, power, and international political economies. We will explore how both self-identified feminists and people who do not consider themselves feminists write about and understand gender, justice, human rights, tolerance, agency, imperialism, and other relevant topics. We will also examine how women and self-identified feminists practice solidarity across and within national boundaries, paying attention to the possibilities and constraints that shape transnational feminist activism. We will look at both empirical and theoretical texts from a range of academic disciplines. We will explore some of the following questions: How do racial, sexual, and national identities change the meanings of gender and feminism? Who should be the arbiter of “equality,” “fairness,” and “human rights”? What ethical questions shape the practices of feminism and feminist politics both domestically and internationally? What is the relationship between modes of production, political economy, and gender politics? What are the possibilities and limits of a transnational feminist politics? What are the material conditions/structural factors which enable and/or undermine transnational feminist solidarity?
WSCP 81001 - Feminist Texts and Theories
GC W 11:45-1:45 p.m., Room TBA , 3 credits, Prof. Victoria Pitts-Taylor[21995]
[Cross listed with MALS 72100]
This course provides a broad overview of the issues and texts of feminist theory. The instructor will use an interdisciplinary approach to consider some of the themes, questions, methodologies, and findings of contemporary scholarship. The course will cover a selection of feminist texts, taken from both literary and social sciences sources, and also classic and contemporary theoretical works. In addition, students will explore the ways in which the field of gender studies has raised new questions and brought new perspectives to those areas where the humanities and social and behavioral sciences intersect, with material which is interdisciplinary in nature and frequently poses a challenge to conventional disciplinary boundaries.
WSCP 81001 - Feminist Texts and Theories SECOND SECTION
GC TBA Day & Time., Room TBA , 3 credits, Prof. Sarah Chinn[22097]
[Cross listed with MALS 72100 ]
WSCP 81601 – Topics in Women and Gender Studies: Feminism and Technology
GC T 11:45-1:45 p.m., Room TBA , 3 credits, Prof. Kathlene McDonald[21996]
This seminar on gender, new media, and technology will examine the relationship between digital technology, democracy, and movement building. The course is designed to provide an overview of contemporary, cutting-edge theorizing about gender, race, technology, and power to construct a framework for examining how feminists use social media to engage in activism around issues such as health, body image, labor, education, poverty, and human rights. We will consider the implications and possibilities of new digital tools and methods for grassroots organizing and coalitional politics and will problematize issues of community-building, access, identity, and representation. Further, we will look at the multiple ways that individuals and groups use new media to represent gender, racial, ethnic and/or sexual identities. And finally, we will consider how digital mapping and archiving can contribute to the building of an online feminist scholarly community.
The format of this class will be hybrid, which means that it will include both face-to-face and online sessions and will engage with traditional and digital scholarship. Projects will involve analyzing and creating digital media and will feature opportunities for collaborative writing and interpretation, both within the course itself and across institutions.
The class is part of a larger Distributed Online Collaborative Course (DOOC), a feminist rethinking of the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). In this model, the idea is to create a shared learning experience across multiple campuses through collaborative teaching and learning. Students will have the opportunity to engage in intellectual exchange with a global network of scholars who are committed to creating an online space that is truer to feminist theorizing and process. For more information, see http://fembotcollective.org/femtechnet/faq-for-femtechnet/
WSCP 81000 -Selected Topics in Art History: Gladiatrices of American Art: Women in the Artistic Sphere, 1848-1920
GC M 11:45-1:45 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Katherine Manthorne [22057] [Cross listed with ART 87300]
Gladiatrix was the female equivalent to a male gladiator, a trained combatant. The women we explore in this seminar were just that: painters, sculptors, critics, photographers, printmakers, gallery owners, historians and collectors who battled to shape the cultural realm. We discover that the American art world as currently outlined in survey books and courses has omitted an entire network of accomplished women that we aim to reinsert into the narrative. Taking our cues from Women’s History Studies, we address important questions in the social history of art and women’s rights from the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 to the passing of the 19th Amendment in 1920, guaranteeing all American women the right to vote. Together we investigate a wide array of historical figures and enterprises, aided by a growing bibliography in the field and accessible art collections.
5 auditors permitted, only by permission of the instructor.
Requirements: Weekly reading assignments & discussion; visits to art collections; final, 20-page research paper including related abstract, annotated bibliography, and short oral presentation.
Preliminary Readings: April F. Masten, Art Work. Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York. (Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
Kirsten Swinth, Painting Professionals. Women Artists & the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930. (Chapel Hill & London: U. North Carolina Press, 2001).
WSCP 81000 –Affect, Feeling, Emotion: The Medieval Turn
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Glenn Burger [21997] [Cross listed with ENGL 80700]
This course will consider various theoretical frameworks—both contemporary and medieval—useful in discussing the production and management of affect and emotion. It could be said that the Middle Ages invented affective devotion, and the course will begin by focusing on medieval emotional relationships with texts, devotional objects and religious drama concerned with Christ’s passion: for example, “The Wooing of Our Lord,” Richard Rolle’s Meditation, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, and lyric laments of The Virgin. We will track the ways that affect in courtly love poetry provided medieval readers with intimate scripts to put inner and outer states of feeling into contact with one another, particularly as the individual perceives herself in relation to (private) desires and (public) pressures. We will examine such texts as Guillaume de Lorris’ Romance of the Rose, Machaut’s Dit de la Fonteinne Amoureuse, Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, and John Lydgate’s Complaynt of the Loveres Lyfe. We will also examine the crucial role that affect management played in late medieval conduct literature, and we will consider how the production of self-restraint in such texts, particularly within the structures of the married household, helps form emotional communities that allowed emergent social groups new modes of self-identification. We will examine conduct texts such as The Good Wife’s Guide (Le Menagier de Paris) and The Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry, as well as literary texts such as Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, as well as Thomas Hoccleve’s Series, and Boccaccio’s Petrarch’s, and Chaucer’s versions of the Griselda story. Student work in the course will include one or two oral presentations as well as a 20-25 page research paper.
WSCP 81000 –Anxieties of Modernist Representation
GC W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mary Ann Caws [21998] [Cross listed with ENGL 80200]
This seminar takes as its principle that anxiety and uncertainty provoke our thinking and seeing more effectively than pre-established categories, and that initial confusion can clarify more interestingly than straightforward structure. Among the kinds of problems that might be entailed in the visual and verbal interpretation are: how figure relates to ground, foreground to background, abstract to figural, detail to overall or global, the relation of romantic and contemporary wandering line in character and in art to the stroll of the flaneur and the flaneuse, the singular to the series and to the collective (it might be fun to bring in the fascinations and frictions of writers’ and artists’ colonies here), the regular to the irregular, the miniature to the epic, the expected to the extremes of landscape, seascape, and cityscape, and, above all and always, how do we relate our interpretation of reading to that of seeing.
The overall notion is that the unresolved and problematic – on the part of the creator and the observer-participant - is more gripping than the resolved, an idea determined in itself to be modestly provoking, without rewarding itself the optimistic label of the provocative. Which issues we will finally work on will be determined in relation to the interests of the gathered group.
Certain of the artists and writers joining us, among others, are likely to inhabit a stretch from Mallarmé and Manet to Meret Oppenheim, from Gertrude Stein to Sartre, from Artaud to Beckett and Breton, from Paula Modersohn-Becker to Rilke, from Claude Cahun and Unica Zurn to Virginia Woolf, Francesca Woodman and Joseph Cornell, modernists all.
WSCP 81000 –The Black Pacific
GC M 11:45-1:45 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Kandice Chuh [21999] [Cross listed with ENGL 80600]
This course takes as its point of departure Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness, first published in 1993, to open questions about space, race, and history. In what ways are critical engagements with race subtended by naturalized or occluded spatial protocols? Is blackness a meaningful category when located within the frame of the Pacific? What is the relationship between blackness and Asiatic racialization when situated in this way? What might we learn not only about geography and history as technologies of racialization by thinking and working through the construct of “the black Pacific”? What kinds of politics and ethics emerge from thinking “the black Pacific”? How do the insights garnered by thinking through this construct compel the rearticulation of the ways in which literary and other studies are divided by place and time, and in what ways?
Students enrolled in this course should read Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic prior to and in preparation for the first day of class. Other texts for this course will include work by Brent Edwards, Christopher Connery, Saidiya Hartman, Edward Said, Joseph Roach, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Lisa Lowe, Bill Mullen, Lisa Yoneyama, Marc Gallichio, Taketani Etsuko, Yusef Komunyakaa, John Russell, Yasuhiro Okada, Langston Hughes, Velina Hasu Houston, Jessica Hagedorn, Monique Truong, and Martin Luther King, Jr. among others. Students taking the course for 2-credits should expect to present to class a 10-page paper that addresses the issues of the class or to produce an equivalent assignment; students taking the course for 4-credits should expect to write one short papers and a 15-20 page paper. Everyone is, of course, expected to participate fully in class discussions.
WSCP 81000– Trance
GC W 2:00-4:00 p.m., RoomTBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum [22000] [Cross listed with ENGL 80200]
Dickinson called it “Circumference.” Tennyson called it “mystic gleams.” Walter Benjamin called it “concentration.” (Elsewhere, he called it “hashish.”) In this seminar, we will conduct a spirited investigation of trance—as metaphor and method—in literary composition, especially poetry. Trance, for our curious purposes, can include any extreme state of consciousness, any condition of automatism, exaltation, possession, inspiration, or acute receptivity. We won’t seek to prove or deny the truth of trance; instead, we will trace its role as the imagined catalyst for rhapsodic flights. Our inquiry will begin with William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, Henry James’s The Bostonians, and Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation. We will then study some visionary poets: Walt Whitman, Antonin Artaud, André Breton, H.D., Allen Ginsberg, Alice Notley, and others. (One other possibility, operatic: Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.) We will end the semester by reading Jerome Rothenberg’s epochal anthology, Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe & Oceania. Requirements: in-class presentation and a final project.
WSCP 81000 – Experimental Selves, Graphic Subjects
GC W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Nancy K. Miller [22001] [Cross listed with ENGL 87500]
“I do not know how far I differ from other people,” Virginia Woolf remarks in “A Sketch of the Past,” neatly summarizing the memoirist’s dilemma. In this course we will explore the process of self-representation in the works of twentieth and twenty-first century writers and artists for whom questions of identity have produced experiments in form. In addition to literary and graphic memoirs, we will discuss photographs, visual essays, and critical issues in contemporary autobiography.
Writers include: Roland Barthes, David B., Alison Bechdel, Zora Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston, Adrienne Rich, Marjane Satrapi, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and others. Work for the course: in class presentations and a final paper.
WSCP 81000 – Humanism and the Animal Body
GC W 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Robert Reid-Pharr [22002] [Cross listed with ENGL 80600]
Challenging the Cartesian distinction between man as a distinct “thinking animal” and all other animal species, we will work in this seminar to examine what possibilities are available to us if we pry open the human/animal divide. What happens when we take seriously the reality of the constant and necessary intermingling of species? Moreover, how does such an awareness impact our continued discussions of the interaction between various types of human communities? Each seminar participant will do an in class presentation and submit a research paper. Texts that we will examine include Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am; Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal; Donna Haraway, When Species Meet; Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heiddeger to Derrida; Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory; Michael Serres, The Parasite; Kari Weil, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?; J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals; Paola Cavalieri, The Animal Question: Why Nonhuman Animals Deserve Human Rights; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern; Anna L. Peterson, Being Human: Ethics, Environment, and Our Place in the World; Cary Wolfe, What is Post-Humanism?; and Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.
WSCP 81000 –Writing, Culture, and the Humanities in Transition: 1991-2002
GC M 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jessica Yood [22003] [Cross listed with ENGL 79010]
The 1990s were particularly important years in the history of higher education in America. During this decade, scholarship in the humanities and especially in literary, cultural, and composition studies altered our understanding of writing and literature and the reasons we teach these subjects.
The course begins with an overview of English departments in the history of American higher education. We will then determine how the intellectual climate shifted in this time of “life between two deaths”—the phrase Phillip Wegner uses for the “long nineties.” Like many historians, Wegner sees this decade as a period of post. It comes after many of the groundbreaking “isms” of the previous period and before the geopolitical and technological shifts of today. We will look again at the unique contribution of scholarly writing in this period, when critical and theoretical discourse merged in unprecedented ways with larger public debates. Our primary sources will be the canonical and marginal texts of the culture wars: essays, memoirs, criticism, syllabi, pedagogical statements, and political tracts written by cultural, literary, and rhetoric-composition theorists from 1991-2002. Select fiction, film, and digital media will frame these scholarly works.
For students interested in this period, the course offers another lens for viewing your objects of study. For those unsure of a specialization, or ambivalent about the idea of “specialization” in our field, this course suggests how traditional disciplinary and professional categories were challenged in the 1990s, and how they paved the way for new approaches to knowledge and craft. Emerging fields like Digital Humanities and Writing Studies have their roots in this period, and we will explore several other recent experimental boundary crossings in English studies.
Responsibilities include participation in a course blog, a presentation, and a final textual or digital project appropriate to students’ interests and goals. Readings come from Kathy Acker, Michael Bérubé, Patricia Bizzell, Octavia Butler, Sharon Crowley, Andrew Delbanco, Don DeLillo, David Denby, Sidney I. Dobrin, Stanley Fish, Henry Louis Gates, Gerald Graff, Christopher Newfield, Richard Rorty, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Kurt Spellmeyer, and Phillip E. Wegner, among others.
questions and suggestions welcome at jyood@lehman.cuny.
WSCP 81000 – Special Topics in Spanish-American Literature: Hispanic Jewish
Literature and Cinema of the Diaspora
GC T 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Nora Glickman [22004] [Cross listed with Spanish 87100]
The purpose of this course is to discuss constructions of Jewishness (through characters, topics, and symbols) in writings and films from Latin America and Spain. The selected corpus includes fictional and documentary works written during the 20th and 21st centuries and covering five hundred years of Jewish life in Spain and Latin America.
Readings consist of short stories, novels, plays and films by Sephardic and Ashkenazi authors, including Ana M. Shua, Isaac Chocrón, and Moacyr Scliar -–and non-Jewish writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Carne Riera and A. Muñoz Molina. We will also view and discuss contemporary Latin American films from directors such as Daniel Burman, Cao Hamburger, and José Jusid.
The interpretation of the material covered will be both textual and theoretical, with a special focus on the most influential authors that have shaped the diaspora studies. Rather than attempt to fix a static definition of the Jewish cultural identity, the course will examine how Judaism is in constant flux, responding to cultural currents in its various diasporas. Braziel and Mannur’s anthology, Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, encompassing multiple transatlantic and transnational voyages, will provide a framework for discussion. Related issues this course will highlight are: collective memory, inter-marriage, rituals, and multiple identities within a minority group.
The course will be conducted in Spanish, but students have the option of writing their papers and participating in class in English. Many of the texts are available in English.
WSCP 81000 – Pedagogy and Theory of Global History
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Dagmar Herzog [22005] [Cross listed with Hist.72100]
The aim of this class is triple: to provide you with the opportunity to read and discuss with your peers important secondary scholarship in global history - whether in specific preparation for oral exams or simply to enhance your range as a teacher; to provide you with the opportunity to experiment with and discuss pedagogical challenges and successful teaching strategies on a continuous basis (including how to talk with your students about cultural differences, perspectivalism, theories of causation, and the relationship between arguments and evidence); and to develop more confident mastery of the terms of debate surrounding major world-historical issues that continue to have ramifications in our present.
Themes to be considered include: labor, commerce, and migration; power, diplomacy, and violence; faith, belief, and knowledge; social movements and cultural diffusion; disease, drugs, and the environment; desire, love, and pleasure. Critical thinking about gender relations will be integrated throughout.
WSCP 81000 -Movements, Interest Groups and Elections in American Politics
GC R 4:15-6:15 , Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Frances Fox-Piven [22006] [Cross listed with PSC 82001 &Soc. 84600]
This course will attempt to put it all together, to analyze how social movements, powerful interest groups, and the parties, campaigns and voters which are supposed to be the mainstay of democracy, interact and combine to shape public policy and ultimately American society. To try to gain traction on these big dynamics, we will first consider the paradigms that guide the study of movements, interest group politics and elections, each considered separately. Then we will select a number of turning points in American political development in which the distinct forces mobilized in movements, interest groups, and elections were activated to gain state power and determine policy outcomes. I want especially to consider the interaction, of movements and elections, of elections and moneyed interests, for example. Citizens United and the Tea Party are new, but the dynamics they generate when they conflict or combine are not.
WSCP 81000 - Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs
GC W 6:30-8:30 , Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. George Andreopoulos [22007] [Cross listed with PSC 86800]
This course will focus on key concepts in human rights and humanitarianism, and examine their analytical value in the context of varying approaches towards the promotion and protection of internationally recognized human rights and humanitarian norms. In particular, the course will examine these concepts in light of (a) the recent debates in international relations theory on the role of ideas and norms, and the intersections between international relations and international law research agendas; and (b) the growing convergence between international human rights law and international humanitarian law. It will assess the impact of normative considerations, as well as the role of the relevant state and non-state actors on a whole set of critical issue areas including discrimination, accountability, human protection, political membership, human development, and legal empowerment. The course will conclude with a critical discussion of recent UN initiatives in these issue areas.
WSCP 81000 – Supportive Settings and Restorative Environments
GC T 6:30-8:30 , Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. David Chapin [22008] [Cross listed with Psych 80103]
This will be a project-based seminar that will include experiential work, extensive readings, local field trips, and guest speakers, all focusing on the close environment. Each seminar participant will be asked to choose a particular nearby place for exploration and as an anchor for readings. Through the course of the semester each participant will be expected to produce two draft presentations and one final presentation. Imaginative use of media will be encouraged and supported. We will attempt to come at this topic from different disciplines and contrasting perspectives. We will include both academic literature and other sources. We will look as conventional wisdom surrounding "nature" as well as the "urban." We will also consider the situation of people with special needs along with the needs of people who escape categorization. We will attempt a critical reading of a history of restorative places.
WSCP 81000 – Critical Childhood/Youth Studies
GC T 4:15-6:15 , Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wendy Luttrell [22009] [Cross listed with Psych 80103 and UED 75100]
Critical Childhood Studies (sometimes called the “new sociology/anthropology of childhood” understands youth as social actors who are “central informants of their own life worlds” (Christensen and James 2008). Not incomplete adults but human subjects who have insights, they contribute to as well as are shaped by social institutions. This course will examine the basic tenants of critical childhood studies, including the ways in which it contests the traditional socialization model, which emphasizes children as passive recipients of a unidirectional socialization process. A critical childhood studies approach understands child-adult relationships as existing within power relations-- therefore, Waksler’s (1996) argument that “children do not have the power to correct adults’ misunderstandings of them.” The new sociology of childhood critiques the “old” sociology of childhood that ignored the significant effects of adults always speaking for children, the ease of which “effectively silenced” children. Rejecting neither the idea that children develop nor that children are dependent on adults, the new sociology of childhood suggests, rather, that thinking of the relationship in terms of interdependence rather than deficiency, and acknowledging the lack of authority that children have in their relationships with adults, recognizes the differences in power relations and works toward understanding agency. As Lee (2001) asks, what does it mean to take children seriously? The dangers of romanticizing children’s voice will be considered as well. How does the new sociology of childhood intersect with critical theory, disability studies, feminist theory and critical race theory?
This class will examine the conceptual framework of the new sociology of childhood (and youth), and study its politics and implications for research. It will imagine generational difference as a border, and look at research that enables us to understand children and youth relative to power relations, authority, culture, education and punishment. It will also look at adults with whom children are in relationship, including parents, teachers, police, salespeople, and counselors, as well as the institutions, discourses and systems that shape how childhood is experienced. We will ask methodological questions about how to study children from the standpoint of the new sociology of childhood.
WSCP 81000 – Critical Mapping
GC R 11:45-1:45, Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. John Seley [22010] [Cross listed with Psych 80103 ]
This is a seminar on the social, political, and economic ramifications of mapping. We will examine the use of maps in such diverse areas as the distribution of power and territoriality, economic development, and the location of government and private services. Specific topics will include map technology (its expansion and limitations), the uses of data in maps, geosurveillance and risk analysis, environmental justice, the dumbing down of maps, participatory and counter-mapping, and various geo-political issues. No prior mapping experience is required.
Students will be expected to participate actively in the analysis of map usages as well as in the discovery and presentation of examples of the many possible uses of maps. It is anticipated that students will delineate and/or produce maps in their selected research areas.
WSCP 81000 –Group Relations: A Racial and Cultural Focus
GC T 2:00-4:00 , Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Tamara Buckley [22011] [Cross listed with Psych 80103 ]
There are two components to this course – didactic and experiential learning. The didactic component will consist of a lecture and discussion where students will learn about group dynamics and social systems theories, with an emphasis on racial and cultural factors. The experiential component will consist of experiential groups, where students will participate in small and large self-study groups. The experiential component provides an opportunity to practice through reflection on actual situations as they occur in the here and now. Students will have an opportunity to integrate theory and experience and begin the application of this learning to various kinds of groups and work settings. The task of the small group is to recognize, describe, and discuss group events and processes as they occur. By studying “here and now” events, students can increase their understanding of the processes that occur as groups develop and function. Students will also increase their personal awareness by considering the roles they may take up in the pursuit of learning. Small study groups will be conducted using the Fish Bowl model.
WSCP 81000 –Research Methods and Ethics in Environmental Psychology 1
GC T 2:00-4:00, Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Susan Saegert [22012] [Cross listed with Psych 79200]
The aim of this course is to help students construct a critical framework for developing, conducting, and interpreting research. This will involve: (1) cultivating fluency in existing research languages – i.e., learning to “speak research” across different traditions, including discourses of ethical and institutional responsibility, ontological and epistemological justification (e.g., reliability, validity), etc. (2) Practicing the skills of theory development, research design, and the critical analysis of research reports; and (3) Crafting a sophisticated expression of research commitments, which includes: (a) a set of theoretically, ethically, and rhetorically adequate justifications for choices in theory development, in research design, and in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data,(b) a coherent discourse for evaluating, arbitrating, and integrating research claims from across different research traditions, and (c) an ethically defensible explication of researcher responsibilities.
Course work will include discussing and critiquing readings from philosophy of social science, from methods texts, and from empirical reports from multiple research traditions. Students will also practice the skills of research by developing multiple approaches to their own research questions, constructing the artifacts of research (e.g., consent form, IRB form, etc.) and producing a prospectus for a brief research report.
WSCP 81000 – Sociology of Gender GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Hester Eisenstein [22013] [Cross listed with Soc. 73200]
This course is an introduction to the sociology of gender, and can be used by students to prepare for an orals field in gender. Topics to be covered will include some of the following: gender and imperialism; globalization and women’s labor; race, class and the critique of intersectionality; feminist/womanist theory; the body, sexuality and heteronormativity; families and housework; incarceration and gender; capitalism, consumerism, and the uses of gender identity; reproductive rights and population control; violence and rape culture; migration; public life, neoliberalism and welfare; Islam, Christianity and the state; and colonialism and indigenous identities. Guest lecturers from Sociology and other GC programs will be invited to join us during the semester.
WSCP 81000 – Women, Work and Public Policy.
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Janet Carol Gornick and Ruth Milkman [22014] [Cross listed with Soc. 83300 and PSC 72500]
This course is an overview of key issues affecting women in the 21st century workplace in affluent industrialized countries. We begin with an overview of women’s position in the contemporary labor market, examining the changes and continuities in patterns of gender inequality, such as job segregation by gender and the pay gap between male and female workers. Here we also pay close attention to the impact of growing class inequalities, which have led to increasing polarization in the labor market between college-educated women and those with less education. We also consider divisions along lines of race, ethnicity and nativity, and examine the recent rise of the “precariat” – workers who have little or no employment security and who are often excluded from basic legal protections that once covered the bulk of the workforce. Women are overrepresented in the precariat, especially in part-time and temporary jobs, which are disproportionately female. We look at the ways in which public policy initiatives – such as affirmative action, equal pay laws, and anti-discrimination measures have addressed these issues, and evaluate their impact, and consider additional challenges that remain.
The course also examines the effects on women workers – of all classes, races, and ethnic groups, and of immigrants as well as natives – of inequalities in the division of labor in the household. Despite the massive increase in female labor force participation over the past half century, women continue to perform the bulk of unpaid housework and childcare, and bringing about change in this arena has proven even more challenging than transforming the social structures defining paid work. We will consider recent research on the effects of so-called “work-family reconciliation policies” – that is, public policies aimed at supporting women (and men) as they balance the responsibilities of paid work and family care. The key question now under consideration is whether some of these policies – e.g., paid family leave, rights to part-time and flexible scheduling – create new forms of gender inequality. The rapid growth of paid care jobs, which are overwhelmingly filled by women, is another topic of interest here.
Throughout, we take a comparative approach to these questions, examining the situation in the United States as well as in other high-income countries.
WSCP 81000 – Gender, Media, Crime and Culture
GC W 11:45-1:45 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Lynn Chancer [22015] [Cross listed with Soc. 82800]
This course will explore a fascinating selection of sociological literature that combines, in myriad ways and through the use of diverse methodologies, the subject matters of gender, crime, media and culture. The first part of the course will offer students an overview of different theoretical perspectives currently exerting influence in the sociological subfields of gender, crime, media and culture respectively. In the second part of the course, we will turn to research in substantive topic areas. Among the topics covered will be school violence cases, domestic violence, sex work, gang research and the gendered division of labor in legal (as well as illegal) occupations.
WSCP 81000 – Race and Multiculturalism in Global Perspective
GC R\ 11:45-1:45 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Erica Chito-Childs [22016] [Cross listed with Soc. 84001]
We hear endlessly about our increasingly multicultural world, with rising, even skyrocketing intermarriage rates, increased visibility of multiracial families, multiracial casts featured in film and television and even Barack Obama, the first African American biracial president. Yet what does this tell us about the contemporary state of race relations in America, or even more importantly globally? This course will cover a myriad of issues under the rubric of race and multiculturalism, encompassing a large multidisciplinary body of research. Throughout the course, we will explore what cross-racial coalitions, interracial intimacies, multiracial families, and multicultural unions show us about contemporary race relations, and the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and class. Subjects covered include interracial/intercultural marriage, transracial adoption, multiracial coalitions, multicultural education, and multiculturalism in the media and popular culture. We will focus on these issues in contemporary America, as well as globally with a particular focus on Portugal, South Africa, Brazil, Australia and Western Europe. A variety of theoretical frameworks including critical race theory, cultural studies, and post-colonial writings, as well qualitative and quantitative methodologies for studying these issues will be addressed. You will be expected to develop a research project over the course of the semester.
WSCP 81000 - Social Welfare Policy and Planning I
Silberman School of Social Work 2180 Third Ave,
H T 2:00- 4:00 p.m., Room 610, 3 credits, Prof. Michael Fabricant [22017] [Cross listed with SSW 71000] Permission of the instructor required.
The policy course will address the restructuring of the welfare state during an era of fiscal crisis and austerity. From health care to social services to education austerity policies like Race to the Top are radically restructuring the culture and practices of public agencies. The phenomenon of austerity policy has produced an increased emphasis on privatization, metrics, business practices and rationing. This course will analyze the legislation triggering the reform, the political economic forces mobilizing in support of it, the restructuring of services and the transformation of the social reproduction functions of the welfare state. This last point is especially salient as it disproportionately impacts poor communities, people of color and women.