Women’s/Gender Studies Certificate

In Fall 2022, the Women’s/Gender Studies Certificate will once again be offering its foundational Learning Communities course GENDER MATTERS (see description and course competency below). Kim Simard from Cinema-Communications will be leading a group of faculty volunteers from across different disciplines. The goal is to offer a Learning Communities experience to W/GS students that deepens their appreciation of the rich interdisciplinary nature of this field, while creating an academic hub for the certificate that brings diverse students and teachers together.

The course will be offered next fall on Wednesdays from 4:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m., and we are inviting faculty from across the disciplines to propose a specific talk or activity that addresses one of the key themes of the course. The primary teacher will be responsible for fulfilling all the duties related to teaching a college course; this includes the designing and scheduling of all assignments and evaluation of students. However, in order to enrich the interdisciplinary nature of the course and help students build connections between the guest teacher’s contributions and the rest of the course material, your help may be requested to identify a relevant text, develop an integrative assignment or offer support to a student wanting to delve deeper into the subject of your contribution. With your permission, we also hope to turn some of the talks into special events for the larger community.

If you are interested, you need not currently have a course listed with the women’s/gender studies certificate but must have some experience with the field. The course is designed as a contemporary issues complementary course and has been conceived by a team of W/GS faculty and students. A number of core themes have been identified, but they are broad enough to allow the teachers involved to address them through their particular disciplinary backgrounds, interests and expertise. Any talk or activity offered by a guest teacher should address one of the following:

• A critical reflection on the binaries of sex and gender
• An exploration of how gender intersects with other hierarchies to shape women and men’s lives
• A historical context (e.g. of patriarchy and gender, feminist activism, etc.)
• Feminist perspectives in art, literature and/or film
• Contemporary issues in feminist research and activism

Through this call, we hope to identify approximately 6-8 teachers interested in volunteering their time and energy to this project. One of our main objectives is to have rotation among teachers over the semesters; each time around, the selection of guest teachers will be guided primarily by the connections of their topic to the larger flavor of the course established by the primary teacher.

If you are interested, please send an email to Pat Romano, W/GS Faculty Member and LC Lead for Certificates, with a short summary of your talk/activity, stating how it addresses one of the themes identified above and why it makes an important contribution to a foundational women’s/gender studies course. Please include the name of your department, a list of your current W/GS course(s) or an idea for a future W/GS course you might like to offer. Finally, please include, if you can, the title of a short text, film or other resource tool that would support your talk/activity.  The deadline for submission is Wednesday, June 8. 

We look forward to working with each of you.

GENDER MATTERS

Course Description

This course will bring women’s/gender studies students and faculty into a learning community to explore how gender shapes our individual lives, societal institutions and the systems of privilege and exploitation that mark our world. Together we will analyze the problem of gender inequality, and its seeming intractability, from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. Through the course, students will analyse feminist research into the various manifestations of the problem, such as the epidemic of violence against women, toxic masculinities, the cultural representations of women’s bodies, and the ways in which gender intersects with other hierarchies in society. In this unique course, students will be exposed to the diversity of women’s voices through the writings of key feminist thinkers and activists, while recognizing how a transdisciplinary perspective offers rich insights into understanding gender inequality and finding real solutions.

Course Competency

This course will be offered as a Contemporary Issues complementary course with the following competency: to consider contemporary issues from a transdisciplinary perspective.

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This course was developed in winter 2018 by a W/GS Learning Communities Working Group led by Pat Romano (Humanities), and including Elliot Berthelet (W/GS student), Dipti Gupta (Cin-Com), Louisa Hadley (English), Selma Hamdani (Psychology), Julie Johnson (History), Ben Lander (History), Cory Legassic (Humanities and Sociology), Johanne Rabbat (Religion), Kim Simard (Cin-Com and W/G Studies Coordinator), Laura Shea (Sociology), and Florencia Vallejo Ortiz (W/GS student)