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Fall 2008 applications deadline: August 29, 2008 Read how to apply Contact 617.324.2085 for more information or write gcws@mit.edu Fall 2008Spring 2009
FALL 2008 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS:Women's Activism: Gender, Literacy and Human RightsWednesdays, 5:30 - 8:30 PM / 9.10.08 – 12.10.08 This course explores education, literacy, and human rights as sites of women’s activism. It seeks to build deepened understandings of gender and intersectionality as we use different lenses to focus on these sites; we will consider how gender, race, class, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, age, location, literacy, and ideologies impact upon activism. Women throughout the world have engaged in collective and individual actions both to resist oppression but also sometimes to further their own privileges. This activism has taken place in formal educational institutions, at the community and grassroots level, and through national and international organizations and movements. This course will examine the meaning of women’s activism around education and human rights both globally and locally. FACULTY Lorna Rivera is Associate Professor of Sociology and Community Planning at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She is also a Research Associate at the Mauricio Gaston Institute for Latino Public Policy at UMass-Boston. Dr. Rivera’s work focuses on women’s literacy, Latino Studies, and social inequalities in public education. Kathleen Weiler is Professor of Education at Tufts University. She is the author of a number of works on women and education exploring the possibilities and parameters of education for women, including ethnographic studies of classroom teaching, feminist theory and pedagogy, and historical studies of women educators in the American West. A sociologist and activist, Loretta J. Williams directs the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights, a 24 year old national network with a hub office at Simmons College, that, among other things, publishes /Multidiversity: Myers Book Commentary/ and the annual /Sheroes Womyn Warriors/ Calendar series. She consults locally and nationally on multicultural organizational development with particular attention to anti-oppression strategies.  Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women's and Gender StudiesFALL & SPRING, Tuesdays, 1:00 - 4:00 PM / 9.9.08 - 5.5.09 A writing workshop for dissertation writers. Classes will include presentation and discussion of students’ work-in-progress. Discussion will move back and forth between theoretical considerations and practical ones as we address three subjects central to dissertation work: the archive, methodology, and rhetoric. Each student will be asked to reflect on ways that feminism and gender studies affected her discipline’s views of its appropriate archive and on the question of what archive of materials is best suited to answer the questions raised in her dissertation. We will also consider general issues of scholarly method, methodological issues that feminism and gender studies have raised, and methodological issues prominent within the disciplines of participants’ different disciplinary fields. The inquiry into rhetoric will ask how a dissertation writer convinces various audiences that her work is significant. Each student will also give an oral presentation to the group that has been self-consciously adapted for an interdisciplinary audience. Enrollment is limited to ten students FACULTY Susan Staves is Paul Proswimmer Professor Emerita of Brandeis University. Her scholarly interests have centered on English literature and history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is the author of /Player’s Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration/, /Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660-1833/, /A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660-1789/, and articles and essays on literary, legal, historical, medical, and musical subjects.
SPRING 2008 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS:Gender, Race, and the Complexities of Science and Technology: A Problem-Based Learning ExperimentThursdays, 5:00 - 8:00 PM / 1.29.09 – 5.14.09 Science and technology are relatively insulated from wider public deliberation-art and literary criticism is familiar, but not "science criticism." Yet there is a large body of social interpretation of science and technology, to which feminist, anti-racist, and other critical analysts and activists have made significant contributions. Building on this work, this course sets out to challenge the barriers of expertise, gender, race, class, and place that restrict wider access to and understanding of the production of scientific knowledge and technologies. In this spirit, students participate in an innovative, problem-based learning approach that allows them to shape their own directions of inquiry and develop critical faculties as investigators and skills as prospective teachers. In these inquiries students are guided by individualized bibliographies co-constructed with the instructors and by the projects of the other students. Students from all fields and levels of preparation are encouraged to join and learn about gender, race, and the complexities of science and technology. FACULTY Anne Fausto-Sterling is Professor of Biology and Gender Studies in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Biochemistry at Brown University and is a visiting professor at the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at MIT in 2009. Author of scientific publications in developmental genetics and developmental ecology, she has achieved recognition for works that challenge entrenched scientific beliefs while engaging with the general public. Peter Taylor is a Professor at the UMass Boston, where he directs the Programs in Science, Technology and Values and Critical & Creative Thinking. His teaching spans biomedical and environmental sciences, science and technology studies, critical pedagogy and reflective practice. He is author of Unruly Complexity: Ecology, Interpretation, Engagement and co-editor of Changing Life: Genomes, Ecologies, Bodies, Commodities.
Gender, Armed Conflict, and PeacemakingWednesdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM / 1.28.09 – 5.13.09 Peace Keeping operations involving both military and civilian personnel have been deployed in a number of countries such as Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Afghanistan. These interventions have come about following intense levels of violence, breakdown in law and order, systems of governance and social systems as well as violations of human rights. This course is designed to review the phenomena of conflict, forced migration and militarization from a gender perspective to highlight the policy and operational implications that arise from this analysis. The gendered nature of conflict and intervention will be explored from a multi-disciplinary framework involving anthropology, sociology, policy analysis, philosophy and the arts. Presenters will utilize literature, poetry, film, witness testimonies from the field, ethnographic narratives and other resources to explore the complex ways in which women and men experience, FACULTY Carol Cohn is the Director of the Boston Consortium on Gender, Security, and Human Rights. Her research and writing has focused on gender and international security, ranging from work on discourse of civilian defense intellectuals, gender integration issues in the US military, and, most extensively, weapons of mass destruction. Gordana Rabrenovic is Associate Professor of Sociology and Education and Associate Director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University. Her substantive specialties include community studies, urban education and inter group conflict and violence. Lisa Rivera is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her areas of specialization are moral and political theory, feminist philosophy and ethics in international affairs. Feminist InquiryThursdays, 6 - 9 PM / 1.31.08 – 5.8.08 This course investigates theories and practices of feminist inquiry across a range of disciplines. Doing feminist research involves rethinking disciplinary assumptions and methodologies, developing new understandings of what counts as knowledge, seeking alternative ways of understanding the origins of problems/issues, formulating new ways of positing questions and redefining the relationship between subjects and objects of study. All research grows out of complex connections between epistemologies, methodologies and research methods. We shall explore how these connections are formed in the traditional disciplines and raise questions about why the traditional disciplines are inadequate and/or problematic for feminist inquiry. What, specifically, are the feminist critiques of these disciplines? The course will consider methodology, i.e., the theory and analysis of how research should proceed. We shall be especially attentive to epistemological issues—pre-suppositions about the nature of knowledge. We shall examine the theoretical positions our authors take, and evaluate the usefulness of their methodological approaches. As feminist inquiry has developed over the last thirty-some years, it has become increasingly clear that its practice is inherently interdisciplinary. Our aim is to promote the development of feminist theory and methods by providing a forum for sharing, assessing, discussing and debating strategies used by feminist scholars in an array of fields such as literary and cultural studies, history, philosophy, sociology, psychology, political science, religion, and international studies. We will also explore in what specific ways feminist inquiry is, or can be, interdisciplinary. What topics are especially illuminated by an interdisciplinary gendered approach to the world? We will examine how feminist theorists may create the wider interdisciplinary spaces with which to explore problems that cut across, and expose as arbitrary, traditional disciplinary boundaries. FACULTY Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman is an Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University. Her areas of specialization include African American literature and gender and sexuality studies. She has published articles in _African American Review_, _Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire_, and _The Faulkner Journal_, among others. Her current research concerns representations of transgressive sexualities in African American fiction. Frinde Maher is Professor of Education at Wheaton College, where she directs the Secondary Education Program and is a Visiting Scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. She has taught Women’s Studies courses for many years, including, for the past decade, Feminist Theory. She has published widely in the fields of feminist pedagogy and women in education, and is co-author, with Mary Kay Tetreault, of two books: The Feminist Classroom (1994; second edition 2001) and Privilege and Diversity in the Academy (2007). Read how to apply Contact 617.324.2085 for more information or write gcws@mit.edu Fall 2008 application deadline: August 29, 2008 |
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