M.A. (6 Credits)
Required Course (3 credits)
Complementary Course (3 credits)
OR
3 credits selected from a list of Complementary Courses
PhD (9 Credits)
Required Courses (6 credits)
Complementary Course (3 credits)
3 credits selected from a list of Complementary Courses
*Please note that students are not required to complete WMST 601 or WMST 602 in the first year of their graduate program and may benefit from delaying enrollment in WMST 602 until their second year of studies.
Core Courses
WMST 601 is an intensive interdisciplinary graduate seminar that examines some of the major theories and research methodologies that orient current scholarly work in gender and women’s studies. The seminar’s emphasis will be placed on key themes in feminist research inquiry that cut a cross-disciplinary path through scholarly literatures in the humanities, social sciences and some natural sciences, including themes such as: the social construction of bodies and issues of embodiment, theories of sexual difference, practices of telling history, and queer and trans-sexuality studies, among several other topics. Seminar time will be split between lecture and discussion, inter-disciplinary faculty roundtable discussions, and student presentations.
What does it mean to situate one's research in relation to the field of gender and women's studies? What qualifies scholarly research as "feminist"? What are the relationships between research, power, and social justice? This course explores these questions with a focus on the links between feminist epistemology, methods of inquiry, and the field of gender and women's studies. Required for PhD students and optional for MA students enrolled in the Graduate Option in Gender and Women's Studies, the course provides students with the opportunity to develop their original research in relation to the field of gender and women's studies. To ground our discussions, we will survey a number of qualitative research methods based on participants' interests. These may include archival, oral history, ethnography, qualitative interviews, and participatory action research, and will be finalized in the first meetings of the course. Overarching our exploration of particular methods, we will be attentive to the fraught politics of interpretation, narration, and representation in the production of intersectional feminist knowledge. We will also consider feminist struggles over ethics, power, intelligibility, and authority in the field of gender and women's studies as it is situated in the contemporary neoliberal university. On a practical level, students can expect to make concrete progress on their thesis projects through one of two major assignments: 1) The crafting of a full research proposal related to their thesis project including an extended section on methodology; 2) The drafting of a chapter or substantive section of their thesis that focuses on methodology and/or situates their thesis project in conversation with the field of gender and women's studies.