Gender Studies

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course introduces students to key concepts and texts in environmental humanities, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary studies of race, gender, sexuality, capital, nation, and globalization. The course examines the conceptual foundations that support humanistic analyses of environmental issues, climate crisis, and the ethics of justice and care. In turn, this critical analysis can serve as the basis for responding to the urgency of calls for environmental action.

 

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Students will learn what difference humanistic studies make to understanding environmental issues and climate crisis. The course will prepare students to:

• Identify humanistic methods and how they contribute to understanding the world;
• Demonstrate critical approaches to reading and representing environments;
• Engage ethical questions related to the environment; and
• Apply concepts from the course to synthesize the student’s use of humanistic approaches to address urgent environmental questions.

COURSE DESCRIPTION:
This course introduces students to key concepts and texts in environmental humanities,
with an emphasis on interdisciplinary studies of race, gender, sexuality, capital, nation, and
globalization. The course examines the conceptual foundations that support humanistic analyses
of environmental issues, climate crisis, and the ethics of justice and care. We will also focus on
how the generalized contemporary environmental crisis plays out on the specific terrain of New
York City.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
Students will learn what difference humanistic studies make to understanding
environmental issues and climate crisis. The course will prepare students to:
• Identify humanistic methods and how they contribute to understanding the world;
• Demonstrate critical approaches to reading and representing environments;
• Apply concepts from the course to synthesize the student’s use of humanistic approaches
to address urgent environmental questions;
• Develop a strong understanding of how generalized elements of the environmental crisis
play out in and are resisted in New York City.

Discussion Section

This course examines the conceptual foundations that support feminist and queer analyses of racial capitalism, security and incarceration, the politics of life and health, and colonial and postcolonial studies, among others. Open to all students; required for the major in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE).

This course examines the conceptual foundations that support feminist and queer analyses of racial capitalism, security and incarceration, the politics of life and health, and colonial and postcolonial studies, among others. Open to all students; required for the major in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE).

Enrollment for this class is by instructor approval and an application is required. Please fill out the form here: https://forms.gle/bPsV7rcf5RWB35PM9

This introductory course for the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE) as well as Majors/Minors in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) is open to all students. We focus on the critical study of social difference as an interdisciplinary practice, using texts with diverse modes of argumentation and evidence to analyze social differences as fundamentally entangled and co-produced. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this course, the professor will frequently be joined by other faculty and guest speakers who bring distinct disciplinary and subject matter expertise. Some keywords for this course include hybridity, diaspora, borderlands, migration, and intersectionality.

N/A

In academic discourse, romance and sex are often discussed as historical constructs shaped by the social, economic, and political contexts of their time, marking a powerful association between the romantic discourse and capitalism. This course builds on this understanding while supplementing it with the critical but often-overlooked role of technological mediation. Starting from the premise that romantic love is profoundly influenced by the affordances of the technology of its time, a critical awareness of technological mediation in romance—especially of digital technologies, i.e., online dating, social media, or cybersex– will afford us an understanding of how social categories such as gender, race, class, ability, or sexuality are redefined by technologies and in turn govern popular cultural perceptions of dating and sex.

Whereas technology is usually framed as prosthetic or derivative of the human, this course challenges this view approaching technological developments as ‘co-produced’ by humans and technology, forcing us to grapple with both the inherently discriminatory power of socio-technical systems and the unimaginable capacities of these digital devices (Benjamin 2020). The course readings span sociology, media studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, or disability studies, equipping students with a critical framework to understand and analyze power structures in love (and beyond) in the contemporary conditions of algorithmic governance. 

Comparative study of gender, race, and sexuality through specific historical, socio-cultural contexts in which these systems of power have operated. With a focus on social contexts of slavery, colonialism, and modern capitalism for the elaboration of sex-gender categories and systems across historical time.

The Senior Seminar in Women's Studies offers you the opportunity to develop a capstone research paper by the end of the first semester of your senior year. Senior seminar essays take the form of a 25-page paper based on original research and characterized by an interdisciplinary approach to the study of women, sexuality, and/or gender. You must work with an individual advisor who has expertise in the area of your thesis and who can advise you on the specifics of method and content. Your grade for the semester will be determined by the instructor and the advisor. Students receiving a grade of B+ or higher in Senior Seminar I will be invited to register for Senior Seminar II by the Instructor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Senior Seminar II students will complete a senior thesis of 40-60 pages. Please note, the seminar is restricted to Columbia College and GS senior majors.

Student-designed capstone research projects offer practical lessons about how knowledge is produced, the relationship between knowledge and power, and the application of interdisciplinary feminist methodologies.

Student-designed capstone research projects offer practical lessons about how knowledge is produced, the relationship between knowledge and power, and the application of interdisciplinary feminist methodologies.

Prerequisites: 5 semesters of college-level French or the equivalent.  This course in taught in French.

Eligibility:  This course is open to undergraduates, graduate students, and visiting students

Based on an interdisciplinary, intersectional, subalternist and post-colonial approach, this course is a general introduction to the history, sociology and anthropology of the economy of the sex-trade in Africa, America, Asia and Europe from the early nineteenth century to today. It aims to clarify: 1) the historiographical situation by questioning and analyzing the French regulatory system and its many avatars in Europe, the United States and in the colonial world, but also questioning the backlash to this system that consisted firstly of the abolitionist (born in England in the second half of the nineteenth century) and then the prohibitionist movements; 2) The relationship between class, “race” and gender in the sex market via issues of human trafficking and sex tourism in Europe, America, Africa and Asia; 3) The socio-economic issue - and its political connections – in the economy of sex with particular attention to individuals (prostitutes versus sex workers), their voices, their legal status, and even their mobilization (rallies and demonstrations, community collectives and trade unions, political and / or literary publications), but also the many heated debates that these demands for recognition and these mobilizations have provoked in places as diverse as France, the Netherlands and India to take only three specific examples in the world covered in the course.

To enroll in this course, you must apply to the Columbia Summer in Paris Program through the Center for Undergraduate Global Engagement (UGE). Tuition charges apply; scholarships available.

Please note the program dates are different from the Summer Term B dates. 

Far from obvious renderings of place, maps are spatial arguments about who belongs where and how living should be defined. This course approaches place as something that is contested daily in the U.S. through the struggle of who gets to lay claim to a way of life. From the landscapes of dispossession to the alternative ways marginalized people work with and against traditional geographies, this course centers Black place-making practices as political struggle. This class will look at how power and domination become a landed project. We will critically examine how ideas about “nature” are bound up with notions of race, and the way “race” naturalizes the proper place for humans and non-human others. We will interrogate settler colonialism’s relationships to mapping who is and isn’t human, the transatlantic slave trade as a project of terraforming environments for capital, and land use as a science for determining who “owns” the earth. Centered on Black feminist, queer and trans thinkers, we will encounter space not as a something given by maps, but as a struggle over definitions of the human, geography, sovereignty, and alternative worlds. To this end, we will read from a variety of disciplines, such as Critical Black Studies, Feminist and Intersectional Science Studies, Black Geographies and Ecologies, Urban Studies and Afrofuturist literature. (Note: this class will count as an elective for the CCIS minors/concentrations in F/ISTS, ICORE/MORE, and Environmental Humanities.)

This course explores transcontinental connections across Africa, Asia, and the Americas as
forged in the practices and movements of peoples, in the context of global colonial and
postcolonial orders. We will consider the intersections, crossings, and collaborations of
different communities of the global South across these continents in the course of their social,
cultural, and political struggles to shape and transform the worlds they live in. We will ask, how
might different narratives of these global South connections contribute to our imagination and
practice of global resistance and transformation? Topics include: colonialism, capitalism,
imperialism, Third Worldism, feminism.