Northeastern Graduate Courses : Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies Courses

ANTH 6275: Gender, Sexuality and Culture (SOA G275)

Examines the construction of sexuality in western social sciences, its deconstruction by critics, and differential communities. Because the greatest challenges to western social scientific constructions of sexuality come from the margins of the dominant culture, the course pays close attention to nonheterosexual and nonwestern formulations of identity, experience, and lifestyle. Critically reads the work of Freud, Ellis, Kinsey, Margaret Mead, Levi-Strauss, and Foucault, feminist theorists, and others. Focuses on the experiences of people of color in the United States and in a range of other countries.

CAEP 6200: Introduction to Counseling: Theory and Process in an Ecological Context (CAP G200)

Provides an overview of counseling and psychology from the ecological perspective. Covers the history, theories, and process of counseling across forces within psychology and across individuals (children and adults), groups, and families. Includes an introduction to counseling skills.

CAEP 6203: Understanding Culture and Diversity (CAP G203)

Works from a broad definition of culture and diversity. In addition to traditional culture and ethnic classifications, examines disability, poverty, and gender as culturally defining factors. Also explores the dynamics of culture in social systems, with the perspective of valuing differences in society and sociocultural forces impinging on culture from the ecological perspective.

CAEP 6218: Infant, Child, and Adolescent Development (CAP G218)

Provides an overview of development from birth through late adolescence. Covers the major theories of human development from a culturally informed, gender-sensitive ecological orientation. Reviews stages and theories of development from an interdisciplinary perspective and related to implications for learning. Examines cognitive, language, social/emotional, play, and physical aspects of development.

CAEP 6222: Human Sexuality (CAP G222)

Designed for the twenty-first century and the critcal issues that have evolved in the field. Includes current information on issues in human sexuality (and acts as a forum for the discussion of current trends), which may include HIV/AIDS, abortion, ethics and morality in genetic engineering, personal behaviors, social aspects of acquaintance rape, early sexual experiences, divorce, and remarriage. Allows for the development of counseling skills needed to deal with various issues.

CAEP 6286: Family Counseling (CAP G240)

Addresses the family as a system within an ecological context. Covers parent counseling, the school and family as interactive systems, and school-parent collaboration. Also considers families in early intervention and other family-school interventions.

CAEP 6380: Seminar in Feminist Psychology (CAP G380)

Looks at sex-gender socialization and role ascription in the development of women and men. Examines feminine and masculine gender role stereotypes and constructs in mental health theory, procedures, and practices. Introduces the variety of feminist standpoints and explores their impacts on the conceptualization of health and healing. Presents major points in feminist therapy and psychology. The student examines selected areas in-depth within this course.

CAEP 6390: History and Systems of Psychology (CAP G390)

Examines the development of psychological theories in the context of western intellectual development. Attends to the underlying epistemological assumptions and historical and cultural forces on psychology. Also emphasizes some of the potential contributions to psychology of other world civilizations and to paradigmatic strengths and limits.

CRIM 7210: Gender, Crime, and Justice (CJ G210)

Examines ways in which criminology, the criminal justice system, and the law contribute to the social construction of gender. Investigates process through which biological females are encouraged to become girls and women by cultural assumptions about female deviance, discourses on female crime, the criminal justice system, and legal assumptions about the meaning of equality. Focuses on feminist approaches to criminal justice that parallel the new feminist jurisprudence.

ENGL 7213: Topics in Early American Literature

Focuses on the work of one writer, a group of writers, or a theme or structure common to several writers-Jonathan Edwards, women writers, the poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or typology, for example-in the first two hundred years of American literature. Topics change with time and demand.

HIST 7227: Twentieth Century China (HST G227)

Assesses the impact of the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949 on state-societal relations. Initially focuses on the Mao era, particularly state-sponsored efforts to transform Chinese society through social mobilization campaigns, politcal culture, industrialization, and rural collectivization. Explores the impact of the economic reform policies initiated after 1978, emphasizing the social impact of globalizing economic forces, the rise of a consumer culture, the development of a legal system, and the ethnic relations between Han Chinese and minority populations, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang.

HIST 7235: Third World Women (HST G235)

Offers a critical examination of the complex gender dynamics shaping the lives of women in nonwestern societies from colonial times until the present. Deconstructs the term “Third World” and sees how it can be read against the context of imperialism. Examines gender constructs in relationship to racial and class hierarchies. Other topics include patterns of gender domination and female resistance, the interplay of imperialist and patriarchal forms of domination under colonial rule, the western gaze and representations of Third World “primitive” women, and the feminization of labor and the global economy.

HIST 7304: Research Seminar in Gender and Society in the Modern World (HST G304)

Studies feminists’ claims-making; the meanings of masculinity at work and in arguments for citizenship; sexuality and rights; masculinity and femininity; and examines how gender, as a system of cultural practices and power relations, intersected with class and race to influence the meanings of citizenship, work, state policy, and sexuality. Discusses the social practices and political consequences of those meanings. Considers topics such as gender and the “democratic” European revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the ways in which gender shaped the meanings of work, skill, and the body; the importance of race in European war; and the emergence of modern welfare states. Although this course takes Europe as its point of departure, it also explores how Europeans operated as part of a transnational, if not global, economic and political system from the late eighteenth century to the 1950s.

NRSG 3302: Nursing with Women and Families (NUR G088)

Emphasizes the promotion of health for women and their families. Self-care and empowerment are an integral focus in examining women's health from a developmental perspective. The nursing process provides the framework for students to assess and therapeutically intervene in promoting healthy childbearing and the health of the woman during the life span. Emphasis is on caregiving of the woman, the fetus, and the infant within the family environment. Concepts of human development of individual, family, and community form the context in examining the caregiving role of the professional nurse. Discusses the effect of cultural, social, economic, and ethical influences as well as the impact of health-care technology.

POLS 7332: Gender and Politics (POL G332)

Explores the roles of women in politics, with emphasis on the United States. Examines the traditional roles of women in politics, movements to attain equality for women in all spheres of public life, the woman as citizen and voter, the role of gender in achieving power and in political efficacy, and the place of women in contemporary politics. Also covers political action to promote women’s issues and modern feminism.

PHTH 5120: Race, Ethnicity and Health in the US (BHS G120)

Explores the role of economic, social, and individual factors in explaining racial and ethnic health disparities, and examines intervention approaches to eliminate them. Topics include genetic and social constructions of race and ethnicity, measuring race and ethnicity, and the differences in prevalence and patterns of disease across groups; cultural and structural factors that affect health-care delivery, such as discrimination, racism, and health status; and public health approaches to prevention and improving health-care delivery. Class activities include field work.

SOCL 7202: Feminist Theory (SOC G202)

Considers major developments in feminist theory since the rise of the contemporary women's movement. First looks at early socialist feminist and radical feminist theory and their critics, psychoanalytical feminist theory, postmodern feminism and its critics, and theories about exclusion and difference among women of color. Gender, sexuality, and power are central categories of analysis.

SOCL 7212: Feminist Methodologies (SOC G212)

Feminist scholarship has challenged and reworked basic assumptions about the social world and the research that describes it. This requires three basic approaches: Rethinking, Reflecting, and Rewriting. To do this we need to examine the ways of knowing common to the social sciences and the ways in which new paradigms have or have not been integrated into the canon.

SOCL 7237: Women, Men, and Social Change (SOC G237)

Looks at how the Industrial Revolution and the corresponding changes in the labor force and patterns of domestic life have altered the sexual division of labor. In postindustrial society, new institutional forms are recasting personal relations. Examines these forces of social change and their impact on gender roles.

SOCL 7248: Race, Class and Gender (SOC G248)

Analyzes the intersection of race, class, and gender in women’s lives and their meaning for equality and feminism. Includes work by and about men. An interdisciplinary approach focuses on the socially constructed nature of these concepts, how they shape social life, and create meaning. Difference has become a central category for understanding our multicultural social life, underscoring inequality, stratification, and divergent life chances and experiences in the United States. Examines struggles to analyze gender, race, ethnicity, and class simultaneously and to grapple with issues including theory, autobiography, sociological data and analysis, and popular culture.

SOCL 7256: Contempory Issues in Sociology (SOC G256)

Discuss contemporary issues in sociology. Include supervised readings and written reports on special problems.

SOCL 7262: Social Psychology of Stratification (SOC G263)

Explores the social psychological dimensions of structured social inequality. Overviews the “social psychologies” embedded in the classical social theorists, then explores the literature on sociological social psychology (as opposed to its psychological cousin), identifying key theoretical frameworks and focusing on “social structure and personality” (or “social structure and attitudes”) research. Explores relevant literatures on various “subjective” responses to stratification including the self-concept, stratum (that is, race, class, or gender) identification and consciousness, the process of legitimation, stratification beliefs (or stratification ideology), racial attitudes, and links between these phenomena and various policy attitudes and preferences (support for affirmative action, wealth redistribution, and so on). Also explores the ways in which such responses may contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of the status quo (social reproduction), and social change.

You can also view these courses at the NEU Registrar.

Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies - Courses

Feminist Inquiry

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 asking questions and redefining the relationship between subjects and objects of study. The course will focus on 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. What makes research distinctively feminist lies in the 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 they are inadequate and/or problematic for feminist inquiry and what, specifically, are the feminist critiques of these intersections.

Modhumita Roy is Associate Professor of English and Director of the undergraduate Women's Studies program at Tufts University.

Jill McLean Taylor, Ed.D. is a Professor of Education, and Women's and Gender Studies at Simmons College, and chair of WGST

Gender and Poverty in the United States

The course provides multi-disciplinary social science approaches to understanding the intersection of gender, poverty and inequality primarily in the United States. The course will be an advanced reading seminar that explores various (including feminist) approaches to theorizing, measuring, experiencing and researching poverty. The course will also examine models, policies, and strategies to reduce poverty and inequality. The course will weave discussions throughout about how these approaches relate to students' training in various graduate programs and the methodologies students will explore (and ultimately use) in their own research.

Randy Albelda is a professor of economics and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Social Policy at University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research and teaching covers a broad range of economic policies affecting low-income women and families. She is the coauthor of the books Glass Ceilings and Bottomless Pits: Women's Work, Women's Poverty, Unlevel Playing Fields: Understanding Wage Inequality and Wage Discrimination, and The War on the Poor: A Defense Manual.

Deborah Belle is Professor of Psychology at Boston University. Her research has focused on stress and depression among low-income mothers, women's social networks and supports, and women in science careers. Her books include Lives in stress: Women and depression, and The after-school lives of children: Alone and with others while parents work.

Lisa Dodson is research professor in the sociology department at Boston College. She teaches and conducts research about low-income mothers and families. She wrote Don't Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women and Girls in Poor America and recent articles include "Wage Poor Mothers and Moral Economy" and "Poor Women and Habits of Hiding: Participatory Methods in Poverty Research." Her forthcoming book is The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert the Unfair Economy.

SCREEN WOMEN: Body Narratives in Popular American Film

The cinematic body of the woman has long been the central focus for theories of spectatorship, psychoanalytic film theory as well as feminist media and cultural studies. As such it provides rich material for an interdisciplinary conversation not only about socio-cultural and psychological constructions of gender, sexualities, and power but also about the pathologies of body disturbances and eating disorders which have become increasingly prevalent among women and girls. Using popular film and related media as our texts this course will investigate "hot button" issues in the contemporary discourse about women and body image in images of excessive mothering, adolescent sexuality, obesity, diet culture, transformative surgery, body makeovers, and gender reassignment in order to answer the following question: how are contemporary debates surrounding the body both reflected in, and informed by, popular culture representations? Students can expect to come away from the class with a deeper understanding of the cultural influences that shape media products and familiarity with feminist and feminist media theory as it relates to the topic of embodiment and body image.

Emily Fox-Kales, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist who specializes in the treatment of eating disorders and body disturbances in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She also is on the faculty of Northeastern University where she teaches film, gender and cultural studies in the Cinema Studies program. She has served as Film Editor of the journal Gender & Psychoanalysis and published on psycho-social narratives of the woman's body. Her forthcoming book is Body Shots: Hollywood and the Culture of Eating Disorders.

Suzanne Leonard is Assistant Professor of English at Simmons College, where she teaches film studies, feminist theory, and women's literature. Her published articles have appeared in Women's Studies Quarterly, MELUS, and in various anthologies including Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Duke UP, 2007) and Feminism, Domesticity, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2008). Her forthcoming book on Fatal Attraction (2009) is an inaugural text in Wiley-Blackwell's series, Studies in Film and Television.

Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women's and Gender Studies

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: data and the archive, methodology, and explanation or interpretation. Students will be asked to reflect on ways that feminism and gender studies have affected their discipline's views of what data are considered relevant and on the question of what body of materials is best suited to answer the questions raised in each of their dissertations. We will also consider general issues of scholarly method, methodological issues that feminism and gender studies have raised, and methodological issues prominent within the major topics of the participants' different disciplinary fields. The inquiry into explanation and interpretation will ask how dissertation writers convince various audiences that their work is significant. Each student will also give an oral presentation that has been consciously adapted for an interdisciplinary audience. Enrollment is limited to ten students.

Janet Z. Giele is Professor Emerita of Sociology, Social Policy, and Women's Studies at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University. Her research focuses on the changing life course of women and the emergence of American family policy. She is the author, editor, or co-editor of Women: Roles and Status in Eight Countries (1977), Women and the Future (1978), Women in the Middle Years (1982), Women and Work: The Continuing Struggle Worldwide (1992), Two Paths to Women's Equality (1995), Methods of Life Course Research (1998), Women's Equality in the Workplace (2004), Changing Life Patterns in Western Industrial Societies (2004), and The Craft of Life Course Research (2009).

Note: This workshop meets every other week.


You can also view these courses at the GCWS course website.