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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Topics in American Literature (ENG G211)

Explores a significant topic in American literature. The topic for Fall 2006 is Multi-Ethnic Literature, Theory, and Pedagogy

Topics in Eighteenth-Century Literature (ENG G284)

Explores in depth a topic, theme, or genre in eighteenth-century British literature, such as satire; London’s city culture; literary theory; the emerging women writers; the essay; or a major writer, for example, Jonathan Swift, Jane Austen, or Henry Fielding.

Topics in Victorian Literature (ENG G286)

Offers a focus on special topics such as gender issues, the 1890s, Victorian fantasy, and science fiction.

Eighteenth-Century Novel (ENG G291)

Focuses on Behn, Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Walpole, Sterne, Beckford, and Austen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Seminar (SOA G280)

Discusses selected topics in the field of anthropology.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Contempory Issues in Sociology (SOC G256)

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

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.

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Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies- Courses

Women's Activism: Gender, Literacy and Human Rights

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.

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.

Interrogating Marriage

Is Marriage a patriarchal institution? Much feminist scholarship has characterized it that way, but now in the context of the recent Massachusetts Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage, the meaning of marriage itself demands serious re-examination. This course will discuss history, literature, film, and legal evolution, making use of cross-cultural, sociological, anthropological and many other theoretical approaches to the marriage question from 1630 to the present. As it turns out, sex, marriage, and the family have never been stable institutions; to the contrary, they have continued to function as flash points for the very social and cultural questions that are central to gender studies scholarship.

Committee, looking toward eventual publication, and writing with an eye to a professional position. Enrollment is limited to ten* students.

RENEE BERGLAND is Professor of English and Gender/Cultural Studies at Simmons College. She teaches courses in American literature and culture, gender studies, and literary and cultural theory. Her first book, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects, focuses on the Native American figures that haunt US cultural narratives. More recently, she wrote Computer of Venus: Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science, forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2007. Other current projects are an essay collection on the recently discovered Nineteenth-Century American novel The Hermaphrodite, and a monograph on the global Emily Dickinson.

LEONARD BUCKLE is Associate Professor of Law, Policy and Society and served from 1985 to 2003 as Co-Director of the LPS program. He teaches negotiation and research methods and supervises dissertations in humanistic and social scientific approaches to the study of law and law-like institutions. He has done research in tobacco control, community-based dispute resolution and informal uses of the legal system. Before joining the Northeastern University faculty, he taught and conducted research at MIT's department of urban studies and planning, Tufts' department of political science and the Kennedy School of Government.

SUZANN THOMAS-BUCKLE is Associate Professor of Law, Policy and Society and served from 1985 to 2003 as Co-Director of the LPS program. She teaches interdisciplinary research methods and dispute resolution and supervises dissertations in the field of informal justice and the ad hoc construction of social control. Her academic interests include indigenous legal systems, conflict resolution and the construction of law through formal legislation and litigation and through informal processes in organizations and communities. Before joining the Northeastern University faculty, she taught and conducted research at MIT's department of urban studies and planning, Tufts' department of political science and the Kennedy School of Government. “I hope to do more work on writing of the west, to explore concepts of the west in future papers, etc.”

Gender, Race, and the Complexities of Science and Technology: A Problem-Based Learning Experiment

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.

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."

Representing Gender: Global Perspectives on Art, Media, and Popular Culture

This course explores and interrogates the ways in which social and cultural conventions construct sexuality, gender, race, class, ethnicity and nationality across a broad range of representations in art, popular culture and the communications media. Utilizing a global feminist perspective and drawing on examples from the US, China, India, Mexico, Japan, and South Africa, we will focus on thematic intersections and patterns of representation.

We examine the ways in which cultural, ideological, and generic conventions converge in a wide range of contemporary representational practices and how feminist theoretical and analytical approaches have attempted to account for a diverse range of influences and impulses.

PAMELA ALLARA is Associate Professor Emerita at Brandeis University. An art historian, she teaches courses the history of women’s art, contemporary art, film, photography and visual culture. The author of a monograph on the American painter Alice Neel, (Pictures of People: Alice Neel’s American Portrait Gallery, [1998/2000]), her recent research has been on activist art in South Africa. In 2003, she organized the exhibition, “Co-existence: Contemporary Cultural Production in South Africa” for the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis and the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. During the 2005-6 academic year, she organized two exhibitions: “Geobodies: A Question of Boundaries” for the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, and “Cross-Current In Recent Video Installation: Water as Metaphor for Identity” for the Tufts University Art Gallery.

LISA CUKLANZ is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Boston College. She is author of Rape on Trial: How the Mass Media Construct Legal Reform and Social Change (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996) and Rape on Prime Time: Television, Masculinity, and Sexual Violence (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Her research interests focus on mass media representations of gendered violence. Her work has been published in journals including Critical Studies in Media Communication, Women's Studies in Communication, Communication Quarterly, and Journal of Gender Studies.

Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women's and Gender Studies

A writing workshop for dissertation writers at all levels, beginning with preparation of the proposal. Class will include rotating discussion in each meeting of pre-circulated material by one or two students. In addition to a constructive critique of your writing, we will focus on: theoretical and methodological concepts in Women's and Gender Studies across disciplines; research, argumentation, and writing; practical matters such as: the Dissertation Committee, looking toward eventual publication, and writing with an eye to a professional position. Enrollment is limited to *ten* students.

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.

Note: This workshop meets every other week.

Gender, Armed Conflict, and Peacemaking

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, manage and respond to violence and situations of protracted crisis.

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 Inquiry: Strategies for Effective Scholarship

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.

LAURIE CRUMPACKER (Professor and Chair of History; Acting Chair of Women’s Studies at Simmons College.) She holds a B.S. from Simmons in English/Education, an M.A. from Harvard/Radcliffe in English Literature, and a Ph.D. from Boston University in American Studies. At Simmons, she was founding Director of the Women’s Studies Program (now the Department of Women and Gender Studies) and also of the Liberal Studies/ Women’s Studies Masters Program (now the Gender and Cultural Studies Program). She has been the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Susquehanna University and at Wheelock College. Her publications include The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr (Yale, 1984) and Second to None: A Documentary History of American Women (U. Nebraska, 1994). She has recently written articles on African American and white working women’s education and on the impact of feminist theory on liberal education.

FRINDE MAHER, is Professor of Education at Wheaton College, where she directs the Secondary Education Program. 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).

Transsexuality, Transgenderism, and the Rest...

This course will cover narrative, anthropological, historical, and theoretical texts (including films) about transsexuality and transgenderism. We begin with transsexuality before and beyond identity politics and its transformation in the light/shadow of identity politics and theories of gender. While the course will remain located in the Americas and Europe, we will consider how trans-subjectivities produced in other socio-cultural formations inform histories and politics of transsexuality and transgenderism in so-called western contexts.

CLAUDIA CASTANEDA teaches feminist science and technology studies in Boston area universities, and works as a writing coach for academics at all stages of the research/writing process. She is the author of Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds (Duke University Press, 2002), and other articles that focus on scientific and technological materialization of bodily differences including race, class, gender, and sexuality in broader circuits of power and exchange.

AFSANEH NAJMABADI teaches History and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her last book, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), received the 2005 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association. She is an associate editor of the six-volume Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (Leiden: Brill, 2004-2008), and is currently working on Sex in Change: Configurations of Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary Iran.

JYOTI PURI writes and teaches in the areas of sexualities, states, nationalisms, and transnational feminisms. Her book, Woman, Body, Desire in Post-colonial India (Routledge 1999), addresses how constructs of gender and sexuality are shaped across national and transnational contexts. Encountering Nationalism, (Blackwell Publishers 2004), is a feminist sociological exploration of nationalism and the state. A number of related articles and chapters are published in journals and edited volumes on sexuality and gender. She is the recipient of fellowships and grants, including a Rockefeller Research Fellowship and a Fulbright Senior Research award. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Sexualizing the State: Biopolitics and Sodomy Law in India.

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