Introduction to the interdisciplinary field of women's and gender studies with an emphasis on an understanding of the "common differences" that both unite and divide women. Beginning with an examination of how womanhood has been represented in myths, ads, and popular culture, the course explores how gender inequalities have been both explained and critiqued. The cultural meaning given to gender as it intersects with race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality will be studied. This course also exposes some of the critiques made by women's studies' scholars of the traditional academic disciplines and the new intellectual terrain currently being mapped.

This course explores love and intimacy from an interdisciplinary, humanistic social science, intersectional, data feminist, and queer studies perspective. In this course, we will examine the systems of meaning, politics, and infrastructures of feeling surrounding notions of love and intimacy. We will also explore the structural forces that constitutively shape and mediate love and intimacy today, focusing on how emerging technologies, shifting economic, political, and sociotechnical conditions, heightened border crossings, and reproductive and climate injustice are reconstituting the terms, practices, and meanings associated with love, intimacy, and intimate arrangements in real time.

What is feminist research? What is feminist methods? This course addresses these questions by exploring a wide range of methods of interviewing, ethnography, surveys, archival research, focus groups, and participatory action research from a feminist perspective. The class introduces students to feminist approaches to research from across the humanities, natural and social sciences. The readings for the class explore topics of engaged research and feminist politics of knowledge production. The course focuses on situating multiple methods within feminist epistemologies, and critically examining self- reflectivity among researchers and the ways they influence research.

A quarter century ago the Institute of Medicine defined the work of public health as "what we as a society do collectively to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy." Historically rooted in a commitment to social justice, U.S. public health is now renewing this commitment through 1) an epidemiological shift to examine the social, economic, and political inequities that create disparate health and disease patterns by gender, class, race, sexual identity, citizenship, etc., and 2) a corresponding health equity movement in public health practice. This broad-ranging course examines the debates shaping the above as well as the moral and legal groundings of public health, basic epidemiology, and the roles of public and private actors. Highlighted health topics vary year to year.

This course will offer a critical introduction to queer theory, a major theoretical framework within women’s and gender studies that emerges from the study of sex and sexuality as a guiding force in social and political life. The course will start with an expansive background on the history and development of queer theory, before exploring some of the key debates that continue to animate the field. Specifically, we will consider the complicated relationships between queer theory, feminist theory, and queer of color critique. Finally, the course will consider the relationship between queer theory and forms of queer expression in literature and culture, such as in Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home and its musical adaptation.

This course focuses on the politics of human reproduction which is inextricably linked with nation states, as well as cultural norms and expectations. Reproductive issues and debates serve as proxies for more fundamental questions about the intersecting inequalities of citizenship, gender, race, class, disability and sexuality. What does reproductive justice look like? We will discuss how the marketplace, medical technologies and the law are critical to creating social hierarchies that are produced, resisted and transformed. We ask: Why is access critical to control for the use of fertility technologies (both pre-and during pregnancy), gamete purchase, egg freezing? How is each accomplished and by whom? How are new technologies in reproduction coupled with the global marketplace creating a social hierarchy between people (e.g. gamete donors, gestational carriers). Finally, what is the relationship between the commercialization of reproduction and the creation of new intimacies and forms of kinship? The course emphasizes both empirical research situated in the U.S. and research involving transnational flows.

The stories we tell about the world make certain futures possible, while foreclosing other imaginable ones. This course reveals how Western historical, theoretical, and scientific ways of knowing understood both women and nature as inferior and thus needing to be controlled. Pushing back against the ideas of any inherent binary separations between sex/gender and nature/culture, we will examine feminist ecological possibilities for planetary futures. Learning from the intertwined histories of environment, race, and gender, that have led to both personal and global inequity and disaster, we will also engage solutions that imagine different futures. Recognizing that solutions to environmental problems require a feminist attunement, we can start to understand the implications that our ethical commitments have to the future of life on the planet.

Four decades ago, the Institutes of Medicine defined public health as "what we as a society do collectively to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy." Some in U.S. public health understand the field to be historically rooted in a commitment to social equality, and in recent years have been leading a movement in epidemiology to examine the social, economic, and political inequities that create disparate health and disease patterns by gender, class, race, sexual identity, citizenship, etc., and in practice to pursue health equity. Yet these commitments do not exist without tension. This broad-ranging course examines the context and key debates shaping the knowledge, laws, ethics, and practice of public health in the U.S.