Feminist Studies 280A: 

Feminist Pedagogies

 Jigna Desai

This course serves three purposes: This course is designed for students interested in studying and discussing the praxis of feminist and critical pedagogy in higher education. First, it explores feminist and critical pedagogy. While exploring various teaching philosophies and methods, you will learn about the relationship between critical pedagogy, feminist theory, and practice and develop a teaching philosophy statement. Secondly, we will discuss the actual experiences of and strategies for effective teaching and learning in the classroom. We will also focus on how do we create learning goals, respond to microaggressions, disclosures, white fragility, etc while analyzing the material conditions of our university. Third, you will begin creating a syllabus and a teaching portfolio that will be useful as you apply for teaching positions. 

Feminist Studies 594xx:

Black Feminist Genders and Sexualities

Mireille Miller-Young

This course is meant to provide a foundation for some of the pressing discussions happening now in the field of Black feminist theory and particularly in the area of gender and sexuality. We will explore how the emergence of Black feminist theory in the academy has worked to destabilize forms of gender, sexual, and other dimensions of normalization and state power, and created the possibilities to think in new ways about democracy, freedom, citizenship, family, identity, cultural production, space, and modern capital. From Black feminist theory we witness the intervention of theoretical frameworks to account for the intersectionality of oppression, as part of a necessary critique of feminist theory and of the nation in ways that account for evolving forms of globalization, empire, neoliberalism, violence, and normalization. By (re)visiting some of the key texts in the field alongside newer works, we will use the class as a forum to unpack and explore the useful provocations this work offers for our own work, and to share how it inspires our imaginations in the academy and beyond.