Fall 2025 G&SS Courses

Gender and Migration

GNDR 411/511

Instructor: TBA

Course Description

This course uses feminist and interdisciplinary readings to discuss the multiple experiences of people who find themselves in situations of forced migration and displacement due to street level and organized violence, structural dislocation due to neoliberalism and globalization, economic collapse and government instability, histories of civil war, and climate catastrophes and displacement, and the overall, push and pull factors that extract people from their home countries. This course explores the challenges presented to communities fleeing structurally complex situations, and the in-transit and receiving communities’ responses to these migrant mobilities. This course also discusses the local, regional, and global responses to creating long-term and meaningful change in communities most affected by migration.

Gendered Ecologies: Nature, Science, Empire

GNDR 450/550

Dr. Dylan M. Blackston

Tuesdays, 1:30-4:00 pm

Course Description

At our contemporary moment of global ecological-political crisis, this course takes seriously theoretical and methodological approaches for thinking across species, genders, and locations.

With attention to how colonialism and slavery have capacitated enduring hierarchies of power, we will examine how certain forms of life come to matter in our social, political, and natural worlds. From underground fungal networks to the movement of plants and people along colonial routes, from hormonal transitions to various definitions of nature and naturalness, this class explores both specific and expansive ideas of ecology; that is, what happens when we consider not only the relationships between organisms and their physical environments but also the capital-driven transnational flows of life and death that have enabled those ecologies to come to be? What limitations do Western approaches to “the human” place on our capacity to think about gender, sex, and the environment in relation to one another? We’ll take a transnational approach to exploring questions of how gender is implicated in the logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. We will work through these questions as an entryway to seeking frames for justice, present-but-under examined modes of survival, and novel approaches to imagining life in and beyond the now.

Feminist and Queer Theory

GNDR 471/571

Dr. Dylan M. Blackston

Tuesdays/Thursdays, 12:00-1:15 pm

Course Description

In this course, we will engage contemporary feminist and queer thought from a wide variety of theoretical orientations. We will consider the relationships between theory and activism as well as some of the key debates in the field of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies. Central to our course is an engagement with how feminist and queer theories take root and what effects they have beyond the walls of the university. Who are feminist theorists? What is a queer theory? What are the stakes of feminist and queer theory and activism? How do feminist and queer theories intersect with other strains of interdisciplinary thought? Using these questions as our guides, we will consider how knowledge production and activism are entangled with our experiences of gender, sex, race, class, location, citizenship, and ability.