Academics

• Course Code: 01:988:482

The opening decades of the 21^st century have been characterized by growing inequalities within and across nations.  In 2016, just 62 people possessed more wealth than 3.6 billion people, the poorest half of the human population (Oxfam 2016).  Government cutbacks in support for education, welfare, health care, and housing have heightened the gap between the rich and the poor even in the most affluent nations.  The economies of more than 100 nations are worse off now than they had been in 1980. The wealthiest 20% of the world population now controls 86% of the world income, while the poorest 20% controls only 1.1% and 85% of the world population controls only 14% of the world’s income. Between 1970 and 1995, average per capita income in the poorest third of countries fell from 3.1 percent to 1.9 percent of the average per capita income of the richest third.  Inequalities are restricted to income. As Valentine Moghadam (2005, 41) has pointed out, “In the 1990s one-fifth of the world population, living in highest income countries, have 86% of the gross domestic product (GDP), 82% of the world export markets, 68% of foreign direct investment, and 74% of the telephone lines; the bottom fifth, living in the poorest countries, had about 1% of each category.”

As poverty has grown globally, it has also been “feminized.” More than 70% of the poor globally are women.  The “feminization of poverty” refers to more than the fact that the preponderance of the poor are women; the poor are constituted as a feminized category, as dependent, subrational, and in need of direction (Kingfisher 2002). Thus the poor are subjected to modes of regulation and control that the affluent would not tolerate.  Employers require mandatory overtime while paying less-than-subsistence wages, providing no health or pension benefits, and infringing basic freedoms pertaining to domicile, mobility, reproduction, and marriage. 

Strategies of national and international agencies to deal with poverty are peculiarly gendered. Too often, structural adjustment policies mandate cash cropping, which displaces subsistence agriculture and the subsistence farmers who happen to be women. Structural adjustment policies increase women’s participation in waged labor at a time when global competition is driving wages down.  Thus women find themselves working more hours in paid labor, playing crucial roles in the informal economic sector, and assuming increased responsibility for family subsistence.  Development strategies grounded in women’s microenterprise help expand capitalist markets and foster economic growth, but they also heighten the economic responsibilities of individual women, magnifying their burden as providers for family subsistence. They increase the debt of poor women, imposing new levels of stress as well as responsibility. Thus gender disadvantage is intensified for women who already work longer hours than men, earn less, and are restricted to lower quality employment than men.

In liberal and social democracies, wage-based social insurance, pension, and welfare schemes have contributed to women’s poverty by penalizing women who earn markedly less than men for work outside the home and who receive no compensation at all for labor in the home.  Programs such as European family allowances reinforce traditional notions that the appropriate role for women is in the home, substituting the male-dominant state for husband as “provider,” thereby perpetuating women's dependence.  In the United States, the latest round of “welfare reform”—Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), replete with workfare and bridefare—punishes poor women for performing precisely those roles that patriarchal society accords them while eliminating entitlements to social provision.  Without adequate childcare or training provisions, such programs force recipients of public assistance to perform menial labor in “public service” to “work off” their benefits.  Failure to perform assigned tasks entails forfeiture of benefits, that is, potential starvation.  Thus some commentators have suggested that some of the wealthiest nations in the world have not moved far beyond the British Poor Law of 1601 in their “enlightened” treatment of the poor.

Poverty is a feminist issue. This course will explore the contributions of feminist analysis, advocacy and policy-making to anti-poverty policy and social justice politics.  It will consider feminist critiques of anti-poverty policies in post-industrial and industrializing nations and explore how feminists have framed the question of poverty in new ways.  It will also examine how feminists have illuminated the “feminization” of poverty and drawn attention to gender bias in remediation strategies that would otherwise remain invisible.  Moreover, it will explore how feminist activism has attempted to bring new urgency to debates about social justice at a time when political parties and elected officials in many parts of the world have substituted privatization for poverty alleviation.  

• Course Code: 01:988:481

Course Description

This course will examine the history and cultural contexts of visual narratives that address gender and sexuality. Rather than considering sequential (visual) narratives as vehicles of entertainment or escapism, or material realizations of inchoate cultural trends, we will explore the ways they are crafted to express, critique, and/or influence social policies. We will also consider how national arts/cultural policies have included or excluded women and issues of gender and sexuality.

In addition to documentary or fiction films or videos directed by women, students will also discuss a variety of other visual narratives, including graphic novels, sequences of photographs, and visual timelines, including material created for or distributed via the Internet. Readings on cultural policy will augment readings on how sequential narratives construct meaning and how audiences make sense of them.

Course Objectives

• Understand how the construction, distribution and reception of visual narratives promotes and controls dominant and alternate visions of gender and sexuality, with particular attention to the historical development, subsequent critiques of, and alternatives to narrative and visual conventions;
• Be able to discuss feminist critiques of visual representation and apparatus; feminist and other oppositional theories of reception/audience; and experimental forms of visual narrative, both documentary and fictional;
• Understand how visual narratives have contributed to the formation and/or critique of social policies relevant to in several different time periods or national cultures during the past hundred years;
• Understand how national cultural policy structures, support systems, and practices in different world regions have addressed (or excluded/ignored) women, gender and sexuality;
• Become aware of current trends and discussions regarding diversity in cultural programming and globalization of the information economy and cyberspace.

• Course Code: 01:988:480

Overview

This course contextualizes human rights in contemporary global politics. Students will gain a thorough understanding of critical UN ideologies and mechanisms but will apply them to local case studies to see how international rights affect individual life experiences in various contexts.  Topics explored include: dynamics between security, conflict, and “peace”; reproductive and sexual rights; the relationship between state sovereignty and human rights; the rights of the child; indigenous rights; the implications of defining human beings as legal and “undocumented”; the impact of torture and terrorism; and hunger in the “first” and “third” worlds.   

• Course Code: 01:988:445
• Semester(s) Offered: Spring, Summer
• Credits: 3

• Course Code: 01:988:430
• Semester(s) Offered: Fall
• Credits: 3

• Course Code: 01:988:429

Learning Goals

This course has five main objectives.

• The first is to provide an analysis of the location of women in the processes of economic development; to understand what economic development is, the scales or levels at which it occurs, and the centrality of gender at every level.
• The second is to examine theoretical and conceptual frameworks for that analysis.
• The third is to reflect upon linkages between the global economy and the gendered macro and micro process of development and transitions from ‘government’ to ‘governance.’
• The fourth is to understand the usefulness of a rights based approach to gender justice.
• The fifth is to provide basis for research, practical action and policy formulation and for evaluating directions and strategies for social change from a gender perspective. 

• Course Code: 01:988:426
• Semester(s) Offered: Spring
• Credits: 6

• Course Code: 01:988:425

Course Description

In this course students will draw from their internship experiences to explore the meaning of context, agency, and complicity in gendered activism from multiple perspectives, including those from women based in the Global North and South and those from movements from the local through the international levels.  The course format (which includes theoretical- and activist-based texts; guest speakers; and documentaries) will help students to ground their specific internship experiences in the larger scope of academia and activism over the last decade.

• Course Code: 01:988:422
• Semester(s) Offered: Fall, Spring, Summer
• Credits: 3

Students work in organizations related to women's and gender studies. Supervision by assigned staff at the placement. Paper, student journal, and assessment of work performed at placement required. Permission of undergraduate director required.

• Course Code: 01:988:420

RN Response Network provides medical assistance in the context of natural disasters wherever they may occur. This internship placement involves 150-180 hours of professional work with RN Response Network in conjunction with a research paper that links this professional experience with relevant academic work on humanitarian intervention.