Graduate Program

The opening decades of the 21st century have been characterized by growing inequalities within and across nations, war, terrorism, and devastating climate and environmental crises. The U.S. “War on Drugs” has contributed to the growth of the “prison-industrial complex,” which incarcerates 2.2 million Americans, 70% of whom are people of color. Hyper-surveillance, police harassment and brutality, and the deaths of unarmed African Americans in police custody have given rise to the Black Lives Matter campaign. New reproductive and genetic technologies have raised a host of ethical issues not only about how to conceive human life but also about who should be born. Trans* activists have mobilized against surgical interventions and state practices that coerce people to conform to binary gender formations. These developments make it clear that social justice continues to be a pressing and unresolved issue.

This course is designed to introduce students to competing theories of social justice and the complexity of social justice issues, while also familiarizing them with various social justice strategies and the demands of successful social justice advocacy and activism. In examining social justice activism, the course focuses on women’s mobilizations for economic, environmental, and reproductive justice, as well as immigrant, Indigenous, LGBTQ, and Trans struggles for livelihoods, rights, and recognition. The course will help students not only to deepen their understanding of the dynamics of oppression with particular attention to issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality, but to develop their ability to participate in social change.

• Instructor: Hasnaa Mokhtar
• Course Delivery: M 56 0350 P - 0650
• Current Course Description: Find your voice as a feminist advocate. Learn key concepts such as heterosexism, privilege and oppression, intersectionality, and decoloniality. Explore the multiple histories, presents, and futures of varied feminist activisms and organizing across the global North and South. Develop your anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-sexist gender analysis, feminist writing, researching, and reflective participatory decision-making skills. This course will prepare you for the demands of transformative social change advocacy and will assist you in developing basic capacities such a public speaking, agenda-setting, needs assessment, harnessing free media, group facilitation, grant writing, networking, and community organizing.

Find your voice as a feminist advocate. Learn key concepts such as heterosexism, privilege and oppression, intersectionality, and decoloniality. Explore the multiple histories, presents, and futures of varied feminist activisms and organizing across the global North and South. Develop your anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-sexist gender analysis, feminist writing, researching, and reflective participatory decision-making skills. This course will prepare you for the demands of transformative social change advocacy and will assist you in developing basic capacities such a public speaking, agenda-setting, needs assessment, harnessing free media, group facilitation, grant writing, networking, and community organizing.

• Instructor: Radhika Balakrishnan
• Course Delivery: T 1100 A - 0200

The course provides a multi-disciplinary materialist approach to understanding the way that capitalist development has created/es gendered borders and changes/ed boundaries. The course examines the global economic system and the ways in which it has changed over time. This is an advanced reading seminar that explores various (but especially feminist) approaches to theorizing how the global economy works to deconstruct and unmask the neoliberal, market-driven policy agenda and examine national and global alternatives. It will focus on how the changing nature of production with global flows of capital and people, have a gender differentiated impact on the lives of women in different locations. Particular attention will be paid to macro economic policy, supply chains and labor rights, financialization, development policy and inclusive growth.

• Instructor: Maya Mikdashi
• Course Delivery: W 45 0200 P - 0500

This course focuses on new feminist and queer movements, and their knowledge production, in post-colonial and colonial contexts. How do these movements practice, theorize, and refuse agency and subjectivity as defining ways to understand queer and feminist life and politics?

• Instructor: Charlotte Bunch
• Course Delivery: Synchronous Remote Th 2:15pm-5:15pm

This course offers students an opportunity to learn the basic history and discourse of women’s human rights. It will cover United Nations instruments of human rights law, the reframing of women’s rights as human rights as an example of feminist theory in action, and the application of human rights to issues of gender-based violence, health, and sexuality.

It is grounded in the experience of the global movement for women's human rights and the diverse voices from around the world that have shaped it over the past two decades.

To view Fall 2026 course descriptions, please click HERE.

Course Descriptions

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Course Descriptions: Selected Graduate Courses - Fall 2026

For a full list of all available WGSS classes, please see the Graduate Course Schedule.

Course Descriptions

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Open to Ph.D. students preparing dissertation proposals.

• Instructor: Jasbir Puar
• Course Delivery: W 34 1210 P - 0310
• Current Course Description: We are in the midst of political upheaval and struggles that will dominate our lifetimes and lifetimes to come: the rise of authoritarian governments under the guise of democracy; engulfing forms of disaster capitalism, climate change, and ecocide; refugee, immigration, and crises of abandoned populations; unprecedented levels of mass incarceration, policing, and counter terrorism surveillance; the consolidation of post-1971 speculative financial markets and the sustaining of US empire through privatized debt and deficit economies; repression of political protest, freedom of speech rights, and the right to assembly; the failure of human rights to stem state violence; and local, regional, transnational and global modes of resistance, refusal, and revolt.  This class focuses on theoretical texts that resonate with our contemporary political struggles and those on the horizon. Reading these works from feminist, queer, postcolonial, settler colonial, critical disability and critical race studies, we will trace the debates, dialogues and interventions pivotal to the production of feminist knowledge production over the last several decades. While only some of these books are explicitly feminist projects and/or gender studies, each is situated in a critical nexus of different inter/disciplines, field formations, intertextual debates, and genealogies of thought. Furthermore, they have been selected in part because rather than foregrounding subjectivity, subject formation, identity, or national location, they develop alternative analytics for systems and structures that span international scales--legal apparatuses, maiming as global governance, debt as spatial enclosure, the biopolitics of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, the commodification of violence--that critically engage and impact relations of gender, race, class, disability, nationhood.  In addition, we will highlight the pragmatics and materiality of the production aspect of knowledge, looking very specifically at how knowledge is dialectically and dialogically created and implicate numerous actors despite authorial attribution. We will focus on intertextual exchange, citational practices, convergences and departures from disciplinary and field norms and expectations, and the repurposing of canonical work for critical race feminist interventions, postcolonial feminist theory, and transnational feminist analysis. We will pay special attention to the literal production of knowledge, highlighting the relationships to capitalist production embedded in the elements constructing a book: the acknowledgements, the chapter structures, the marketing and circulation, the citational strategy, the form and use of footnotes, the use of primary and secondary texts and archives, the choice of press, the process of research involved in creating the text, the institutional conditions within which the project came about, the politics of tenure, recognition, and reception.  

This course is an introduction to many of the methods used in feminist interdisciplinary research. The course looks at how to formulate a research question, collect data, interpret and analyze evidence, and report research results. The course will be a forum to apply knowledge of methods and methodologies to students’ own research and research-activist interests.