[bioundgrd] Fwd: 2012-2013 GCWS Graduate Courses

[Janice Chang]

> From: Andrea R Sutton <arsutton at MIT.EDU>
> Date: August 7, 2012 3:34:48 PM EDT
> Subject: 2012-2013 GCWS Graduate Courses: **Please Distribute**
> 
> 
> Dear Faculty, Administrators and Students:
> 
> Please read below to find out about the 2012-2013 Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies seminars. These courses are open to graduate students across disciplines; Masters and PhD students are eligible to apply as well as advanced undergraduate students doing work in a discipline related to the course topics. 
> 
> The 2012-2013 courses include: 
> 
> FALL
> Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women’s and Gender Studies
> 
> Feminist Inquiry
> 
> SPRING
> Motherhood and Mothering: Theory, Discourse, Practice and Change
> 
> Gender and Poverty in the United States
> 
> Gender, Race, and the Complexities of Science and Technology
> 
> The complete course descriptions and faculty bios are below. 
> 
> There is an application process for GCWS courses. Applications are accepted until the enrollment deadline and are reviewed by the seminar instructors immediately following.  Students will be notified of their final acceptance two to three days after the deadline.  Students may apply after the deadline, pending available space in the class.  
> 
> Application deadlines: 
> 
> Fall: August 24, 2012
> Spring: January 3, 2013
> 
> Please call or email the GCWS at gcws at mit.edu for more information about application procedures, member institution cross-registration policies, or credit questions, and visit our web site: http://web.mit.edu/gcws
> 
> 
> FALL & SPRING
> 
> Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women's and Gender Studies
> 
> FALL & SPRING, Tuesdays, 4 – 7 PM 
> 9/4/12 – 5/7/13
> Meets every other week at MIT, building and room TBD
> This workshop will provide intellectual and practical guidance for students at any stage in the dissertation process.  Class sessions will be structured with four primary goals:  to address challenges in the  conception and completion of a dissertation; to explore the methodological and theoretical issues attendant on discipline-based and interdisciplinary feminist research; to foster the professional development of participants; and to provide a structure of group work, hands-on exercises, and peer review that will help students move most effectively through their own projects.  
> Flexibly shaped to meet the needs of its participants, the dissertation workshop will entail minimal reading assignments so that the majority of the students’ time can be directed to their own projects.  The class will provide a forum for working out problems of conceptualization and structure, the use of evidence, the development of individual chapters, techniques for effective research, drafting and revising, and preparing abstracts. We will also discuss and practice techniques for presenting conference papers, publishing articles, and preparing for the academic job market.
> 
> FACULTY
> 
> Susan Ware specializes in 20th century U.S. history, women's history, and biography, and has published extensively in those fields.  A visiting scholar at the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at MIT in 2012-13, she has also served as director of Graduate Studies for the History Department at New York University before coming to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study to edit volume five of Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary from 1997-2005.
> 
> 
> FALL: 
> 
> Feminist Inquiry
> 
> FALL: Thursdays, 6 – 9 PM
> 9/6/12 – 12/6/12
> Building 56 room 154
> 
> This course investigates theories and practices of feminist inquiry across a range of disciplines. Doing feminist research involves rethinking disciplinary assumptions and methodologies, developing new understandings of what counts as knowledge, seeking alternative ways of understanding the origins of problems/issues, formulating new ways of positing questions and redefining the relationship between subjects and objects of study.
> 
> All research grows out of complex connections between epistemologies, methodologies, and research methods. We shall explore how these connections are formed in the traditional disciplines and raise questions about why the traditional disciplines are inadequate and/or problematic for feminist inquiry. What, specifically, are the feminist critiques of these disciplines? The course will consider methodology, i.e., the theory and analysis of how research should proceed. We shall be especially attentive to epistemological issues -- pre-suppositions about the nature of knowledge. We shall examine the theoretical positions our authors take, and evaluate the usefulness of their methodological approaches.
> 
> FACULTY 
> 
> Renee Bergland is Professor of English at Simmons College. She teaches courses in American literature and culture, gender and cultural studies, and literary and cultural theory. Her books include The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects; Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics; and Philosophies of Sex: Critical Essays on Julia Ward Howe's Hermaphrodite (edited with Gary Williams).
> 
> Frinde Maher is Professor Emerita of Education, Wheaton College, and Resident Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center, Brandeis University. Her research concerns feminist pedagogies and women in higher education. She is co-author, with Mary Kay Tetreault, of The Feminist Classroom (1994, 2001) and Privilege and Diversity in the Academy (2007).
> 
> 
> 
> SPRING: 
> 
> Motherhood and Mothering: Theory, Discourse, Practice, and Change
> 
> SPRING: Wednesdays, 5:30 – 8:30 PM
> 1/30/13 – 5/8/13
> Meets at MIT, Building and Room TBD
> 
> 
> Motherhood is often lauded as the most important job, and Americans regularly talk about valuing family.  However, as it tends to be women who are primarily responsible for caregiving in the family, the work is systematically devalued economically, socially, and legally.  The gendered nature of mothering also has a profound influence on women’s and men’s lives outside of the family, especially at work. To explore the complex intellectual and practical issues contemporary American motherhood raises for feminist scholars, this course draws on the strengths of two disciplines—rhetoric and sociology—to examine motherhood as an intellectual concern, a social institution, and a site of competing discourses.  The course structure interweaves theory, discourse, practice, and change as we explore a variety of approaches to motherhood and mothering as key theoretical concerns and as pivotal sites of women’s resistance, social action, and change.
> FACULTY
> 
> D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric in the College of General Studies at Boston University.  She is the author of White Feminists and Contemporary Maternity:  Purging Matrophobia; is co-editor of Contemporary Maternity in an Era of Choice:  Explorations into Discourses of Reproduction, which won the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender’s 2011 Outstanding Book Award for an edited volume, and she has been published in Quarterly Journal of Speech, the Western Journal of Communication, Women’s Studies in Communication, Text and Performance Studies, Critical/Cultural Studies, National Women’s Studies Journal, Feminist Formations, and The Journal of the Association for Research and Mothering.
> Ana Villalobos, Assistant Professor of sociology at Brandeis University, is a multiple award winning teacher with courses focusing on parenting, work and gender.  Her research investigates mothering within social, cultural, and economic pressures, and she is currently completing a book entitled Motherload: “Making it all Better” in Insecure Times.
> 
> 
> 
> Gender and Poverty in the United States
> 
> SPRING: Tuesdays, 5 – 8 PM
> 1/29/13 – 5/7/13
> Meets at MIT, Building and Room TBD
> This advanced reading seminar will engage students in analyzing the intersections of gender and poverty in the United States, and will explore commonly experienced dilemmas faced by those who study low-income America. Economic inequality and economic stressors other than poverty (e.g., unemployment, homelessness) will also be examined. Intellectual approaches from multiple disciplines, especially feminist approaches, to theorizing, measuring, and fighting poverty will be examined. The perspectives of those who are low-income and poor themselves will be highlighted. The course will weave discussions throughout about how these approaches relate to students’ training in various graduate programs.
> 
> FACULTY
> 
> Randy Albelda is a professor of economics and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Social Policy at University of Massachusetts Boston. Her focuses are on economic policies affecting low-income women.  Her coauthored books include Glass Ceilings and Bottomless Pits; Unlevel Playing Fields; and The War on the Poor. 
> 
> Deborah Belle is professor of psychology and director of the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program at Boston University. Her books include: Lives in stress: Women and Depression, Children’s Social Networks and Social Supports, and The After-school Lives of Children: Alone and With Others while Parents Work.
> 
> Lisa Dodson is a research professor of sociology at Boston College whose multi-method research focuses on women’s poverty, moral economy, and low-income work and family life. Her recent book The Moral Underground is based on eight years of research about economic hardship and everyday resistance.
> 
> 
> 
> Gender, Race, and the Complexities of Science and Technology
> 
> SPRING: Thursdays, 5 – 8 PM
> 1/31/13 – 5/9/13
> Meets at MIT, Building and Room TBD
> Science and Technology are relatively insulated from wider public deliberation -- art and literary criticism are familiar; but not "science criticism." Yet there is a large body of social interpretation of science and technology, to which feminist, anti-racist, and other critical analysts and activists have made significant contributions. Building on this work, this course sets out to challenge the barriers of expertise, gender, race, class, and place that restrict wider access to and understanding of the production of scientific knowledge and technologies. In this spirit, students participate in an innovative, problem-based learning approach that allows you to shape your own directions of inquiry and re-engage with yourselves as avid learners and inquirers.  At the same time as you are developing critical faculties as investigators you are also learning tools and processes for teaching and engagement with wider communities. In these inquiries students are guided by individualized bibliographies co-constructed with the instructors and by the projects of the other students. Students from all fields and levels of preparation are encouraged to join and learn about gender, race, and the complexities of science and technology.
> 
> FACULTY
> 
> Anne Fausto-Sterling is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Biology and Gender Studies in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Biochemistry at Brown University and is a visiting scholar at the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at MIT in 2013. Her most recent book (Routledge, 2012) is entitled Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World. 
> Peter Taylor is a Professor at UMass Boston, where he directs the graduate programs on Science in a Changing World and Critical and Creative Thinking. His teaching spans biomedical and environmental sciences, science and technology studies, critical pedagogy, and reflective practice. He is the author of Unruly Complexity: Ecology, Interpretation, Engagement, co-author of Taking Yourself Seriously: Processes of Research and Engagement, and co-editor of Changing Life: Genomes, Ecologies, Bodies, Commodities.
> 
> 
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 
> Andrea Sutton
> Program Coordinator
> Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies 
> Building 14N Room 211, MIT
> 77 Massachusetts Avenue
> Cambridge, MA  02139
> (617) 324-2085
> http://web.mit.edu/gcws
> 
> ** Like us on Facebook to get updates on events and opportunities!  
> 
> **Follow us on Twitter for real-time feeds from our events! 
> 
> *Office hours for GCWS are Tuesdays - Fridays, 9:30 AM - 6:30 PM
> 
> 
> 

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