Please consult the New School Course Catalog for a full list of current courses. Fall 2025 courses that count for the Gender and Sexuality Studies Graduate Certificate are listed below; view an archive of past courses.
Fall 2025 Courses
Radio and Podcasting from the Margins, NMDS 5449
Cassius Adair, Assistant Professor of Media Studies
Ever since broadcast radio ushered in a new era of mass media, audio storytelling has been a force of social power and persuasion. Radio—and now podcasting—has the ability to transmit messages across huge geographical areas, reaching those without formal literacy and at a lower cost than television or film. On the one hand, the low barriers to entry and lack of formal media gatekeepers have allowed the circulation of misinformation and even outright bigotry in the podcasting space. Yet podcasting also has the potential to allow marginalized people to tell their own stories directly into the microphone. In this class, we'll build audio stories that can push back on established norms, unsettle mainstream formats and genres, and bring new voices into the mix. As the class learns together how to create podcasts from scratch—building skills in storytelling, scripting, interviewing, field recording, digital audio editing, sound design, scoring, and distribution—we’ll also ask critical questions about how and why certain genres and formats of audio production are more valued in the contemporary podcasting landscape. Guest audio producers, editors, and designers will join us throughout the semester as we grapple with how to understand, and maybe even join, this changing industry. Assessment will include written reflections and production of a short fiction or nonfiction podcast series. No production experience is required or expected, but students should have access to basic digital audio recording and editing tools (a cellphone and laptop). Students with hearing or audio processing disabilities are welcome; please reach out in advance if you have specific access questions or suggestions. Our listening syllabus will center audio stories by queer and trans people, people of color, indigenous people, disabled people, and others who have been historically marginalized in the audio industry.
African American Women: Subsistence in Blackness Through Dress, UTNS 5549
Luciana Scrutchen, Assistant Professor of Fashion Design
This course examines the history of African American women’s subsistence ethos as it has been sustained and curated through dress as a reaction to systematic barriers. Through historical and material culture, we investigate African American women’s aesthetic practices as influencers and makers in response to institutional racism and sexism during the Jim Crow era through the present context of dressing for the corporation, purposefully obfuscated by the privilege of choice. We also examine the dress aesthetic of queer African American cis and transwomen and non-binary African American people as cultural resistance and a provocation for hate violence. Black subsistence in the penal system will also be explored as an identity and cultural preservation practice through dress within a system designed to strip identity and the impulse to resist authority.
Gender, Genre, and Language in Korean Film, NFRN 3725
Margaret Rhee, Assistant Professor of Writing Across Media
This course engages with the ever-growing field of Korean cinema and television studies as we examine contemporary film and serialized K-drama across diverse genres—from science fiction to horror to romance to road movies. Drawing on media and cinema studies, Korean studies, Asian American studies, and related fields, our study of Korean film and TV interrogates race, gender, nation, ability, and class with attention to media specificity and historiography. Guiding questions include: How does engagement with genre enable a transgressive consideration of class, gender, and queerness? What is the role of language, such as subtitling and transpacific distribution, in the reception of Korean cinema and television transnationally? How do Korean cinema and TV drama shape new directions in media studies, Korean studies, ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and other fields? By the end of the course, students will have a better understanding of the history and complexity of varied currents in Korean film and TV and will be able to critically read, analyze, and write about Korean film and television from a variety of perspectives.
Gendered Ecologies, NEPS 6003
Abigail Perez Aguilera, Assistant Professor and Chair of the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management Program
What connects the depredation of nature to gendered violence and social plundering? What links dominant governance and corporate policy and management frameworks to gendered environmental destruction and violence against women land defenders and environmental activists? What actions are being taken by grassroots groups against these violences and transgressions? How can we build sustainable alternatives centered on depatriarchalization and based on freedom and liberation? How can we imagine and materialize alternative futures that challenge hegemonic structures of oppression? In this seminar, we draw on gendered and feminist political ecologies, anti-patriarchal decolonizing theory, Indigenous feminisms, ecofeminsm, queer ecologies, Black studies, environmental humanities, memory studies, diasporic thought, and critical science and technology studies to deploy a critical gendered approach to environmental politics and policy and sustainable socioecological transformations. We examine what connects gender-coded experiences of human and non-human precarity, premature death, marginalization, and forced displacement to hegemonic governance frameworks of policy and corporate management practices. We critically examine and challenge the way gender is factored and "mainstreamed" into state, intergovernmental, and corporate apparatuses and discourses and policy frameworks around issues like environment, climate, development, and the rights of women and marginalized populations. We pay particular attention to alternatives to gendered violence and patriarchy built on responses from below and their radical imaginations and embodiments of counterhegemonic gendered ecologies. This class is an online seminar. We will have a discussion-based class with small breakout rooms, presentations, the creation of a class blog, guest speakers, and discussions on texts, public policies, social movements, and case studies.
Gender, Culture, and Media, NMDS 5117
Brittnay Proctor-Habil, Assistant Professor of Race and Media
For historian Joan Scott, gender is a useful category for historical analysis. For transactivist Leslie Feinberg, gender is poetry. For Black feminists, such as Angela Davis and Kimberlé Crenshaw, gender is inextricable from race, class, and sexuality. This course examines the complex and fluid concept of gender as it manifests in media forms in the widest sense (including human and cyber bodies, print and online news, graphic novels, movies, television, Web series, and the performing arts). We study the ways in which gender identities are imposed, resisted, and lived, focusing on the role of media in transmitting, shaping, maintaining, and transforming representations of gender. Students analyze gendered and racialized language and embodiment in the fields of art, activism, popular culture, and the law and consider how the intersection of gender and race shapes the construction of media. The course provides an introduction to feminist approaches to media studies, drawing on Black feminism, queer theory, disability studies, psychoanalysis, memoir, and journalism. NOTE: In fall 2019, this course was titled Gender and Visual Culture. The content overlaps significantly. Please email the instructor for more details.
Black Feminist Media Methods, NMDS 5030
Brittnay Proctor-Habil, Assistant Professor of Race and Media
This course explores the various methodologies used in media studies at the nexus of sound studies and visual culture. The course is taught from a Black feminist episteme, meaning that we will center work and scholarship coming out of Black feminism (in its many variations and pluralities). During the course, we will address the context, historicity, and politics surrounding media studies, sound studies, and visual culture, as well as the antagonisms and tensions that have emerged in Black feminist approaches to these fields of inquiry. We will survey an array of methods and approaches used in Black feminist approaches to media studies, sound studies, visual culture, which include but are not limited to Black feminist theory; Black Marxist critiques of capital; Black performance theory, listening, and discourse analysis; "viewing/looking"; the process of description; sound art; and the use of sound in Black literature, archival research, ethnography, and other fields. The seminar will be organized around guided discussions, lectures, seminar papers, selected readings, and intermittent praxis exercises.
Deep Futures: Feminist Ecological Imaginaries from Latin America, GANT 6079
Columba González-Duarte, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
In this course, we address socio-environmental questions through the lens of feminist ecological imaginaries. Drawing on political ecology, Latin American feminist thought and practice, and subaltern socioecological struggles, we will build a theoretical and pedagogical tool kit for imagining, creating, and enacting “Deep Futures”—nonlinear, relational timescales centered around life-affirming human-nature relations. New Latin American feminisms have emerged from environmental and ecological movements, initially linked to resistance against capitalism and modernity. Increasingly these voices also challenge coloniality and patriarchy and call for a reimagination of theory, methods, and everyday practice to address socio-environmental and gender issues. This feminism is committed to linking theory, research, and pedagogy with the responsibility to enable other futures for human and more-than-human communities. It also draws attention to how violence traverses ecologies, just as it traverses racialized, disabled, nonbinary, and/or colonized women’s or feminized bodies. Together these feminist voices are opening new horizons for Deep Futures. Inspired by this Deep Futures framework, we will strive in this course to cultivate intersectional and engaged methods that involve both humans and more-than-humans as part of our daily practice. An important class component involves students presenting their pedagogical tool, which I call “recuperdas.” It takes time to present and practice this tool: The class lasts two hours and 40 minutes and is followed by a seminar discussion.
The Making of the Modern World, GLIB 5542
Paul Kottman, Professor of Comparative Literature
This course will introduce students to some of the most significant and influential critical contributions to common understandings of love and desire, from classical times to the present. Through readings from a range of disciplines, we will investigate how changing conceptions of Eros, broadly conceived, have shaped key social, psychological, political, philosophical, aesthetic, and economic formulations about history and culture in the West. These readings will form the basis of class discussions designed to help students think through major critical paradigms and a variety of methodologies associated with Liberal Studies at The New School, using an intrinsically interdisciplinary approach to intellectual history and critical thought. Tracing the long arc of significant statements on love and sexuality will serve to highlight certain continuities and ruptures in our own self-portraits concerning human nature and culture. Specific themes, topics, and key terms include mythopoetic origin stories of love, courtly love, strategies of love, seduction, auto-affection, Eros/Thanatos, melancholia, ars erotica/scientia sexualis, libidinal economies, fetishism, the repressive hypothesis, gendered dialectics, jouissance, queer love, liquid love, mediated desire, and desiring machines. Readings will likely include Plato, Ovid, the Marquis de Sade, Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, Wilhelm Reich, Michel Foucault, Susan Sontag, Simone de Beauvoir, Lauren Berlant, Luce Irigaray, Zygmunt Bauman, and others.
Labor Economics I: Race, Ethnicity, and the Political Economy, GECO 6270
Faculty TBA
This course explores how different research communities study race and ethnicity in economics and political economy, as well as the policy perspectives that emerge from each approach. Students will examine key areas of racial economic disparity, including the racial wealth gap, labor market inequalities, child poverty, and health disparities. By the end of the course, students will be able to critically evaluate policy proposals and assess the racial impacts of a given policy, the biases shaping that policy, and strategies for improving policies to advance racial equity.
Political Economics of Development, NINT 5251
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Professor of International Affairs
The defining challenges of our times—extreme inequality within and between countries, environmental destruction, pervasive poverty, threats to democracy—do not fall from the sky. They result from public policies and social institutions that in turn are shaped by theories about the process of development. This course offers a critical introduction to the central ideas and theories that have shaped these policy choices. The course addresses questions such as: Is inequality necessary for economic growth? Why is the gender wage gap so persistent? Should the understanding of the economy limited to market interactions? How can developing countries grow with environmental sustainability? Is spending in health and education a luxury or an investment? Do international trade agreements create a level playing field for countries? Is a flexible labor market the most effective way to promote employment and wage growth? What is the role of the state in transforming economies? How should the governance of global international economic institutions be reformed to give more voice to the Global South? The course emphasizes the importance of ethical foundations and the historical inequities of North–South relations. It introduces theories from mainstream and heterodox approaches including structuralism, feminism, capabilities and human rights, and sustainability. The aim is to prepare students to engage critically and creatively in contemporary debates about what works and what does not work to promote sustainable and equitable development. Note: This course was formerly titled Development Economics.
Film, Fashion, and Representation, PGHT 5520
Marilyn Cohen, Part-Time Associate Teaching Professor
Issues of gender, race, class, nationalism, ethnicity, and sexuality reverberate through film, whether it is about whom we see or do not see on the screen and/or how they are seen. History films, for example, can use costume to fabricate and “dress up” a problematic past; the mechanics of film can magnify its materiality and immateriality. This course looks at the ways in which film specifically uses costume or the dressed body—intentionally or unintentionally—as a representation of identity. In various film genres, characters, through dress, makeup, and hairstyle, embody different realities and subjectivities. Such "fashioning" can either enhance the film narrative by remaining subservient to character or offer alternative readings by drawing attention to fashion as separate from character. Either way, fashion in film cinematically reinforces sociopolitical and cultural ideologies related to marginalization, diaspora, and alterity. The course will mainly concentrate on American 20th-century film (silents, musicals, westerns, film noir, dramas, etc.) but will include worldwide cinema industries extending into the 21st century. Course readings come from areas of cultural studies such as film, race, and queer theory as well as writings focused on clothing and fashion as object and practice. We also consider related material such as fashion editorials, photography, advertising, and other forms of visual culture. Students are required to watch films outside of class and will present films and readings in class. They research and write papers about self-selected movies included in the syllabus or outside of it. As the class is taught as a seminar, meaningful participation in class discussion is especially important.
Historiography and Historical Practice, GHIS 6133
Oz Frankel, Associate Professor of History
This course focuses on U.S. history to explore current permutations of historiographical interests, practices, and methodologies. Over the last few decades, U.S. history has been a particularly fertile ground for rethinking the historical, although many of these topics and themes have shaped the study of other nations and societies. American history has been largely rewritten by a generation of scholars who experienced the 1960s and its aftermath and have viewed America's past as a field of inquiry and contestation of great political urgency. Identity politics, the culture wars, and other forms of organization and debate have also endowed U.S. historiography with unprecedented public resonance in a culture that had been notoriously amnesic. We examine major trends and controversies in American historiography, the history of the historical profession, the emergence of race and gender as cardinal categories of historical analysis, popular culture as history, the impact of memory studies on historical thinking, the recurrent agonizing over American exceptionalism, and current efforts to break the nation-state mold and to globalize American history. Another focus will be the intersection of analytical strategies borrowed from the social sciences and literary studies with methods of historicization that originated from the historical profession. This course should be taken during a student's first year in the Historical Studies program.
Gender and Domination, GPHI 5511
Chiara Bottici, Professor of Philosophy, and Jamieson Webster, Part-Time Assistant Professor
Spanish in the Media, NSPN 3020
Raul Rubio, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies
An intermediate conversation and writing course focusing on film and media, designed for students interested in furthering the development of their oral and written proficiency in Spanish. The course offers a panoramic overview of Spanish-language media from Latin America, Spain, and the United States and covers topics related to current events spanning ethnic, gender, and sociopolitical and cultural realities. Students will engage in lively class discussions, presentations, writing assignments, and creative projects. The course will be conducted in Spanish. Prerequisite: intermediate proficiency in Spanish.
Theories of Urban Form, PGAR 5513
Brian McGrath, Professor of Urban Design
Theories of Urban Form examines the various ways architects have theorized their role in relation to the design of cities over the past four decades. The period of time covered, from the 1970s to the present, was an era of radical transformation in architecture, urban form, and daily life. It witnessed the emergence of digital technologies, the end of the Cold War, neoliberal globalization, and its recent collapse. Additionally, we have seen an awakening of environmental consciousness as well as the emergence of diverse urban subjectivities in relation to civil rights struggles around race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. While we will focus on the last 40 years, we will also examine contemporary theories in relation to intellectual genealogies and historical examples and practices reaching deeper into the past. A key theme will be examining the tension between the way the city is made through collective architectural expressions and the way individual buildings are informed by the architecture of the city itself. We thus examine transitions in urban form through the change in discourse, both in written architectural theories and in representations, and in the way these forms of material construction establish a specific metabolism of the city based on social, food, energy, and water systems and ultimately change the role of the architect in shaping urban form.
Fashion Studies: Key Concepts, PGFS 5000
Faculty TBA
This seminar provides a critical review of definitions of fashion as well as the theoretical concepts and debates that have shaped the development of fashion and of fashion studies as a scholarly field. Responding to the definition of fashion in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture as “the cultural construction of the embodied identity,” the course will specifically address discourses on the relationship of fashion, body, and identity, problematized by complex variables such as gender, class, ethnicity, and trans/nationality. In studying key issues, texts, and paradigm shifts in the discourse of fashion studies, students will become familiar with scholars who have influenced the field such as Elizabeth Wilson, Susan Kaiser, Valerie Steele, Caroline Evans, Agnes Rocamora, Tanisha Ford, and Carol Tulloch as well as debates in disciplines that have informed the field, including cultural studies, gender studies, anthropology, and sociology. In addition to engaging in critical class discussion and close readings of texts, students will work on a research paper exploring some of the key concepts at a more in-depth level, learning how to use and synthesize scholarly perspectives in the field of fashion studies.
Climate Change: Systemic Crisis/Systemic Change, NEPS 5001
Leonardo Figueroa Helland, Associate Professor of Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management
This course examines climate change as a central component in a web of interconnected global crises associated with the so-called Anthropocene epoch (better understood as Androcene, Eurocene, Plantationocene, Capitalocene, etc.). Guided by an intersection of critical frameworks and subaltern knowledges, we will foreground questions of power and resistance, identity and diversity, and hegemony and social-ecological transformation as we explore the historical and structural dimensions of climate change as a matter of global (in)justice (i.e., climate (in)justice). In emphasizing the social drivers and political ecologies of climate change, we will highlight how complex intersecting power relations systemically connect climate change to multiple other crises in fields like energy, economics, food systems, health, demographics (e.g., urbanization and migration), security, and governance at the global, local, and transnational levels. We will draw on diverse critical approaches to global political ecology (e.g., Indigenous, decolonizing, peasant, and anti-racist perspectives; world systems ecology; eco-Marxism; intersectional eco-feminism; Global South feminism; social ecology; complex systems ecologism; posthumanism; eco-ability; frontline, fenceline, and grassroots knowledges; and others) to take a critical look at political and policy responses to climate change by dominant actors such as governments, intergovernmental organizations, corporations, and large NGOs in the international and national policy spheres. We will also examine the groundswell of alternative paradigms and subaltern movements working locally and globally to resist climate injustice, prefigure just transitions, and address the climate crisis in relation to other crises by advancing “system change, not climate change.” Students will research and assess the work of different actors and organizations in the spheres of climate policy and/or climate justice with the aim of producing collaborative research projects that combine critical insight, systemic analysis, socially transformative creativity, public engagement, and the ability to set forth pathways for change.
Law, Race, and Empire, GHIS 6295
Jack Jin Gary Lee, Assistant Professor of Sociology
The long shadow of colonialism and empire draws our attention to the need to re-think the foundational concepts and institutions of the contemporary world. Rather than viewing the post–World War II international order of independent postcolonial nation-states with distinct legal systems as a given in inquiry, scholars have turned to question how modern empires and colonialism developed, identifying the consequences of these forms of domination for (post)colonial states and societies. This recent turn in sociological and legal-historical scholarship has recast foundational concepts like traditional/modern society, modernity, sovereignty, the rule of law, and citizenship. In these intellectual projects, scholars have also trodden new grounds, tracing historical connections and journeys that allow us to see our present (post)colonial world anew. This graduate seminar is designed to cultivate and develop understandings of the ways the U.S., British, and other empires have shaped the forms and uses of modern constitutions, criminal punishment, race, religion, gender, sexuality, and, more broadly, the “social” and the state. Beginning with classic theoretical statements on empire and colonialism and rethinking paradigmatic events like the U.S. revolution, the course will proceed to unpack the processes and events that established the social contours and dynamics of the U.S., British, and other empires over the 19th and 20th centuries. We will pay attention to the significance of law and race in the political economy of empire and colonialism and seek to theorize their workings.
The Basic Works of Freud, GPHI 5513
Alan Bass, Part-Time Faculty
This course covers the major concepts in Freud, stressing their revolutionary nature. Topics covered include trauma, defense, wishes, dreams, unconscious processes, infantile sexuality, perversion, narcissism, identification, life and death drives, anxiety, disavowal, and ego splitting.
Slavery and Anti-Slavery in the Atlantic World, GHIS 5104
Julia Ott, Associate Professor of History
Historians' recent investigations of the centrality of racialized chattel slavery to the origins of capitalism—along with activists' efforts to expose the ongoing legacy of New World slavery—inspire a broad reconsideration of the connections between capitalism, race, and coerced labor. This course will examine how historical and present-day forms of slavery and racism have shaped—and continue to shape—capitalism. We will also investigate myriad forms of resistance, emancipation, and reparation seeking by peoples of the African diaspora and their descendants.
"Why Love Hurts": The Politics and Aesthetics of Love Pain, GLIB 6325
Faculty TBA
The course is dedicated to exploring the politics and aesthetics of love pain. While the focus is on 21st-century configurations, we will also engage with historically shifting representations and interpretations of the miseries of love. We will approach emotions from a decidedly sociopolitical perspective: Drawing on the work of Eva Illouz, Laura Berlant, Susan Sontag, Sara Ahmed, and bell hooks, the course seeks to unearth the political, social, and economic nature of seemingly intimate emotions. Attention to some of the more hurtful and disappointing aspects of love will allow us to analyze how emotions are invested in the logic of the capitalist market and shaped by culturally available technologies, including digital media technologies. We will also consider how notions of love and the miseries of emotional life intersect with the politics of gender, sexuality and heteronormativity in the 21st century and investigate what is at stake in acts of "unloving." The course takes seriously the power of aesthetic artifacts in shaping ideas of love and love pain; accordingly, we will examine the work of cultural media—literature, film, essays and Instapoetry (by William Shakespeare, James Baldwin, Spike Jonze, Maggie Nelson, and Yrsa Daley-Ward)—and focus on their investment in affective economies.
Levinas and ..., GPHI 6086
Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy
This lecture course will attempt to introduce, explain, and, to some extent, defend Levinas' work through his complex relations to a series of other philosophers—first, those who most influenced him, positively and negatively, namely Husserl, Hegel, and Heidegger, and, second, some of the readers who have engaged most powerfully with Levinas' work, namely Blanchot, Derrida and Irigaray. We will also examine Levinas' relation to a number of other "ands": Judaism, psychoanalysis, Benjamin, Kant, politics, theories of the political, the problem of violence, sexual difference, the question of gender, and the experience of literature. My overall aim is to show the persuasiveness and fragility of Levinas' thinking, allowing us to feel tempted and provoked by Levinas' thinking, but in a way that does not discourage critique.
Environmental Law and Policy, NEPS 5023
Camila Bustos, Part-Time Lecturer
This course provides a comprehensive exploration of environmental law, examining both domestic U.S. statutes and international legal frameworks through a critical and transformative lens. The course adopts an intersectional approach, scrutinizing how environmental law intersects with and often replicates existing power asymmetries along race, class, and gender lines. By contrasting the U.S. legal system with international environmental law, students will gain critical perspectives on how legal principles can evolve to better protect the environment and promote justice. In the first part of the course, we will examine major U.S. federal environmental statutes, including the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Endangered Species Act, while critically analyzing their effectiveness and limitations. In the second half of the course, we will delve into international environmental law, exploring tensions and synergies between overlapping international and domestic environmental legal regimes. Through case studies and contemporary issues such as climate migration, plastics pollution, and ecocide, students will learn to interrogate and reimagine environmental protection methods for the 21st century and the ongoing planetary crises. Throughout the semester, we will engage with subaltern perspectives and justice-oriented frameworks, challenging traditional approaches to environmental law. Students will be encouraged to think strategically about regulatory design choices, criteria for decision making, and the role of power in shaping environmental law and policy. We will also interrogate how the law and lawyers create and perpetuate injustice by upholding systems of oppression and dispossession based on capitalism, neocolonialism, white supremacy, and the patriarchy.
Political Economics of Development, GECO 5032
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Professor of International Affairs
The defining challenges of our times—extreme inequality within and between countries, environmental destruction, pervasive poverty, threats to democracy—do not fall from the sky. They result from public policies and social institutions that in turn are shaped by theories about the process of development. This course offers a critical introduction to the central ideas and theories that have shaped these policy choices. The course addresses questions such as: Is inequality necessary for economic growth? Why is the gender wage gap so persistent? Should understanding of the economy be limited to market interactions? How can developing countries grow with environmental sustainability? Is spending in health and education a luxury or an investment? Do international trade agreements create a level playing field for countries? Is a flexible labor market the most effective way to promote employment and wage growth? What is the role of the state in transforming economies? How should the governance of global international economic institutions be reformed to give a greater voice to the Global South? The course emphasizes the importance of ethical foundations and the historical inequities of North–South relations. It introduces theories from mainstream and heterodox approaches including structuralism, feminism, capabilities and human rights, and sustainability. The aim is to prepare students to engage critically and creatively in contemporary debates about what works and what does not work to promote sustainable and equitable development. Note: This course was formerly titled Development Economics.
Sociology of Work and Labor, GSOC 6143
Rachel Sherman, Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology
This course will address the politics and organization of work during the 20th century and into the 21st. Topics discussed include historical transformations in work, including industrialization, globalization, and the rise of service, finance, and information technology; labor market issues including migration and discrimination; forms of managerial control and worker consent or resistance; and the role of labor unions and the state in shaping employment and shop-floor relations. We will look closely at manufacturing, service, and finance workplaces, primarily in the United States but with a comparative emphasis on Europe. We will also cover a number of important theoretical perspectives on work. This course counts toward the Gender Studies minor.
Intersections Between Management and Social Justice, NMGM 5104
Nidhi Srinivas, Professor of Management
The course facilitates an examination of how and if management and managers can be vehicles to advance social justice in different forms—ecological, economic, racial, sexual or gender, design, etc. Grounded in critical social theories, it explores how and if someone interested in using management ideas to generate social justice inhabits a contradiction. And is it possible to think of management in terms of larger questions of social justice, to create workplaces and organizations in general that are more democratic and inclusive? The course requires students to attend or view recordings of the Management and Social Justice Conversation Series, ground them in the literature, and take an actively engaged and critically reflective stance toward the topics and organizations we study. We will look at themes such as emancipatory management practices, forms of inclusion in workplaces, intersectional management practices, Indigenous knowledge/politics, ecological activism, and organizations. Students are encouraged to submit their final products to be featured in the conversation series for the following year.
Equity in Pop Culture: From Big Bads to Breaking Bad, UTNS 5132
Juliet Gomez, Associate Director, Curriculum, Instruction, and College Access
In this three-credit media elective course, students will use a critical eye to examine race, gender, class, and power structures through an often overlooked pop culture archetype: the female villain. Exploring film characters ranging from Batman’s Harley Quinn to Rose from Jordan Peele’s Get Out, we will examine not only the ways female villains get written but how we, as pop culture consumers, view them.
American Material and Visual Culture, PGHT 5720
David Brody, Professor of Design Studies
This class assesses American material and visual culture in a broad context by examining design, decorative arts, architecture, cartoons, photography, painting, sculpture, and world’s fairs. We will connect these objects and images to larger historic themes, such as industrialization, empire, race, class, and gender, to contextualize our study of the United States from the 17th century to today. After reading works from a range of scholarly perspectives, students will be asked to conduct a research project culminating in a presentation and paper. Students will also write weekly reflection papers and give one presentation (as part of a group) related to a set of course readings.