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Note: Please contact the instructor for the course syllabus. Syllabi with class locations will be made available on an OWL website once you are registered. 

Fall Term

GSWS 9574 Indigenous Feminisms
Instructor: Renee Bedard rbedard4@uwo.ca 
This course offers students an opportunity to learn and critically apply Indigenous Feminist concepts in examining gender issues across topics relating to the historical and contemporary experiences of Indigenous women, 2SLGBTQIA+, and gender diverse persons in northern North America. Current and historical events, along with critical policies and documents will be examined, including but not limited to: the Indian Act (1876), the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996), Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action (2015), the Reclaiming Power and Place: Executive Summary of the Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2019), and, Canada’s new Impact Assessment Agency (2024). Using Indigenous Feminist theories and research methodologies, in alliance with Indigenous worldviews, culture, and traditions, students will explore decolonizing strategies, Indigenization, reconciliation, and a resurgence of Indigenous women’s, 2SLGBTQIA+, and gender diverse persons’ ways of knowing in the twenty-first century.

GSWS 9221 Critical Health Humanities: Poems, Pleasure, Public Health Crises
Instructor: Cornel Grey cgrey6@uwo.ca 
What might artists, poets, theorists, archivists, and activists have to say about the pressing public health crises of our time? What purpose do the humanities serve in an epidemic? What can clinical scientists, public health researchers, policymakers, and health service providers learn from the human(ities) about care, pleasure, and the will to live a life with dignity? These are but a few of the questions this graduate seminar will explore. This course will examine how scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences have responded to public health disasters while pushing us to grapple with the uses, limits, and failures of biomedical approaches to health. This graduate seminar is an interdisciplinary experiment largely anchored by Black Studies scholarship. Still, it will include texts from thinkers in disciplines like Indigenous Studies, History, Sociology, Medicine, Visual Arts, and Cinema Studies. Sample topics include HIV/AIDS, cancer, COVID-19, loneliness, and the climate crisis. 

GSWS 9459 Professional Development 
Instructor: Laura Cayen lcayen2@uwo.ca 
This course is intended to assist graduate students in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies with their professional development. The emphasis will be on developing practical skills for being successful as a graduate student, including developing pedagogical skills as a teaching assistant, literature reviews, grant writing, cv development, abstract writing and submission, knowledge mobilization, and the peer-review process for publishing in journals and edited collections. The course also highlights opportunities for alt-academic and non-academic career skill development.

GSWS 9550 Feminist Theory 
Instructor: Helen Fielding hfieldin@uwo.ca 
This course will analyze feminist theoretical approaches providing students with an understanding of the fundamental questions at stake in each. We will consider epistemological perspectives as well as the intersections of feminist theories with other theoretical approaches such as queer theory and critical race theory. The implications of feminist theory for academic research will be addressed throughout. This course is restricted to GSWS graduate students.

GSWS 9468/4463 Queer Science Fiction
Instructor: WG Pearson wpearson@uwo.ca 
This course will look at queer depictions of sexuality in science fiction, a genre that has been arguably somewhat queer from its inception in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Although we will touch on historical concerns, the primary focus of the course will be on work published after Ursula K Le Guin's monumentally influential novel, The Left Hand of Darkness (1967). The course will cover topics such as critiques of heteronormativity in science fiction, futures that imagine alternative epistemologies of sexuality, futures without binary sex/gender systems, the question of what roles sexuality plays in robotics and Artificial Intelligence, sexuality and post-humanism, sexuality in cyberpunk and its offshoots, and responses to the AIDS crisis. Primary texts may include Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X, Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Suzy McKee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, Samuel R. Delany's Trouble on Triton, Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration, Eleanor Arnason's Ring of Swords, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden (or Was), Larissa Lai's The Salt Fish Girl (or Tiger Flu), Hiromi Goto's The Kappa Child, Annalee Newitz's Autonomous, Charle Jane Ander's The City on the Edge of Night, a novel from Becky Chambers' Wayfarer series, Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. Students will also become familiar with some of the critical work on these literary texts, including the relevance of many aspects of queer theory, from the very invention of sexuality and its discursive regulation to contemporary work on Trans theory, queer temporality, queer utopianism, and so on. 

Winter Term

GSWS 9576 Emancipation” in/and the Afterlife of Slavery 
Instructor: Erica Lawson elawso3@uwo.ca 
This essay- and presentation-based graduate seminar examines what Rinaldo Walcott describes as “the long emancipation” signaling the unfulfilled promise of freedom despite the legal end to Black people’s enslavement. It engages provocations and disruptions to challenge complacent readings of democratic liberalism – or what Charles Mills describes as “racial liberalism.”^[1] The seminar is informed by the structural violence of the transatlantic slave trade and its manifestations in what Saidiya Hartman signals as the afterlife of slavery - that is, skewed life chances for African descendants in the Black diaspora (extended to continental Africans). We will examine contested ideas and arguments about freedom, rights, and racial progress, drawing on theoretical critiques from Black Studies. The goal of the seminar is to create an intellectual and conversational space to grapple with ideas/readings in the Black intellectual tradition.

[1] Mills, C.W. (2008). “Racial Liberalism.” PMLA, 123(5):  1380-1397. (By which he means that, “conceptions of personhood and resulting schedules of rights, duties, and government responsibilities have all been racialized).

GSWS 9464 Feminist Methodologies
Instructor: Jessica Polzer jpolzer@uwo.ca 
This course will review feminist research methodologies from a variety of disciplinary traditions and theoretical perspectives. Through readings and assignments, a primary objective of this course will be to examine and articulate distinctions and relationships between epistemology, methodology and methods. Through guided practices of critical reflection, students will be able to articulate the assumptions that underlie and inform various feminist research methodologies and understand their implications for research methodology. Emphasis will also be placed on specific methodological issues that span across this range, and will include, for example: ethical issues, researcher reflexivity and positionality, sampling, and the practices and politics of data collection, interpretation and reporting.  

GSWS 9592 Gender and Development
Instructor: Bipasha Baruah bbaruah@uwo.ca 
This course seeks to provide an introduction to ‘gender and development’ as a domain of theory, practice, advocacy and interaction. The course is informed by the needs and interests of future ‘practitioners,’ i.e. students who hope to engage in research, project design and implementation, policy analysis, advocacy and/or networking in the ‘gender and development’ field or a closely related domain. To best serve the needs of such students, a few lectures of the course are devoted to providing students with a historical perspective on the evolution of the theory and practice of gender and development discourse, and rest of the course focuses almost exclusively on key contemporary and emerging gender issues and debates. Students who do not intend to work as gender and development ‘practitioners,’ but who want to acquire an up-to-date understanding of the field are welcome in the course, which is open to all graduate students with an interest in the contemporary theory and practice of gender and development.

Courses requiring additional permission:  

GSWS 9575 Directed Reading Course (Half Course)
The directed reading course is conducted under the supervision of a faculty member, and is taken only with permission of the Chair of Graduate Studies. Normally, only PhD students are permitted to take a directed reading course. Proposals for directed reading courses must be approved by the Graduate Chair in consultation with the Graduate Committee and must be submitted no later than one month prior to the course start date. 

Proposal for Directed Reading Course  

GSWS 9585 Scholarly Practicum (Full Course)
GSWS 9522 Scholarly Practicum (Half Course)
The Scholarly Practicum course is designed to provide students with an opportunity to receive academic credit for experiential learning. It could involve a community placement, an internship or an applied project. Students and supervisors must have the practicum approved by submitting a written proposal describing the activity and the benefit of it to the student's current program of study and future goals to the graduate chair at least two months (longer if ethics approval is required) before it’s commencement. Proposals for directed reading courses must be approved by the Graduate Chair in consultation with the Graduate Committee and must be submitted no later than one month prior to the course start date.    

The Scholarly Practicum course is designed to provide students with an opportunity to receive academic credit for experiential learning. It could involve a community placement, an internship or an applied project. Students and supervisors must have the practicum approved by submitting a written proposal describing the activity and the benefit of it to the student's current program of study and future goals to the graduate chair at least two months (longer if ethics approval is required) before it’s commencement. 

Proposal for Scholarly Practicum

COURSES FROM OTHER DEPARTMENTS 

English 9223 Edith Wharton, Rebel and Traditionalist
Winter 2025
Instructor: Miranda Green-Barteet mgreenb6@uwo.ca 
Born at the height of the Gilded Age into an upper-class New York family, Edith Wharton was expected to follow the path set out for young women of her social set—to be a good society woman by marrying well, having children, and attending society functions. Instead, Wharton became one of the most prolific writers of the early 20^th century, chronicling and commenting on the very society into which she was born. In this course, we will read Wharton’s writing in all genres, including novels, short fiction, essays, and letters. As we read, we will consider how she simultaneously critiques and reveres New York society. In all her works, Wharton critiques and often satirizes this world, but she also acknowledges the pull New York society has on those who are a part of it and those who remain on its fringes. As we read, we will consider issues of class, gender, race, sexuality, community, and individuality. Among others, we will also consider the following questions: was Wharton an advocate for the “New Woman”? Where does class figure into her social critiques, particularly the working classes who rarely appear in her works on elite society? How does Wharton represent and affirm whiteness, especially considering her silence regarding race? Are Wharton’s critiques of early-20^th century New York and upper-class society still relevant? Why are her works set in locations other than New York or focused on groups other than New York’s social elite often overlooked? How might those works change our view of her so-called “New York texts”? Readings may include: The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, Summer, The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country, Madame de Treymes, Wharton’s short stories, excerpts of A Backward Glance (Wharton’s autobiography), and selections of her letters, along with recent scholarship and historical context.

/english/graduate/courses/index.html 

History 9718 Race and Gender on Imperial Frontiers: Comparative Settler Colonialisms
Winter 2025
Instructor: Laurel Clark Shire lshire@uwo.ca 
In this course we will read and discuss recent literature on the history of settler colonialism in North America alongside comparative studies of other settler societies around the globe. In the past few decades, scholars have begun to use “settler colonialism” to describe societies in which outsiders (white Europeans in most cases) invaded a place in order to settle there permanently, and used political, legal, cultural, and economic structures to transform it into their space, turning themselves into its “natives.” Unlike other kinds of imperial regimes, large numbers of women from the invading culture helped to colonize settler colonies, but they were otherwise very similar to other imperial ventures, and to varying degrees most combined the appropriation of indigenous land with resource extraction and forced labor. New gender norms and racial hierarchies arose from white settler colonial methods of taking land and extracting labor. These new relations of power and privilege had very different consequences for white settlers, displaced Indigenous people, and imported laborers. Due to time constraints, this course will focus mainly on the experiences and interactions of Indigenous peoples and invading settlers, with less time (though not importance) given to the forced migrants and enslaved people that European empires and settlers exploited.

Philosophy 9164 Structural Injustice
Winter 2025
Instructor: Tracy Isaacs tisaacs@uwo.ca 
In this course we will understand structural injustice (or oppression) as (roughly) a form of injustice that (1) is built into a society’s social and political institutions (i.e. its structures) and (2) creates patterns of discrimination and advantage that affect people in virtue of their membership in social groups. It is a complicated social and political phenomenon that is difficult to identify and address. Understanding structural injustice requires that we engage with the ontology of social groups, feminist and social epistemology / theories of epistemic injustice, theories of collective action/responsibility/obligation, the complexities of intersectionality, and critical understandings (feminist, anti-racist, etc.) of power as a source systemic disadvantage/privilege. In this course we will touch on all of these areas, and students will have an opportunity to engage more deeply—through discussion questions, discussion papers, and a final term paper—with the themes that interest them the most.

/philosophy/graduate/Courses_grad/index.html 

Education 9715 PhD seminar in Critical Policy, Equity, and Leadership Studies
Full year seminar (Fall 2024 and Winter 2025)
Instructor: Rita A. Gardiner rgardin2@uwo.ca 
An apprenticeship to doctoral studies and academe with a mixture of methodological, theoretical, and practical content based in the fields. Learning opportunities related to research design and implementation (from conceptualizing problems to writing dissertation), dissemination (e.g., publications and presentations), and writing grant proposals. Students will reflect critically on diverse forms of research, research resources, and their roles and responsibilities as researchers as they plan their own doctoral research.