Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies
- WGS 328: Women, Religion & Ethnography
- Course Description: Cross-cultural ethnographic study of women’s religious lives, including ritual and leadership roles, forms and contexts of religious expression, and negotiations between dominant cultural representations and women’s self-representations.
- Frequently Taught By: Jennifer Ortegren
- WGS 342: Globalization and Transnational Culture
- Course Description: “Globalization” is a concept that has proliferated in both popular and scholarly arenas, describing the increasing intensity of flows of capital, labor, commodities, and ideologies across national borders. Electronic highways, the expansion of jet travel, satellite technology and trade liberalization have made transnational communication and cultural, political, and economic connections closer and faster than ever before. The goal of this course is to interpret these movements through an ethnographic lens and to analyze some of the meanings and implications of these global processes for people’s everyday lives. While many other disciplines have analyzed globalization at the macro level, this course aims to introduce students in particular to globalization at the local level through the medium of ethnography. We will study workers (white collar, pink collar, and blue collar), consumers, migrants and tourists, as actors on the global stage. What have these global transformations of space and time meant for local identities (nationality, gender, class, race, sexuality) and enactments/meanings of culture? We will explore particular cases in West Africa, Mexico, Thailand, India and the Caribbean. Through the reading of ethnographies from several world areas and various theoretical works we will explore the changing shape of local culture, and the gendered underpinnings of global processes as they are enacted across “first” and “third” worlds.
- Frequently Taught By: Carla Freeman
- WGS 385: Special Topics
- Course Description: Topics vary
- Topics Include: Black Feminist Thought and Poetics, Transnational Masculinities, Youth/Gender/Culture: Africa
- Frequently Taught By: Rizvana Bradley, Melissa Hackman