Teaching Team: Elective Course 2020-2021
The Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS) is seeking faculty to teach one section of an elective course, to be offered in Fall 2020 or Spring 2021. The only consortium of its kind in the nation, our thriving community of feminist faculty and graduate students recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. Tenure, tenure-track, and lecturers are welcome to teach with the GCWS.
Faculty from our member institutions (Boston College, Boston University, Brandeis, Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, Simmons, Tufts, and UMass Boston) are welcome to apply. In keeping with the consortium’s unique teaching model, this course will be co-taught by faculty from two different member institutions and two different disciplines. We encourage interested teaching teams to apply together, but also welcome applications from individual instructors. The GCWS office can help connect interested applicants.
This course meets on the MIT campus. Graduate students of any discipline and from any of our member institutions are eligible to take the course. The teaching team will determine the day, time, and semester the course meets.
The GCWS has a standing memorandum of agreement with all member institutions which allows faculty members to teach a course for the consortium as part of their regular teaching load or to receive a stipend.
Each academic year, GCWS offers three distinct elective courses on important and cutting-edge topics. The topics routinely change and these courses normally provide an opportunity for instructors to teach a subject that may not be possible at their home institution. Courses, regardless of topic, integrate a gender analysis along with issues of class, race, culture, ethnicity, and sexualities and consider the practical implications of feminist theory.
GCWS is especially interested in instructors who can teach the following courses (or related topics), but applicants are welcome to propose their own course ideas. We also welcome proposals for courses that are U.S.-focused or have a more international focus.
Death and Feminism
Death and funerary practices, which were traditionally individual and community centered events with women at the helm, is now a multi-billion dollar industry.
How has capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and war impacted our views on death, dying, and the dead?
What can we learn from our ancestries, heritages, and traditional practices about revolutionizing death practices?
Environmental Justice
How is today’s environmental justice and activism connected to feminist struggles within broader histories and debates about economic globalization and social change?
How does environmental activism either center or dismiss the populations most likely to be impacted either by race, geographic location, and/or native ancestry?
How does capitalism and corporations avert and shift responsibility to individuals through marketing reusable straws and other trendy movements?
Future Uses of the Erotic
Sex toys and equipment can be a powerful way for people with disabilities to explore sexual pleasure and can also be used by trans/GNC/NB and queer people to explore sexual and gender identities. However, these advancements happen alongside increased surveillance and data tracking.
How does technology and technological advancements support or monitor our sexual identities and exploration?
Olympics and other Mega-Events
How do Olympics and/or other mega-events contribute to displacement/relocation, poor infrastructure development, rapid gentrification, eradication of public use lands, and increased surveillance and violence against marginalized communities?
How do es it relate to environmental justice, indigenous rights, and other forms of activism?
Body policing is rampant within sports and the Olympics which is seen in restrictions and disqualification of intersexed athletes such as Caster Semenya or racist commentary on the “natural” physical ability of Black athletes such as Simone Biles.
How does race, gender, and sex impact who can compete and how they are treated on the international field?
Surveillance States and Urban Development
Urban development means more convenience but also increased cameras in our daily life – at traffic lights, public transit, public schools, storefronts, and other places.
What are the implications of increased surveillance? How can we plan urban development without increasing surveillance measures?
Previous course topics can be found on our website www.gcws.mit.edu/seminarsoverview.
Interested faculty members should submit a current CV, course title, and brief description for the course to GCWS Program Manager, Stacey Lantz at slantz@mit.edu.