Location: MIT

Thursdays 1:30PM-4:30PM

January 28, 2018 - May 6, 2018

Feminist Inquiry is a seminar designed to investigate the relationships between feminist theories and the research practices that feminist scholars use to study women and gender across a range of disciplines. It is not intended as a survey course on feminist theory, although students will recognize many pivotal thinkers included in our reading list. As an interdisciplinary course, feminist inquiry also cannot offer a strict “how to” approach to research, but instead will engage students in feminist scholarship questioning disciplinary assumptions and methodologies, , seeking new ways to frame scholarly questions, and reconsidering the relationship between subjects and objects of study. Feminist inquiry often asks new and difficult questions about what the analysis of gender, race, class, culture, sexual orientation, and other social factors bring to a particular project or area of research. Students will also have the opportunity to engage in two “hands-on” research inquiries of their own.

Faculty

Linda M. Blum is Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University. She is the author of Between Feminism and Labor: The Significance of the Comparable Worth Movement, At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States, and Raising Generation Rx: Mothering Kids with Invisible Disabilities in an Age of Inequality.

Karl Surkan has taught in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at
MIT since 2005. Dr. Surkan does interdisciplinary work in queer, feminist, and new media studies with a humanities focus, and is currently writing a series of articles on technology and the (trans)gendered body.