This course critically examines current interdisciplinary and feminist scholarship on globalization, its intersections with gender, race and class, neoliberal transformations, power structures, and sexualized and feminized economies. The related socio-spatial reconfigurations, "global" convergences, and tensions are explored, with special emphasis placed on feminist counter-narratives, alternative epistemologies and theorizing of globalization, the theoretical and political debates on the meanings and impacts of globalization, and the exploration of radical possibilities of resistance, agency, and change in local and transnational contexts.

This course examines transnational feminist genealogies of the black diaspora, paying careful attention to the contexts and movements that generated key questions, and exploring how these interventions disclose preoccupations with modernity, freedom and citizenship. Topics include history, trauma, and memory, diaspora and indigeneity, racialised embodiment, queer kinship, Afrofuturism, confinement and deportation, and the careful calibration of political communities.

Subject varies from year to year. Check the WGSI website for information about this offering.

This course reframes the idea of hope through radical enunciations of the imagination. By drawing on works from postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, the course offers a way to think about the aesthetic as it relates to the capacity to compose "otherwise possibilities" (Crawley, in excess of the terms of liberal humanism. The imagination's radical potential for an 'otherwise' will be explored through various concepts such as the "not yet conscious" (Munoz), queer archives, curiosity, and play.

Subject varies from year to year. Check the WGSI website for information about this offering.

Subject varies from year to year. Check the WGSI website for information about this offering.

This course tracks the deployment and emergence of "queer of color critique" and its interconnections with women of color feminisms. We will examine theoretical texts, cultural production, and forms of activism by queer scholars of color who attend to questions of race, class, sexuality, and gender as intersecting social practices.

This seminar provides an introduction to historiographies of Black feminism, and Black feminist approaches to history, memory, and the archive. It studies activism and knowledge-making from the nineteenth century to our contemporary moment, with a particular focus on histories of anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggle across diasporas. For our purposes, "Movements" refers to intellectual/cultural/political mobilizations and fronts, as well as the travel of people and ideas. We will situate our texts historically as well as transnationally to examine contexts and collectives that generated imaginative practices of invention, connection and intervention that continue to animate ongoing movements for solidarity and liberation. In addition to foundational and emerging scholarship on women, gender, and Black radical traditions, we will explore history-making and the political uses of the past through close readings of literary works as well as various forms of political ephemera. This seminar invites participants to build on rich traditions of self-making, bridge-building and freedom dreaming through self-reflection, creative expression, and engaged scholarship. Our collective endeavor is not simply to reckon with, honor and critique what has gone before us, but also to orient ourselves toward new terrains and new questions.

Racial capitalism is a regime of capital accumulation predicated on the creation and mobilization of racial differences among human beings. This course aims to historicize racial capitalism both as a specific set of social relations in particular times/places and as a theoretical intervention into traditional Marxian political economy, underscoring the centrality of gender ideology to both modern conceptualizations of race and class. If capitalism alienates workers from the means of production, producing stratified class societies in the process, gender and race serve to divide human beings even further into different categories of human beings. They can function as critical fault lines of division and, simultaneously, as wellsprings of solidarity. Through a close reading of Cedric J. Robinson’s hallmark text, Black Marxism: The Black Radical Tradition, as well as critical engagement with historians of slavery, race, and reproduction; black feminists; queer theorists; and contemporary popular culture, students will grapple with the genealogies gendered racial capitalism. We will pay special attention of to the efforts of black feminists who have insisted on the centrality of intersectional approaches to both radical critiques of political economy and radical movements for liberation. At the same time, we will explore the flexibility and adaptability of racial capitalism –– its ability to absorb and deflect critique. Topics covered in this course include: racial capitalism and the black radical tradition; early modern capital accumulation and racial formation; race and reproduction from slavery to the contemporary mass incarceration; theorizing super-exploitation; neoliberalism, surveillance capitalism, the carceral state; queer anti-capitalism and the politics of pleasure.

The WGS Research Seminar is a forum for interdisciplinary research in feminist and gender studies. Directed at both faculty and graduate students within the WGSI and across the campus as a whole, the seminar's goal is to foster intellectual engagement with key theoretical, social, and political questions touching on gender and feminism and their many intersections through the presentation of cutting-edge work by leading researchers both within and beyond the University of Toronto.

All University of Toronto faculty, staff, and students are welcome to attend these seminars. WGSI master's and PhD students and graduate students enrolled in the WGS Collaborative Specialization are required to attend 80% of the research seminars. Please ensure that you sign the attendance sheet that is circulated at each seminar.

This course tracks the completion of the WGSI PhD program requirement in which students must present their research at the WGSI research seminar before graduating. Students present their research after they have achieved candidacy in preparation for their final oral examination. This course will appear on record in the term that students complete this program requirement.

This core course explores interdisciplinary feminist theories, methodologies and epistemologies, with particular attention to transnational feminism, anti- and post-colonialism, global capitalism, critical race theory, nation and state formation, gender and sexuality studies, and affect theory.

This is an advanced course designed for doctoral students, which explores feminist debates on epistemology, methodology and methods, paying close attention to the "why" and "how" of the research process, or what Professor Emerita M. Jacqui Alexander refers to as the itinerary of an idea, as well as the complex process of its realization. This course offers a space for students to reflect carefully, creatively, and critically on their research journeys, while also offering an opportunity to address/demystify the moving parts of the doctoral process.

This course will introduce students to work and learning trends in Canada and internationally, with a focus on the relationships between workplace learning and social change. There are three intellectual objectives of this course. The first objective is to situate workplace learning within broader social trends such as globalization, neo-liberalism and organizational restructuring. Second, the course allows for an exploration of the connections between learning as an individual phenomenon and learning as a social/organizational and social policy phenomenon. Finally, a third objective of the course is to highlight the learning strategies that seek to foster social change through greater equality of power, inclusivity, participatory decision-making and economic democracy.

The goal of this course is to develop a working dialogue across two separate bodies of research -- learning theory & social movement theory that to date have encountered one another only rarely and when so, virtually always inadequately. The focus is on building capacity in students to carry out research on various aspects of social movement learning. In doing so, our goals are to understand knowledge production, distribution, storage, transmission as well as the learning dynamics endemic to social movement building, action, outcomes and change. The course will emphasize learning as a unified composite of individual and collective human change in relation to socio-cultural and material perspectives primarily, the participatory structures of social movements as well as traditional changes in consciousness, skill and knowledge amongst participants. We will draw on both advanced theories of education/learning understood in the context of the long- established sociological sub-tradition known as 'social movement studies' and 'social movement theory'. The course will take a critical approach to social movement studies introducing the inter-disciplinary history of social movement studies over the 20th century followed by reviews of canonical theories of political process and the polity model approach, resource mobilization, frame analysis, neo-frame analysis, contentious politics, dynamics of contention and contentious performances. A significant proportion of the course will involve detailed secondary analysis of a specific social movement of the student's choosing, and will demand regular research reports that are meant to serve as a resource for our collective learning as well as to support the production of individual final papers directly. The course is highly recommended to advanced masters as well as doctoral students. No prerequisites are required.

How do working people collaborate to put their skills, capacities, and creativity to practice at and for work? How do we participate at work? What are the practitioner communities that bring together our creativity and productive capacities? How do communities of practice form and how can they be fostered in for-profit, public and quasi-public, and non-profit and social economy organizations? This participatory, presentations-based, and experiential learning course will see students and practitioners from the field delve into the different ways communities of practice and practitioner communities form in different workplace settings, how they may thrive, how we learn in them, and the issues that might challenge them.

This course will allow students to engage in advanced learning and research on the central national and international debates in the field. The focus is on building capacity in students to carry out research on various aspects of work, learning and social change. In doing so, students will develop extensive analytic and conceptual knowledge in the areas of the historical development of the notion of ''workplace learning'' and its links to diverse agendas of social change. The course will require the critical assessment and research applications of theories of workplace learning and social change, as well as practice and policy in the area. The course will include exploration of advanced case study research as well as national and international survey research, and encourage the linkages with students doctoral thesis work. Weekly seminars will be held.