Graduate Course Timetable
2023-2024
Course enrolment for WGSI graduate courses will open for all students on June 14, 2023.
Students are able and expected to enrol in courses through ACORN. Note: for graduate students outside of WGSI, you will only be able to enrol once course enrolment has opened in your home graduate unit.
The SGS Add/Drop is not required to enrol in WGSI graduate courses. Students outside of WGSI who are enrolled in a graduate program offered by the School of Graduate Studies at U of T can enrol in WGSI graduate courses through ACORN. If your home graduate unit requires the add drop form, please email the form to the WGSI Program Office for processing at: wgsi.programs@utoronto.ca
Important Dates
| Term | Classes Start | Final Day to Enrol in Courses | Final Day to Drop Courses |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Fall 2023 |
Monday, September 11, 2023 |
Wednesday, September 20, 2023 |
Monday, November 6, 2023 |
|
Winter 2024 |
Monday, January 8, 2024 |
Monday, January 22, 2024 |
Tuesday, February 20, 2024 |
For other sessional dates, please see that dates provided by the School of Graduate Studies.
• F- Half credit course offered in the Fall (September to December)
• S- Half credit course offered in the Winter (January to April)
• Y- Full credit course offered from September to April
| Course Code | Session | Course Title | Instructor | Day/Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
F |
Feminist Theories, Histories, Movements I |
S. Trimble |
TU: 9am-12pm |
|
|
S |
Feminist Theories, Histories, Movements II |
A. Trotz |
TU: 10am-1pm |
|
|
S |
Feminist Grammars of Togetherness: Coalitions, Entanglements, Intimacies |
J. Ellapen |
TH: 3pm-5pm |
|
|
S |
Indigenous Feminism |
K. Recollet |
TH: 11am-1pm |
|
|
F |
Furtur(eh)istory: Speculative Genealogies of Queer Feminist World Making |
S. Ye |
TU: 3pm-5pm |
|
|
S |
Migration, Mobility, and Displacement in Contemporary Africa |
M. Lo |
TU: 3pm-5pm |
|
|
F |
Performance, Reparation, and other Queer Acts |
R. Diaz |
TH: 3pm-5pm |
|
|
S |
Self-Study: Where Research And Making Things Begins, and Travels |
J. Taylor |
TU: 1pm-3pm |
|
|
S |
Gendering Racial Capitalism |
S. Sweeney |
MO: 11am-1pm |
|
|
F |
Black Diasporic Feminisms: Modernity, Freedom, Belonging |
C. Johnson |
WE: 1pm-3pm |
|
|
F |
Aesthetics of Radical Hope |
D. Georgis |
TH: 11am-1pm |
|
|
F |
Indigenous and Decolonial Science and Technology Studies |
M. Murphy |
TU: 12pm-2pm |
|
|
Y |
Research Seminar |
N/A |
WE: 3pm-5pm |
|
|
WGS2000H*** |
Y |
MA Research Seminar |
N/A |
WE, FR: 3pm-5pm |
|
WGS1007H**** |
F and S |
Directed Research/Reading |
N/A |
N/A |
*Restricted to WGSI MA, PhD and Collaborative Specialization students. Other students may enrol with permission of course instructor.
**This course is offered by the Department of History and taught by a WGSI faculty member. WGSI students are able to take this course if it is of interested to them. Consult the Department of History for enrolment information.
***Only WGSI MA and PhD students are able to enrol in WGS2000H, however, students in the collaborative specialization are expected to attend. All other students are welcome! Information on the research seminar will be posted here.
MA Research Seminar is restricted to WGSI MA students.
****Students must have a project the a WGSI faculty member is willing to supervise in order to enrol in WGS1007H. To enrol please email: wgsi.programs@utoronto.ca
Course Descriptions
WGS5000H1*: Feminist Theories, Histories, Movements I
This course explores feminist theories, histories, and movements with an emphasis on some of the radical traditions that converge at WGSI, including transnational feminisms, Black and Indigenous feminisms, and queer and trans feminisms. The course schedule is organized around a selection of keywords in feminist studies, with weekly readings chosen to illuminate the resonances and dissonances of multiple intellectual genealogies. Some of these keywords highlight major conceptual contributions to the field, while others encourage self-reflexive thinking about the field and its institutionalization over the last 50 years. The goal here is neither mastery nor coverage. This course offers multiple openings to the various strands of inquiry that make up graduate study at WGSI and invites you into the collaborative work of grappling with the big questions that emerge from the meeting of different radical traditions.
Bits of this description are borrowed from Dr. M. Murphy’s syllabus for WGS5000 (Fall 2021)
WGS5001H*: Feminist Theories, Histories, Movements II
This qualitative methods seminar is designed for doctoral students developing research projects with feminist interdisciplinary, transnational and intersectional commitments. It will explore feminist theories and debates on epistemologies and methodologies, 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 realisation. Simply put, how does something begin as a nagging question, a provocation, even an epiphany, and proceed, in fits and starts, until it morphs into a fully-fledged research project, sometimes in ways that bear faint resemblance to what appeared at one point to be a very certain starting place?
WGS1009H: Feminist Grammars of Togetherness: Coalitions, Entanglements, Intimacies
This seminar will examine the concept of togetherness as it relates to feminist and queer studies. A central theme in women of color feminisms and queer of color critique, togetherness informs the world making practices of scholars and activists as we collectively endeavor to create a more livable world. What can togetherness teach us about our interconnected pasts, presents, and futures? How can togetherness as a framework expand how we think about what constitutes the political and its relationship to feminism globally? How can togetherness provide us with new “political vernaculars” to “help us imagine how we want to live with each other” (Keguro Macharia) as an ethical practice in a context where the ongoing afterlives of slavery, indentureship, imperialism, and colonialism continue to stratify us along axes of difference designed to separate the human from the not-so-human? In this course, we will prioritize togetherness across racialized difference as pivotal to feminist imaginations of freedom and dwell in the spaces where freedom and love inform how we understand feminist and queer practices of intimacies, coalitional building, and solidarities. Reading across various texts, we will inquire into the nuances through which grammars of togetherness are invoked and/or explored. We will collectively understand togetherness as theory, method, framework, and world-making practices that are constantly ongoing as we collectively seek to imagine our worlds otherwise.
WGS1010H: Indigenous Feminism
Drawing from Indigenous feminist conversations taken up within the field, this course practices an ethics of care and focuses on relationality through exploring Black and Indigenous feminist ‘texts’ as forms of remapping, and reimagining “otherwise” spatial forms of reworlding. This course gathers together a series of texts and conversations focusing on Indigenous feminisms spatial projects of liberation and radical relationality while highlighting the transformative, or worlding potentials of Indigenous feminist theories; and leaning into critiques of settler colonial infrastructures, and introducing forms of research creation pedagogies to highlight more/ other than human relationalities and intimacies and ‘otherwise’ modes of care. This course allows makes possible a deep exploration of a set of conversations and fields of inquiry centered around Indigenous feminist concerns with space making (ethics, land orientations, critiques of settler colonial atmospherics, and the building of glossaries that reflect a radical relational and poetic intimate relation with kin, space/ and place. This course Incorporates capacious theories, practices, and thinking-in-action that situate bodies and theoretical alignments outside traditional purviews and into deeper relation.
WGS1011H: Furtur(h)istory: Speculative Genealogies of Queer Feminist World Making
This course is a grad seminar that explores different roots and routes to queer and feminist knowledge production, polics and scholarship, in order to imagine alternative futures in the world of pandemics, climate change, neoliberal racial and gendered capitalism, police and state violence, disposability and necropolitics and so on.
We will begin with rethinking some of the key concepts in WGS and examining the ways in which feminist and queer studies disrupt yet reinform social, geopolitical, and colonial/imperial norms. For example, we will reroute the concepts of “gender,” “race” and “sexuality” from the history and geopolitics of the Cold War; we will return to the question of historiography and the use of archives to think about the relations of history, research, desire, affect, and the material; and we will approach racial capitalism beyond the US/North America contexts and settler colonialism. In the second part of the course, we will explore some oft-neglected yet crucial frameworks that scholars use and develop in accounting for intersectional experiences of capitalism, colonialism and subjugation and resistance, such as ornamentalism, the oceanic and the archipelagic, postsocialism, sino-postcoloniality and the transpacific. In the third section, we will look at innovative queer and feminist methods of conducting research and writing by exploring topics such as queer data, speculation and futurity, dys(u)topia, critical fabulation and autoethnography. Lastly, the course will provide some workshops on academic professionalism and career.
Authors may include: Anjali Arondekar, Elizabeth Povinelli, Jennifer Suchland, Darren Byler, Anne Ching, Mimi Sheller, Howard Chiang, Saidiya Hartman, Monica Huerta, to name a few.
WGS1016H: Migration, Mobility, and Displacement in Contemporary Africa
Why do people move? What are the causes and consequences of migration and displacement in Africa? This course critically examines the multifaceted dimensions of migration, mobility, and displacement through (text, art, film and narratives) with a specific focus on communities and populations displaced by war, environmental destruction and disaster, economic failings, and the quest for economic opportunities or individual freedom. We will: 1) explore canonical and emergent interdisciplinary scholarships and their epistemic claims and debates, key theories and concepts on migration, mobility and displacement; 2) engage in current debates and public discourses on these intersecting themes, analytics, and phenomena; and 3) interrogate the morality of media representation and gaze, discursive practices on the ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ subject formation, the ‘catastrophic’ biopolitics and governmentality of migration, the instrumentality and contingencies of political (non) interventions/(in)action, humanitarianism, and the politics of rights, justice, ethics, and solidarity. You will have the opportunity to unpack your own positionality and trajectories to reflect on the differentiated categories and trajectories of migration and mobility and to formulate your own critique and alternative epistemology.
WGS1017H: Performance, Reparation, and other Queer Acts
This course studies reparation as a queer performance, one that enlivens everyday acts of survival, conviviality, and care. Moving beyond its conventional or legal definitions, students will encounter reparation as a hopeful, pleasurable and joyful practice which reframes representations of violence. This course deprioritizes justice and freedom’s institutional guises. It instead draws from the important work of Performance, Queer, Critical Race, Feminist and Postcolonial Studies scholars to theorize both as unfinished pursuits of social transformation. Ultimately, students in this course will understand reparation as a complex ethical stance. This ethical stance stubbornly dreams and creates more livable worlds, despite exclusion’s pressing realities and amidst erasure’s painful effects.
WGS1018H: Self-Study: Where Research And Making Things Begins, and Travels
The self is the starting place for a great deal of creative, political and intellectual work. In this course, we explore the ways in which different scholars, thinkers, activists, and artists travel from themselves to a broader set of questions and connections. We will traverse different genres of self-study, and the theorizations they make possible. The course also trains students to see how some disciplines forbid a foregrounding of self, but proceed in oddly myopic terms.
The class asks students to develop an appreciation for the self-study in which others engage, as well as a more rigorous understanding of the places they themselves are starting and moving from in their own work. We will engage the ethics of where we plan to go in our own research — why, and how. We will puzzle through what can make a study of self nuanced, thoughtful, and expansive. What autobiography invites solidarity and relation, and why? We take up the ethics of situatedness, of partiality, and the practices of hide and seek in intellectual work.
Readings may include the opening chapter of Dubois’ Souls of Black Folk, Cherrie Moraga’s Native Country of the Heart, Latoya Ruby Fraser’s Flint is Family in Three Acts, and Mab Segrest’s Memoir of a Race Traitor. There will be some sociology, some history, some poetry, some art.
WGS1019H: Gendering Racial Capitalism
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 neoliberalism; theorizing super-exploitation; surveillance capitalism, the carceral state; queer anti-capitalism and the politics of pleasure.
WGS1021H: Black Diasporic Feminisms: Modernity, Freedom, Belonging
This seminar studies a select but living archive of Black feminist knowledge-making across diasporas, with a particular focus on the disparate but interconnected itineraries of Black and Third World feminist writers, artists and revolutionaries. We will situate our texts historically as well as transnationally to explore contexts and movements that generated imaginative practices of invention, connection and intervention. In addition to interdisciplinary scholarship, we will immerse ourselves in theoretical insurgencies and conjure work—self-making, bridge-building and freedom dreaming—that continue to animate ongoing struggles for liberation. This course invites participants to build on these rich traditions 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.
WGS1023H: Aesthetics of Radical Hope
This course examines the role of aesthetic imagination in re-building our worlds. By drawing on works from postcolonial studies, cultural studies and psychoanalysis, this course offers a way to think about the aesthetic as it relates to the capacity to imagine “otherwise possibilities’ (Crawley) in ways that exceed 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), trauma and reparation, queer archives, curiosity and play.
HIS1012H: Indigenous and Decolonial Science and Technology Studies
How have Indigenous and other colonialized people created, taken up, critiqued, transformed and resisted technologies, data, and science? From digital games to laboratories, from genetic research to pollution, from statistics to plants, we will discuss the ways land and body sovereignties are at stake in technoscience. We will learn from the growing field of Indigenous science and technology studies that includes historical and other approaches, and then put this field in conversation with works from other decolonial traditions.