Courses & Course Timetables

The Women & Gender Studies Institute offers graduate courses during the fall and winter sessions. Certain enrolment restrictions apply.  Enrolment priority is given to students registered in the Master’s, Ph.D. or Collaborative Specialization in Women and Gender Studies (CWGS) programs. Interested UofT graduate students should contact the WGSI Program Office at wgsi.programs@utoronto.ca to inquire about enrolment. The Institute does not offer graduate courses in the summer session.

Course Timetables

MA students are required to complete a total of 3.5 FCEs (see breakdown below)

Ph.D. students are required to complete a total of 3.0 FCEs (see breakdown below)

Collaborative Specialization – Thesis MAs complete 1.0 FCEs; Non-Thesis MAs complete 1.5 FCEs; PhD’s complete 2.0 FCEs (see breakdown below)

Required Course(s)

FALL SESSION (F) – September to December, 2022 (M= Mon; T=Tues; W=Wed; R=Thurs; F=Fri)

REQUIRED COURSES

COURSE NO.	COURSE TITLE	TIME	INSTRUCTOR
WGS5000H F	Feminist Theories, Histories, Movements I	T10-12	Trimble
WGS2000H: WGS Research Seminar	PhD students are required to attend 80% of the seminars and present their doctoral research prior to graduation.	W3-5 pm	S. Mojab

WGS Electives

MA Students – you are required to complete 1.0 FCEs from this group over the full academic year (fall & winter session). If possible, please split your courses between the fall and winter session.

PhD Students – choose ONE of the courses below. You are required to complete 0.5 FCEs; however, you may enroll in additional electives from this group. Please choose courses in consultation with your supervisor.

Collaborative Students – PhDs are required to complete ONE course from the list below (0.5 FCEs). Non-Thesis & Thesis
MAs are not required to complete any of the courses below, but may do so if they wish.

Electives

COURSE NO.	COURSE TITLE	TIME	INSTRUCTOR
WGS1007H F	Independent Reading/Research	N/A	Faculty
WGS1011H F	Black Radical Thought: Feminism, Anti-Imperialism and the Problem of Humanism	T1-3	R. Walcott
WGS1019H F	Gendering Racial Capitalism	R3-5	S. Sweeney
WGS1023H F	The Aesthetics of Radical Hope	R11-1	D. Georgis

SPRING SESSION (S) – January to April, 2023 (M=Mon; T=Tues; W=Wed; R=Thurs; F=Fri)

Required Courses

MA Students – 0.5 FCEs (full-course equivalents). Attendance is mandatory at the WGS Research Seminar.

PhD Students – 1.0 FCEs must be completed over the full academic year (fall & winter session). Please note that the WGS Research Seminar is a credit/non-credit course.

Collaborative Students – MA students are required to complete WGS5000H (0.5 FCEs). PhD students are required to complete either WGS5000H or WGS5001H for a total of 0.5 FCEs.

COURSE NO.	COURSE TITLE	TIME	INSTRUCTOR
WGS5001H S	Feminist Theories, Histories, Movements II	T10-12	A. Trotz
WGS2000H: WGS Research Seminar	Meets once per month. For details, please read above.	W3-5 pm	S. Mojab
Comprehensives Workshop	Two or three-hour workshop regarding guidelines & expectations. To be held in Spring 2023.	TBA	D. Georgis
Grant Writing Workshop	To be held in Spring 2023	TBA	Dan Newman

WGS Electives

MA Students – you are required to complete 1.0 FCEs from this group over the full academic year (fall & winter session). If possible, please split your courses between the fall and winter session.

PhD Students – choose ONE of the courses below. You are required to complete 0.5 FCEs; however, you may enroll in additional electives from this group. Please choose courses in consultation with your supervisor.

Collaborative Students – PhDs are required to complete ONE course from the list below (0.5 FCEs). Non-Thesis & Thesis MAs are not required to complete any of the courses below, but may do so if they wish.

COURSE NO.	COURSE TITLE	TIME	INSTRUCTOR
WGS1007H S	Independent Reading/Research	T10-12	A. Trotz
WGS1009H S	Gender and Cyberpolitics	Cancelled
WGS1010H S	Indigenous Feminism	R11-1	K. Recollet
WGS1028H S	Queer of Colour Critique	W1-3	C. Lord

General Electives

MA Students – offered outside the department. You are required to complete 1.0 FCEs over the full academic year (fall & winter session). If possible, please split your courses evenly between the fall and winter session. Select your courses from the 2022-2023 School of Graduate Studies Calendar in consultation with your Faculty Advisor.

PhD Students – offered in other departments. You are required to complete 1.5 FCEs; however, you may enroll in less and choose more courses from the WGS elective group above. Please select your courses from the 2022-2023 School of Graduate Studies Calendar in consultation with your Supervisor.

Collaborative Students – offered in your home department or other departments. Thesis MAs are required to complete 0.5 FCEs. Non-Thesis MAs and PhDs are required to complete 1.0 FCEs. Select from the SGS Calendar in consultation with the WGSI Graduate Coordinator/Graduate Administrator. Check the list of pre-approved courses from your home department.

SUMMER SESSION – May-August, 2022

Annual Doctoral Student Progress Report 2021-2022 due June 30, 2022. Please consult with your supervisor regarding the report. The form is available on the WGSI website. Over the summer, students should work with their Supervisor to begin defining their comprehensive fields, assembling readings and constituting committees.

Current Timetables (pdf)

GRADUATE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

Required Courses

Enrolment in required courses is restricted to students registered in the Master’s and Ph.D. Degree Programs in Women and Gender Studies and Collaborative Specialization in Women and Gender Studies.

• WGS5000H F Feminist Theories, Histories, Movements I Required course for M.A. & Ph.D. Students (Fall session) CWGS students must take either this course or WGS5001H.

  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.Instructor: Professor Michelle MurphyEnrolment is restricted to students registered in the Master's and Ph.D. Degree Programs in Women and Gender Studies or Collaborative Specialization in Women and Gender Studies.

• WGS5001H S Feminist Theories, Histories, Movements II Required course for Ph.D. Students (Winter Session) CWGS students must take either this course or WGS5000H.

  This is an advanced course designed for doctoral students, which 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.

  Instructor:  Alissa Trotz

• WGS1005Y: Master’s Research Paper Required course for M.A. Students (Summer Session)

  This is an advanced course designed for doctoral students, which 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.Instructor:  Professor Alissa TrotzEnrolment is restricted to students registered in the Ph.D. Degree Programs in Women and Gender Studies or Master's and Ph.D. students in the Collaborative Specialization in Women and Gender Studies.

**Enrolment is restricted to students registered in the Master’s and Ph.D. Degree Programs in Women and Gender Studies or Collaborative Specialization in Women and Gender Studies.

Other electives are open to UofT graduate students. Students will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Please contact the WGSI Program Office at wgsi.programs@utoronto.ca.

WGS Electives (not all courses are offered every year):

• WGS1004H Decolonial and Feminist Technoscience: Another Future is Possible** (Not offered in 2021-2022)

  This course mobilizes, develops and experiments with "terraformations” as a critical concept. Terraforming was first proposed as a speculative concept in science fiction that imagined the engineering of other worlds. The term then moved into scientific discussions of the possibilities of planetary colonization, naming the process whereby a hostile environment could be altered in order to become suitable for human life. Today, in response to global climate change, terraforming is increasingly invoked in common parlance to name a planetary-scaled engineering fix to the problem of massive environmental violence.  In this course, we seek to re-form terraformations as a critical term, one which points beyond the geo-engineering imaginary to the always situated and always political processes of geosocial processes of worlds-making. In this course we will study and experiment methodologically with "terraformations." We will read and work together to consider powerful terraforming enterprises tied to the cumulative force of colonialism and capitalism. How, we will ask together, have terraforming practices built, rather than ameliorated, hostile worlds? Attending to the pluriverse of terraformations, we also ask, what other visions and practices of world building are possible?  How have core concepts of land, planet, world, and earth been forged in non-innocent formations - that is, through historically specific infrastructural, conceptual, material, and social relationships? What other relationships to land are possible, or are already here?This course is part of the Engineered Worlds Project, a multi-year collaborative research project that examines and creates alternatives to the terms currently available for theorizing the relationships between technoscience, anthropogenic environments, and planetary conditions. The project develops a set of questions and methods for research involving the affective, imaginary, and material engagements with environment, thinking about how the long history of land in relation to anti-black, settler colonial, military, and extractive capitalist formations. An interdisciplinary undertaking, this seminar virtually brings together students and faculty from Science and Technology Studies, Anthropology, Geography, History, and Women and Gender Studies at four universities: University of Toronto (Michelle Murphy, instructor), UC Davis (Tim Choy, instructor), UC Berkeley (Jake Kosek, instructor), and University of Chicago (Joe Masco, instructor). Together we will engage works from fields such as Indigenous Studies, Black studies, science and technology studies, and environmental studies. Authors include Nick Estes, Aileen Moreton- Robinson, Daniel Nemsler, Jason De Leon, Katherine McKittrick, Zoe Todd, Marisol de la Cadena, Tiffany King, Manu Karuka, Katheryn Yussof, and others.Not offered in 2021-2022.Instructor:  Professor Michelle Murphy

• WGS1006Y Community Engagement (Practicum)** (Not offered in 2021-2022)

  This course provides students the opportunity to study, engage directly in, and reflect upon the multiple definitions of feminist social change work outside the university classroom. Students can choose from among many organizations in the Greater Toronto Area. Students will develop new understandings of the relationship between academic and activist work, thinking critically about the practice of experiential learning. Students will spend approximately 7-10 hours a week in their organization from September through February and will have scheduled progress meetings with an on-site mentor. They will gain exposure to the breadth of tactics organizations use, and will think about the politics of scale, coalition across groups/movements/borders, intersectionality and diversity, and neoliberalism. Students will learn how to conduct feminist social action research and program evaluation, and will gain practical skills in areas such as writing grant applications, press releases, outreach materials, organizational histories, and participating in community organizing. The final project is a written case study that contends with a central organizational problem or contradiction.Instructor:  Professor Judith Taylor

• WGS1009H Gender and Cyberpolitics

  This course focuses on theories of feminist cyber-activism and examines the relevance of gender, race, class and sexuality to understanding cyberpolitics.  We question how women transform digital sites into feminist spaces and how online networking serves to complicate, diversify and redefine feminist activism.Instructor:  Professor Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani

• WGS1010H Gender in the International Order (Not offered in 2021-2022)

  Description coming soon...(not offered in 2021-2022)Instructor:  Professor Kerry Rittich

• WGS1011H Water and Environmental Justice

  Description coming soon...Instructor:  Professor Bonnie McElhinny

• WGS1013H Intimacy, Empire, Violence

  This course surveys scholarship on contingency and mutual construction of violence, normality and intimacy, emerged from critical race and ethnic studies, feminist and queer studies, and postcolonial studies. We will explore the geopolitics of war, border control, sex work, labor exploitation, slavery in relation to colonialism/empire, neoliberalism and nation-state.Instructor:  Professor Lisa Yoneyama

• WGS1014H Challenging Coloniality: Caribbean Sexualities in Transnational Perspective** (Not offered 2021-2022)

  This course foregrounds the Caribbean as a transnational space, where sexuality, gender, race and class are intimately connected and shaped by colonial legacies and contemporary circuits of globalization.Not Offered in 2021-2022Instructor:  Professor D. Alissa Trotz

• WGS1016H Migration, Mobility, Displacement in Africa* (Not offered 2021-2022)

  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.Not offered in 2021-2022Instructor: Professor Marieme Lo

• WGS1017H Black Feminist Movements: Transnational Histories

  An introduction to historical methods in transnational black feminist studies. This course examines foundational and emerging scholarship on women, gender and black radical traditions, with a focus on intellectual, social, and political histories of Pan-Africanism, anticolonialism, and Black Marxism. We will explore disparate but interconnected genealogies, itineraries, demands and visions of Black Feminist, Pan-Africanist, Women of Colour and Third World feminist campaigns against racism, heterosexism, capitalism, and imperialism; aesthetic insurgencies; and the challenge of building solidarity across difference.Instructor:  Professor Chris Johnson

• WGS1019H F Gendering Racial Capitalism

  This course historicizes racial capitalism – as both a theoretical intervention and as a system of political economy – while also asking how and in what ways it intersects with categories of gender difference. This course asks: if racial capitalism achieves class stratification through racialism, then how was and is gender difference co-constructed and mobilized alongside racial differentiation in order to facilitate capitalism’s need to separate workers from owners and from each other? Students will also critically examine select black feminist writings that center the simultaneous importance of race and gender to liberation movements. Through a close reading of Cedric J. Robinson’s hallmark text, Black Marxism: The Black Radical Tradition, as well as scholarship from South African Marxist thinkers, historians of race and reproduction, the writings of Claudia Jones, Angela Y. Davis, and black feminist thinkers and writers, students will gain a deeper historical understanding of the genealogies of gendered racial capitalism. Topics engaged in this course include: black Marxism, early modern transnational capital formation, race and reproduction from slavery to the contemporary moment, black women and superexploitation, racial capitalism and neoliberalism, racial capitalism and the carceral state.Instructor:  Professor Shauna Sweeney

• WGS1020H Gender and Globalization: Transnational Perspectives** (Not offered in 2021-2022)

  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, “glocal” 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.Not offered in 2021-2022.Instructor:  Professor Marieme Lo

• WGS1021H Black Diasporic Feminisms: Modernity, Freedom, Belonging** (Not offered in 2021-2022)

  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.Not offered in 2021-2022.Instructor: Professor Alissa Trotz

• WGS1022H Race, Space and Citizenship** (Not offered in 2021-2022)

  How do we come to know who we are and how is this knowledge emplaced, raced and gendered? For educators, these questions underpin pedagogy. In focusing on the formation of racial subjects and the symbolic and material processes that sustain racial hierarchies, educators can consider how dominance is taught and how it might be undermined. Drawing on recent scholarship in critical race theory, critical geography, history and cultural studies, the course examines how we learn who we are and how these pedagogies of citizenship (who is to count and who is not) operate in concrete spaces--bodies, nations, cities, institutions. This course is about the production of identities--dominant ones and subordinate ones in specific spaces. It is taught from an educator's and a researcher's viewpoint. As an educator, the compelling question is how we might interrupt the production of dominant subjects. As a researcher, the question is how to document and understand racial formations, and the production of identities in specific spaces. The course begins by exploring the racial violence of colonialism, of periods of racial terror (lynching, the Holocaust), and of the New World Order (in particular, the post 911 environment, and the violence of peacekeeping and occupations) as well as state violence. In all these instances, law often has a central role to play in producing and sustaining violence. It is through law, for example, that nations are able to legally authorize acts of racial violence and legal narratives often operate to secure social consent to acts of racial terror. Through a feminist and anti-racist framework, we explore how racial violence is sexualized and gendered, and how it operates as a defining feature of relations between dominant and subordinate groups. The course examines how racial violence is linked to empire and nation building, and how individuals come to participate in these racial and gendered social arrangements.Not offered in 2021-2022.Instructor:   Professor Vannina Sztainbok

• WGS1023H The Aesthetics of Radical Hope

  This course examines the role of aesthetic imagination in thinking about, creating and repairing 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, and curiosity and play.

  Instructor:  Professor Dina Georgis

• WGS1024H Black Radical Thought: Feminism, Anti-Imperialism and the Problem of Humanism

  Course description coming soon...Instructor:  Professor Rinaldo Walcott

• WGS1025H Indigenous Aesthetics: Hip Hop, Media and Futurities

  Explores the complexities of decolonization in relationship to social change.  Engages various articulations of Indigenous lands and lives through film, performance, gesture and other activations.  Examines tensions around issues of appropriation, accountability in narratives and knowledge production.This is an online (synchronous) seminar course. This course will be delivered online per the meeting schedule. Students will need BbCollaborate; access to the course website (Quercus) and the ability to use learning platforms and software made available by the university, including Office 365 (including power point), Piazza (for discussion), Bb Collaborate, and access to a google account for collaborative work via google documents and slides. Students require access to a webcam and microphone.Instructor:  Professor Karyn Recollet

• WGS1027H Translating Sexuality**

  Course description coming soon...Instructor:  Professor Robert Diaz

• WGS1028H Queer of Color Critique (Not offered in 2021-2022)

  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.Not offered in 2021-2022.Instructor:  Professor R. Cassandra Lord