Courses

Public Notes

This course section does not offer a waitlist. We encourage you to monitor the registration system regularly and enroll should a seat become available.

Public Notes

Decolonizing Disability

This class brings together several literatures to explore connections between disability justice, prison abolition movements, and anti-imperialist transnational organizing. Understanding the relationships between carceral spaces, debility, and disability is needed more than ever in the face of the rise of authoritarian governments; engulfing forms of disaster capitalism and climate change; the swelling of refugee, migrant, and abandoned populations; unprecedented levels of mass incarceration, policing, counter terrorism surveillance, genocide, and permanent war. These contemporary forces create disability and debility while concomitantly impacting disabled people disproportionately.  We will also look at the abolitionist decolonial ideologies, organizing, and forms of resistance to these interconnected technologies of immiseration that are envisioning and demanding futures free of carceral enclosure. Along with attention to subjectivity, subject formation, and identity readings develop analytics for systems and structures that span international scales--legal apparatuses, maiming as global governance, debt as spatial enclosure, the biopolitics of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, the commodification of violence--that critically form and impact relations of gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and nationhood.  

This course section does not offer a waitlist. We encourage you to monitor the registration system regularly and enroll should a seat become available.

Public Notes

On Masculinities and Femininities: From Social Media to Everyday Life

This course explores how masculinities and femininities are constructed and lived. We seek to examine the relational aspects of gender, the role of institutions and what this means in terms of thinking intersectionally about identity formation(s). We will consider the importance of everyday life, school, the media and especially online spaces that have catalyzed recent movements and phenomena such as the Trad Wives Movement, the Manosphere, Looksmaxxing and more. Our aim is to make visible how white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy (to name a few) continue to operate and persist in daily life (which is also being resisted and challenged), and how masculinities and femininities are implicated.

This course section does not offer a waitlist. We encourage you to monitor the registration system regularly and enroll should a seat become available.

Public Notes

This course introduces students to an advanced understanding of, and engagement with, the interactions between law and social movements. The first part traces class struggles and focuses on the cycles of crisis generated by Indigenous and Black, queer and transfeminist, decolonial, and environmental movements. We will examine how mobilized civil society has served as a central force in advancing legal frameworks that move beyond the false universality of Western, patriarchal, white supremacist law. We will also explore key theories that explain and inform these transformations. This part includes too an overview of some of the most significant transnational and intersectional socio-legal transformations brought about by social movements, offering the opportunity for detailed examination from a global perspective.

The second  part involves a guided research project on a topic of the student’s choice, with a focus on reproductive justice.

Public Notes

How and why do people, groups and various communities of practice organize around social justice issues across scales? What do they accomplish and how can we best capture and assess their accomplishments? How can we apply lessons gained from these experiences in our own organizing efforts locally, internationally and beyond? This course examines the values, principles, strategies, and tactics of local/community and global/ transnational organizing around social justice concerns from combined anti-colonial, anti-oppression anti-racist, anti-authoritarian, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, feminist, ecological, critical disability, human rights and postdevelopment perspectives, including assessments of their processes, outcomes and contributions across geographic scales. Building on critical thinking skills and knowledge bases gained from 100 and 200 level courses, this course uses readings, case studies and problem-based learning exercises to sharpen learners’ community and international organizing skills and competencies to prepare them for their practicums, internships, volunteer work and make then good change agents for a better world.

Public Notes

This course will explore the ways marginalized artists contemplate their relationship to the creative and social justice matters. In the words of a former student in the course: “I love the “unorthodox” structure of this course. It was self–directed and everything we learned can be applied to everyday lives and our practices – a major difference from the variety of GRSJ courses where a lot of it is very theory based. This class had a great balance and was encouraging to pursue interdisciplinary means. This class repaired my relationship with art and inspired me in ways I could never imagined. I would take this course again in a heartbeat.”

Public Notes

This class offers a broad overview of queer and trans of colour theorizing that will open up contesting theories and approaches to these fields. In our first classes we will explore how women of colour feminisms have been an important intellectual genealogy for these fields. We will also consider how Indigenous thinkers complicate queer and trans of color theorizing by applying a decolonizing lens to race, gender, and sexuality. We will then cover three major themes in this class. First, we will consider how racial, gender, and sexual norms have been produced and deployed to target queer and trans of colour lives for state violence, regulation, and policing. Second, we will explore how diaspora and migration have shaped queer and trans of color lives. Third, we will explore how performance has been a critical resource for queer and trans of colour world-making that has opened up opportunities for creative self-fashioning, alternative kinship formation, alliances and coalitions, and decolonial relationships.

Public Notes

This course will serve as an introduction to anti-colonial and feminist qualitative methodologies with a focus on the historical research methods of oral history and archival research. We will first explore the relationship between colonial power and knowledge, including the concepts of epistemic extractivism and feminist critiques of claims to objectivity, neutrality, and universal truth. Next, we will explore anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, and queer methodological approaches to oral history and archival research. Themes to be explored in oral history include embodied memory, shared authority, co-creation of historical knowledge, feminist listening practices, navigating insider and outsider dynamics, and culturally specific storytelling practices such as Filipinx kuwento, Indigenous feminist “yarning,” and Latinx testimonio, plática, and chisme. Themes in archival research include reading with the grain, decolonial sensibilities, critical fabulation, archives of feeling, and emotive archive creation. We will then practice reading across oral history and archival research, discussing the limits and possibilities of these two methodological approaches as we consider how to conduct interdisciplinary research.

This course is restricted to GRSJ majors and minors in 3rd and 4th year. If you would like to be added to the waitlist, please send your request to grsj.programsassistant@ubc.ca and include the course

number, section, and your student number.

Public Notes

This course is restricted to GRSJ majors and minors in 3rd and 4th year. If you would like to be added to the waitlist, please send your request to grsj.programsassistant@ubc.ca and include the course

number, section, and your student number.

Public Notes

This course is restricted to GRSJ majors and minors in 3rd and 4th year. If you would like to be added to the waitlist, please send your request to grsj.programsassistant@ubc.ca and include the course

number, section, and your student number.

Public Notes

This course is restricted to GRSJ majors and minors in 3rd and 4th year. If you would like to be added to the waitlist, please send your request to grsj.programsassistant@ubc.ca and include the course

number, section, and your student number.