Term 1
Instructor: Dr. Jasbir Puar
GRSJ_V 502-101: Issues in Gender, Sexuality and Critical Race Theories
Description: This seminar offers an intensive engagement with foundational and emerging critical theories that shape contemporary understandings of social justice. Drawing from fields such as critical race theory, feminist, queer and trans theory, decolonial, anticolonial, and Indigenous studies, Marxism, disability and debility studies, and bio-necropolitical theory, the course interrogates how power operates across axes of difference and domination. Rather than treating “justice” as a fixed or universal ideal, we approach it as a contested, situated, and evolving concept shaped by historical struggle, epistemic violence, and embodied experience. Students will examine how critical theory functions a method for diagnosing structural inequality, imagining alternative futures, and cultivating collective resistance. Throughout, the seminar emphasizes the ethical and political stakes of critique, the material conditions of theorical knowledge production, and the imperative to ground theory in lived realities and activist praxis.
This course is designed for students pursuing interdisciplinary research in the humanities and social sciences and is particularly relevant for those committed to anti-colonial frameworks in their academic and political work.