GRSJ has some great courses lined up for 2025W. If you are still finalizing your calendar — check out the courses below and sign up today!
GRSJ 200: Gender & Environmental Justice
Term 1
An intersectional overview of environmental issues as they relate to colonial philosophical thought and capitalist economy at the root of social phenomena such as settler colonialism, imperialism, and the refugee crisis intertwined with the climate crisis. The second half focuses on hopeful decolonial alternatives based on Indigenous knowledge of radical care for the Earth, and practices of sound ecology, Indigenous land back movements, deep ecology and the anticapitalist degrowth movement.
GRSJ 230: Gender, Race, Sexuality & Representation in Modern Asia
Term 1
Representation is power. Representation tells stories. Representation speaks to identification and meanings. Rather than attempt the mission impossible of defining “Asia”, this course aims to unpack the complexity of what “Asian-ness” means, in what contexts, within what power dynamics, and for whom. From the streets to the screen, from grassroots identities to popular culture, from memories of wars to workers in factories, from community making to social movements, we – as co-learners – will utilize an interdisciplinary lens to understand key dimensions of representation, to identity how contemporary representation works in and across Asian contexts, and to examine both the foreground and background of “Asian-ness”, almost always already within the power dynamics of gender, race, sexuality, class, coloniality, religion, diaspora, language, and the infinite spectrum of social formations.
GRSJ 302: Pedogogies of Social Justice
Term 1
A study of pedagogies of hope based on care, transformative justice and Indigenous teachings and practices of the gift economy. We will study feminist critical studies of care, radical Black abolitionist theory, practices of mutual aid and empathy, and global Indigenous cultures that cultivate anti-capitalist ways of living based on the principles of co-operation, collective care, community, gift, reciprocity, gratitude and kinship with the more-than-human world. The course is designed to provide healing and hope based alternatives to the profoundly colonial, white supremacist, and ecocidal systems forming our current reality.
GRSJ 316: Queer & Trans of Colour Theorizing
Term 1
The intellectual and political interventions of queer of colour theorizing in the gender and sexual politics of racial and imperial projects, including its engagements with women of colour feminisms, settler colonial and indigenous studies, and immigration and diaspora studies.
GRSJ 350B: Joy as Resistance
Term 2
Joy seems to be everywhere these days, from activist affirmations to neoliberal co-optations. Defined by Kristie Soares as “both a scholarly field and an activist movement dedicated to examining how joy functions as a form of political resistance among minoritized communities,” Critical Joy Studies is still an emerging field. Looking at the works of Imani Perry, Lindsay Stewart, adrienne maree brown, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Miguel Valerio, among others, and using a special issue of the Journal of Festive Studies dedicated to “Joy as Resistance” as a starting point, we will look at how joy can fuel social movements and activate defiance and resistance while recognizing when joy can be understood as assimilation and accommodation, and be imposed as a tool to curtail and erase dissent. We will also think about how and when oppressed peoples need to ‘killjoy’ as a practice of resistance.
GRSJ 425B 201 Special Topics: Sounds of Race & Empire
Term 1
What role does sound play in the making and unmaking of race and empire? Sound has played an important role in disciplining and controlling racialized communities, marking and containing some racialized bodies as “unruly,” “dangerous,” or “noisy.” It has also played a key role in imperial technologies that have enabled systems of communication, surveillance, and warfare over colonial populations and occupied territories. Sound, however, has also been a vital source of joy and worldmaking for marginalized communities that has enabled defiant claims to place and empowered acts of self-making. Sound also exceeds the realm of human audibility, asking us to listen in new ways to the non-human world from rivers and oceans to plant growth and undersea life. This course will consider these themes with readings by scholars such as Dylan Robinson, Fred Moten, Shana Redmond, Jonathan Sterne, Marie Thompson, Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier, Jennifer Stoever, Alexandra T. Vásquez, Alex E. Chávez, Deborah Vargas, Licia Fiol-Matta, Tom McEnany, Josh Kun, Alejandra Bronfman, Roshanak Kheshti, George Lipsitz, Nina Eidsheim, Karen Bakker, Gaye Theresa Johnson, and Daphne Brooks.
