GRSJ 308: Creativity from the Margins

Instructor: Dr. Alifa Bandali

Critical examination of mainstream and alternative media images of gender, race, and sexuality in the context of networked social media, film, music, and television. Recommended pre-requisites: either all of GRSJ 101, GRSJ 102 or third-year standing.

Term 2

Description:

Instructor: Dr. Litsa Chatzivasileiou

Critical examination and practical applications of concepts, theories, methods, and strategies of gender-aware organizing at the community and international levels. Recommended pre-requisites: either all of GRSJ 101, GRSJ 102 or third-year standing.

Term 2

Description: Critical examination and practical applications of concepts, theories, methods, and strategies of gender-aware organizing at the community and international levels.

This course explores social movement building based on anti-oppression values, anti-authoritarian and anti-state practices and anti-colonial, anti-racist principles of community and transnational organizing centred particularly around the issues of border imperialism, migrant justice, settler colonialism and carceral oppression. Through an array of readings by activists and scholars in Critical Resistance Studies, Critical Refugee Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Abolitionist Feminism, including case studies, political art such as graphic novel/activist journalism, and film we will be rethinking protest, resistance, survival, and political mobilization. We will also examine forms of decolonizing social relations and ourselves as activists through the principles of “revolutionary love” and transformative justice, or of what community organizer, Harsha Walia refers to as “emotional, healing justice” to address personal, collective, and systemic traumas as the cornerstone of community care.

Instructor: Dr. Ana Vivaldi

A survey of feminist legal thought and recent developments in feminism and law, with a focus on Canada. Recommended pre-requisites: either all of GRSJ 101, GRSJ 102 or third-year standing.

Term 2

Description:

Modern nation-states are constituted around the Enlightenment’s idea that “all men have a reason” and thus, “all men should be free and equal.” A correspondent liberal discourse on merit proposed that only individual achievements would shape a person’s social position and status. However, social scientists and organized civil society have since pointed out that merit veils the structural creation of unequal positionings. If the “Equality of men” in society and as reflected in the law is still an unfinished project, as social scientists, we can contribute to understanding these inequalities while the organized civil society has acted to transform them.

This course introduces students to an advanced understanding and engagement in the interactions between law and social movements. The first part will trace class struggles and focus on the cycles of crisis generated by indigenous and black, queer and transfeminist, decolonial and environmental movements.We will trace how mobilized civil society has

been a central source for the advancement of legal frameworks that go beyond the false Universality of Western, patriarchal, white supremacy law. We will examine the salient theories explaining and informing these transformations. The second part of the course will overview some of the most salient legal transformations effected by social movements and provide a chance for detailed examination from Canada and worldwide. The third part will be a guided research process on a topic of their choice with a focus on reproductive justice.

Instructor: Natacha Montesel Mora

Gender and indigeneity in the documented histories and narrated lives of Indigenous people in Canada. Recommended pre-requisites: all of GRSJ 101, GRSJ 102, or third-year standing.

Term 2

Description:

This course examines the history, narratives, literature, and artwork documenting Indigenous peoples’ ways of living and knowing from intersectional, feminist, queer, and two-spirits perspectives. It will begin with a review of the history of colonization in the Americas, settling the roots of the current neoliberal, racist, and patriarchal globalized social order. We will build in the work of decolonial authors supporting the argument that colonization created the historical conditions for the triumph of the current socioeconomic, legal, political, epistemological, and discursive global world system (e.g., Grosfoguel, 2007; Quijano, 2010).

The course will also draw on scholarship accounting for Canada’s specific history of colonization and Indigenous system of knowledge, including ways to learn, heal, reconcile, and collectively deal with the systematic oppression and multigenerational trauma. We will pay special attention to Indigenous GLBTQ2+ people’s and women’s stories, narratives, art, and community work.

Instructor: Dr. Yao Xiao

Situates “Asia” in a global context and explores the complex relationships between gender, social structures, and social change.

Term 2

Description: What is going on with “Asia”? Are we talking about a name, a concept, a continent, a variety of societies, a million different ways of life, or perhaps, some profound geopolitical changes in the world? “Asia” – almost as an antithesis of the “West” – is constantly in the making, in movements of people, in intellectual debates, and in the midst of changing social structures that affect communities locally, nationally, and transnationally. It is in these complex contexts of Asia that we turn our attention to questions of social justice: What happens to people who live the intersected tensions of gender, race, sexuality, class, and various other forms of power relations? Who needs what justice? What can we do, personally and structurally? As co-learners, we will utilize an interdisciplinary lens to explore the geopolitical, economic, and cultural changes in Asia, and to critically reflect on interrelated issues of class, gender, race, sexuality, spirituality, ecology, indigeneity, decolonization, diaspora, and globalization.