GRSJ 425C: Special Topics – Gender, Race & Social Justice in Emotions & Everyday Life
Instructor: Dr. Alifa Bandali
Examination in depth of selected topics in gender, race, and sexuality. Consult the Workday Student course schedule for course offerings. May be repeated for credit. Recommended pre-requisites: either all of GRSJ 101, GRSJ 102 or third-year standing.
Term 1
Description: Emotions and affect have injected ‘the feeling body’ into academic discourse, from intersectional studies, critical race theory to gender studies. In particular, knowledge production that takes seriously affect and emotions challenge what has become a part of dominant ways of knowing that is recognizable through terms such as ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ that remove experience and politics from the conversation and dialogue. This course is interested and takes seriously the role of emotions; the nexus between everyday life and emotions; the importance of knowledge production and emotions to examine: “What do emotions do?”
As the Feminist Killjoy Sara Ahmed states: “The ‘doing’ of emotions…to consider the relation between emotions and (in)justice, as a way of rethinking what it is that emotions do.” (2014, 191) This course begins with the premise of what emotions do and builds on this sentiment to explore what can we do with them. We will trace affect and emotions not solely from academic trajectories, but its uses in women of colour and marginalized experiences through writings, activism, scholarship and politics. We will consider emotions such as anger, happiness and empathy (to name a few), along with themes related to the nation-state, popular culture and the media, institutional places and spaces and more.
GRSJ 425B: Special Topics – Decolonizing Disability: Towards the Abolition of Carceral Spaces
Instructor: Dr. Jasbir Puar
Examination in depth of selected topics in gender, race, and sexuality. Consult the Workday Student course schedule for course offerings. May be repeated for credit. Recommended pre-requisites: either all of GRSJ 101, GRSJ 102 or third-year standing.
Term 1
* Please note that students who took GRSJ 425 with Dr. Puar in 2023W are not eligible to take this course as it is the same topic
Description: This advanced undergraduate seminar brings together several literatures to explore connections between disability justice, prison abolition movements, and anti-imperialist transnational organizing. The imperative to understand the relationships between carceral spaces, debility, and disability is greater than ever in the face of the rise of authoritarian governments under the guise of democracy; engulfing forms of disaster capitalism and climate change; the swelling of refugee, migrant, and abandoned populations; unprecedented levels of mass incarceration, policing, and counter terrorism surveillance; the consolidation of post-1971 speculative financial markets and the sustaining of US empire through privatized debt and deficit economies; repression of political protest, freedom of speech, and the right to assembly; the failure of human rights to stem state violence; and finally, the blooming of local, regional, transnational and global modes of abolitionist decolonial resistance, refusal, and revolt. These contemporary forces create disability and debility while concomitantly impacting disabled people disproportionately.
Abolitionist Angela Davis writes that “the abolition movement…cannot simply occur in one country.” Following Davis’ lead, examining the global circuits of infrastructures of incarceration such as prisons, detention centers, migrant and refugee camps requires a transnational approach. “Decarcerating Disability” is a frame developed by disability studies scholar Liat Ben-Moshe to situate histories of institutional incarceration of disability as well to understand the debilitating effects of incarceration. Drawing from Ben-Moshe’s work on “carceral spaces,” we will expand this direction of inquiry beyond prisons to include analyses of the space-time containments of carceral capitalism, logistics as warfare, and infrastructures of containment such as occupation, blockades, militarized zones, checkpoints, border walls, and the non-lethal weapons industry.
In turn we will 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. The Abolition and Disability Justice Coalition, Deadly Exchange, Sins Invalid, and #StopCarceralAbleism are just some examples of anti-imperialist disability justice movement organizations which are challenging the global networks that incarcerate disabled people, produce mass debilitation, and create impairment.
We will be reading work from abolition studies, critical disability studies, southern disability studies, and critical race studies. The readings for the class have been selected because along with attention to subjectivity, subject formation, and identity they 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.
GRSJ 210: Gender, Race & Colonialism in the Americas
Instructor: Dr. Ana Vivaldi
Interdisciplinary exploration of the ways gender, class, sexuality and race shape modern histories in Canada, and transnationally, from 1920 to the present.
Term
Description: This course introduces students to an advanced discussion on the effects of race and ethnicity in the production of social inequalities in the Americas. The first part of the course will review some of the main theoretical discussions in the field with emphasis on the contributions of different approaches: culturalist, materialist, constructivist, subalternists. Students will engage in core questions surrounding ethnic and racial problems, and the historical context of these debates. We will develop an understanding about ethnicity and race as challenges to Nation-State and the making of citizenship; and simultaneously a product of transnational processes linked to colonialism and capitalist expansion. The second part of the course puts the analytical approaches into practice as we will analyze specific ethnic and racial conflicts in a hemisferic and a multi-dimensional perspective. We will consider how political, economic and cultural tensions intertwine producing specific social formations and organizing difference into structures of inequality. The third part of the course will unfold a directed research process.
GRSJ 425A: Special Topics – Colonialism & After
Instructor: Dr. Jemima Pierre
Examination in depth of selected topics in gender, race, and sexuality. Consult the Workday Student course schedule for course offerings. May be repeated for credit. Recommended pre-requisites: either all of GRSJ 101, GRSJ 102 or third-year standing.
Term 2
* Please note that students who took GRSJ 425 with Dr. Puar in 2023W are not eligible to take this course as it is the same topic
Description: Colonial formations have shaped processes, stories, relationships, and resistance. This course bears witness to the strategies and politics of European colonialism and the emergence of modernity – with regional emphasis on the Caribbean and the continent of Africa. The course will address such topics as the theories of imperial expansion; the rise of “scientific” racism; the technologies of colonial rule; the role of race, culture, and gender/heteropatriarchy in colonial ideologies and practices; the socio-cultural, economic, political, and environmental impact of colonial rule; and the question of decolonization. We will engage with a range of textual and visual sources, including historical writing, political essays, and film.