Women's Studies Certificate Program
Course Descriptions
Spring 2002

Women's Studies Certificate Program
Coordinator: Patricia T. Clough, Room 5103 (817-8895, 817-8905)

The Certificate in Women's Studies is available to students matriculated in the Ph.D. programs at The Graduate Center. Women's Studies is an interdisciplinary approach to research and scholarship that draws on various disciplines, while challenging disciplinary boundaries. The general aim of the program is to offer critical reflection on the experiences of both women and men in terms of differences of gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity and nation. Students are prepared to teach courses and to do research in Women's Studies and related critical approaches to the disciplines, such as those developed in Queer Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Cultural Studies. Besides focused course work and guidance in research, Women's Studies offers participation in a wide range of graduate students and faculty activities, such as lecture series and forums. Students are also invited to participate in the research programs and seminars at the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate Center.

WSCP 81600 -Workshop in Women Studies: Critical Methodologies/ Research
GC W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Patricia T. Clough & Michelle Fine [50688]

Focusing on the wide range of methodologies developed for feminist research and other critical approaches to the disciplines, we will explore the relationship of methods, politics and desire in the production of knowledge and the circulation of information. We will examine the impact of feminist thought on the various disciplines in the humanities, the social sciences, the sciences and the arts. We also will take account of recent criticisms of methods and disciplinarity elaborated in cultural studies of science, critical ethnography, standpoint epistemologies, posthuman studies, critical education and postmodern aesthetics and ethics. There also will be preparation for writing and publishing essays and research papers, including an introduction to networks of journals and granting institutions.

WSCP 80802 - Contemporary Feminist Thought
GC T 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Lisa Jean Moore & Victoria Pitts [50689]
[Cross listed with MALS 72200]

This course, Contemporary Feminist Theory, explores the diversity and ambiguity of various contemporary feminist theories and addresses emergent traditions and challenges in contemporary feminism. We focus on new geographies of the body, identity, and gendered culture that have been opened by multiculturalism and transnationalism, new cultural and biomedical technologies of the body, and contemporary issues in sexuality, reproduction, and mothering. Readings will be drawn from a variety of disciplines and will include both broad theoretical pieces and multicultural and transnational narratives/testimonials.

WSCP 81000 - Introduction to American Studies: Histories and Methods
GC M 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Catherine Lavender [50690]
[Cross listed with ASCP 81000 and MALS 73200-American Social Institutions]

This course serves as an introduction to many of the methodological and epistemological questions in the field of American Studies. Some of the things seminar participants will be reading in this course are older studies and articles which chart the development of the field. Others are newer studies which show the results of American Studies traditions and methodologies.

The seminar will focus on the development of several concerns among American Studies scholars. Starting from the "Myth and Symbol" School's synthesis of literature and history, American Studies has expanded to include cultural studies and new approaches to literary criticism. American Studies has also come to encompass the study of the cultural construction (and deconstruction) of categories of analysis including race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and the body. Finally, there have been several other influences within the field of American Studies, including cross-cultural studies and popular culture studies.

Course readings and seminar participation will be augmented by ongoing discussions with members of the CUNY Graduate Center faculty whose research in American Studies sheds light on the histories and methods of the field.

Full syllabus available at: <http://scholar.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/amsintro.html>

WSCP 81000 - Modern Period: Self, Body, Other
GC W 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Vincent Crapanzano [50691]
[Cross listed with Anth. 82300 and CL. 74000]

This seminar will be devoted to a theoretical consideration of notions self, body, and other, and by extension desire and power, in contemporary social, literary-critical, and philosophical thought. We will give critical attention to classificatory (cognitive), phenomenological, dialectical, pragmatic, psychoanalytic, structural and post-structural approaches. My perspective will be ethnographic, less in the sense of looking for "causes" and "explanations" for contemporary articulations of these prevailing notions than in putting them into question by calling attention to contrastive modes of articulation and understanding. We will consider, for example, the way notions of the body have served to anneal a certain approach to the individual, psyche, language, desire, and death. We will look at the "denuding" of relationship that is perpetuated by an abstract dialectic of self and other. We will look at masking -- fashion and make-up -- in terms of self- and other- alienation, projection, and the "hovering" within the non-space between mirror and mirror image and by extension other reflecting media: the screen, the word. Readings will include works by Hegel, Foucault, Freud, Bataille, Lacan, Kristeva, and Butler as well as more substantive literary and ethnographic ones. Two short workshop papers will be required as well as one longer research paper.

WSCP 81000 - Woman's Art/ Feminist Art
GC T 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room 3416, 3 credits, Prof. Anna Chave [50692]
[Cross listed with Art 86000]

Taking a case study approach, this course explores what is (and has been) at stake in the decision by female artists to align, or resist aligning, their practice with feminism. Also at issue are the stakes entailed in the critics' or historians' decision to assimilate women's art practice to a feminist critique, and the relative efficacy and acuity of the differing forms such critiques have assumed. Course to be conducted as a colloquium. Auditors by permission of instructor at first meeting of class.

Suggested preliminary reading: Broude/Garrard, The Power of Feminist Art, 1994 and Griselda Pollock, "Inscriptions in the Visible," in Inside the Visible, ed. de Zegher, 1996.

WSCP 81000 - Women in Criminal Justice: Women, Crime and Justice
JJ T 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room 431T, 3 credits, Prof. Natalie Sokoloff [50693]
[Cross listed with CRJ 72200]

This course takes advantage of the many new books published and the constantly evolving literature on women, crime, and justice. It is structured to provide a set of challenging and provocative questions to help us learn more about and evaluate what happens to women in the criminal justice system, how gender and crime are related to issues of social inequality, and what alternatives are available using a more social justice framework. Because any discussion of women, crime, and justice must acknowledge both the diversity of women and the diversity of crimes and conditions under which laws are made and enforced, we will look at all issues through a constantly developing and changing perspective on the intersectionalities of race/class/gender/nation/sexual orientation. Students will be encouraged to critically evaluate all materials--and in so doing to improve upon and transform our understandings of what happens to women throughout the criminal justice system and in relation to social justice.

WSCP 81000 - African American Literacy and Cultural Criticism
GC R 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Robert Reid-Pharr [50694]
[Cross listed with Eng. 75200]

This seminar will introduce students to some of the more significant of recent critical and theoretical trends within the study of African American literature and culture. Participants in the seminar will be asked consistently to wrestle with the question of whether or not it is possible to produce a specifically black literary criticism. In relation to this question we will read a number of authors who seriously challenge our ability to utilize race as a critical category. We will also, however, be equally concerned with understanding how one might best define what has come to be known as the Black American literary tradition. Thus, the students who will be best served by this course are those who possess at least a basic knowledge of both nineteenth and twentieth century Black American writing. Questions of "black" corporeality, gender and sexuality will figure prominently in the course. In particular, participants will be asked to think through the manner in which developments in Feminist Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Ethnic Studies and American Studies impact African American literary and cultural critique. Students will be asked to write several short papers during the course of the semester. They will also do at least one in class presentation. Authors whom we will examine include: Paul Gilroy, Saidiya Hartman, John McWhorter, Hazel Carby, Robert Reid-Pharr, Henry Louis Gates, Claudia Tate, Philip Brian Harper, Manthia Diawara and Anthony Appiah.

WSCP 81000 - Hotel Women: Stein, Rhys, Colette, F. Chopin, and Others
GC T 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum [50696]
[Cross listed with Eng. 80200]

This seminar is the third in a series exploring intersections of literature, music, and performance (the previous two were "Ear Training" and "Minor Moderns"). In addition to writing a final essay, each student will give an in-class performance--be it recitation, drama, dance, music, or multi-media event. We will provisionally define "hotel woman" as a fugitive sensibility or character, designated feminine, reprieved from the rigors of fixed address. The semester's authors have not always lived in hotels, but their works illustrate the ecstatic liabilities of hotel consciousness, including transience, shiftlessness, languor, depersonalization, sitting, despondency, trance, effeminacy, drift, boredom, satiety, repetition, retirement, imprisonment, hypersexuality, prostitution, shame, and addiction. We will read essays (Heidegger, Kracauer, Bachelard, Koolhaus, Benjamin) exploring the poetics of hotels, and of consciousness thrown into a hotel; we will study the work of visual artists, including the dollhouse photos of Laurie Simmons and the hotel collages of Joseph Cornell; we will read prose by Gertrude Stein, Colette, Jean Rhys, Willa Cather, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick (Sleepless Nights), and Marie Redonnet (Hôtel Splendid), and poetry by Stein, Guillaume Apollinaire ("Hôtels"), John Ashbery (Hotel Lautréamont), and Elizabeth Bishop; and we will see a few films, perhaps Greta Garbo's Grand Hotel, Ida Lupino's Ladies in Retirement, or Little Edie Bouvier Beale's Grey Gardens. The course's musical component centers on Frédéric Chopin, and emphasizes his work's embodiment of the hermaphrodite, the has-been, the miniature, the foreigner, and the fairy. We will pay attention to the literary hauntings of Chopin's chararacteristic forms (small rooms,single-occupancy): nocturne, impromptu, waltz, mazurka, scherzo, ballade, prelude. We will read selections from Chopin's correspondence, and musicologist Jeffrey Kallberg's Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre. Additionally, in our quest to valorize the tiny, the out-of-date, and the wrong, we will listen to salon music (call it "hotel music") by such composers as Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, Serge Rachmaninoff, Amy Beach, Deodat de Severac, Federico Mompou, Gabriel Fauré, and Francis Poulenc. (Footnote: the subtitle of this sometimes Francophilic course is secretly "A Theory of Pleasure.")

WSCP 81000 - Austen and Byron
GC R 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Rachel Brownstein [50744]
[Cross listed with Eng. 81600]

Contemporaries Jane Austen and Lord Byron knew some of the same people and might have met, but didn't. She alludes to his work; he doesn't mention hers. An odd couple, the reticent genteel lady novelist and the self-exiled, self-dramatizing Noble Poet are interesting to read side by side in light of old and new ideas about hero and heroine, foreign and domestic, individual and community, romantic and real. Both the Austen heroine and the Byronic hero have been read as projections of the writers (and/or their readers). The erotic dimension of literary responsiveness, the uses and abuses of biographical criticism, and some differences between reading prose and reading poetry will be among our subjects, along with notions of "romance" and "Romanticism." But the main focus of this seminar will be Austen's irony and Byron's, the similarities and differences between them, and how irony as these early nineteenth-century writers knew and used it differs from the post-modern "irony" that puts "everything" in "quotes."

W.H. Auden writes of Austen and Byron, as it were in the same breath, in his Letters from Iceland: we will begin with Auden, and read some criticism and at least one biography of each writer, but the emphasis will be on the texts. Students will read Austen's six novels and her youthful parodies, Byron's Don Juan and some of his other poems, and some of his letters. In addition to weekly questions for discussion, students will write one paper on Byron and one on Austen.

WSCP 81000 - Literature and 17^th Century Cultural Revolution
GC T 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jacqueline DiSalvo [50697]
[Cross listed with Eng. 82100]

This class will contrast the construction of two islands -- that of Shakespeare's Tempest in 1613 and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe about a hundred years later to launch an inquiry into the century of revolution in between them that created the foundations of modern society and culture. What happens to the Renaissance that, in the most drastic literary evolution ever, we go in a century from Shakespeare's poetic drama and Spenserian allegory via Milton's exhaustion of epic to Defoe's creation of the prose novel? Employing the concepts of Foucault's episteme, Bakhtin's chronotope, Marx's ideology, Gramsci's hegemony. Jameson's ideologeme and Habermas' public sphere, this course will interrogate the roots of the master discourses and founding values, myths and institutions of our bourgeois society. Focusing on Milton, the first conscious cultural revolutionary, as the crux of this "Great Transformation" we will historicize his works via Christopher Hill, Norbert Elias and others from a cultural materialist, feminist and psycho-historical stance within a wider context of seventeenth century writers. Setting Milton against selections from Shakespeare (Tempest), Ben Jonson (Bartholemew Fair), the Court masque, religious and political prose (Winstanley, Coppe, Filmer, Hobbes, Locke), metaphysical (Donne, Herbert, Crashaw), Cavalier (Jonson, Herrick) and Restoration (Rochester)poetry and Aphra Behn, we will consider such issues as the re-invention of gender, the construction of subjectivity and oedipalization of the psyche, anti-Petrarchianism and the reconfiguring of marriage, family, and sexuality, the gendered split of public and private, and the move from punishment to discipline. We will examine the invention of vocation and the work ethic, the culture wars of Puritan literacy vs royal spectacle and Bakhtin's popular carnivale, the poetic move from sacramentalism to iconoclasm, from court masque to Milton's closet drama, the disenchantment of nature, decline of magic, and persecution of witches, republican art, and the effects of primitive accumulation and possessive individualism not only on politics but on psychology, religion and literature. By placing seventeenth century cultural production within various theories of the early modern we will try to develop a dialectical approach to its appropriation/ subversion in contemporary cultural criticism to create a legacy to ongoing cultural revolution.

WSCP 81000 - Black Women Writers: Cross Cultural Connections
GC R 11:45-1:45 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Barbara Webb [50698]
[Cross listed with Eng. 86100]

A study of women writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. This course will explore how these writers address issues of culture, sexuality, and politics in their fiction, essays, and poetry. Of particular interest will be their engagements with nationalist, feminist, and diasporic discourse. How do these women re-envision nation and community in their texts? What are their contributions to the creative use of language and literary form? How do regional and transnational perspectives intersect in their writings? Selected readings will include texts by writers such as Ama Ata Aidoo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Bessie Head, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Maryse Conde, Michelle Cliff, Toni Cade Bambara, Gayle Jones, and Toni Morrison. Requirements: An oral presentation and a term paper (15-20 pages). The course will be conducted as a seminar with class discussions of assigned readings and oral presentations each week.

WSCP 81000 - Construction of Gender in the Victorian Period
GC M 4:15-6:15 p.m, Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Anne Humpherys & Talia Schaffer [50699]
[Cross listed with Eng. 86100]

This course will explore the construction of gender in the Victorian era, with special attention to alternative or marginalized gender and sexual behaviors. From a modern perspective we tend to see Victorian separate spheres as monolithic entities, but in reality these identities were profoundly contested. Reading now-forgotten texts reveals some surprising possibilities for alternative subjectivities. The course will investigate just how the model of the "professional man" evolved, what kinds of class mobility it facilitated, and how it was in turn altered by the demands of empire. We will also investigate alternate forms of masculinity. We will ask how Victorian novels formulated the infamous "Angel in the House," but we will inquire what other forms of female identity realist, sensation, and New Woman novels were able to accommodate. In other words, this course asks how Victorians wanted to be, but also not to be, a man or a woman.

We will explore each model of gender behavior by pairing canonical and noncanonical texts. Reading this way opens up a number of new ideas. What accounts for the difference in the critical trajectory of these texts? Have the noncanonical texts been rejected because they are too threatening, or are they actually conservative in ways that no longer appeal to post-Victorian readers? Do the canonical texts preach an ideologically consistent rhetoric or do they offer nodes of resistance? Possible texts include David Copperfield; John Halifax, Gentleman; The Woman in White; Aurora Floyd; She; Story of an African Farm; The Picture of Dorian Gray; Jude the Obscure, and Dracula, along with various short pieces, both fiction and journalistic. Requirements: one oral report; one short paper, and one long paper.

WSCP 81000 - America Between the Wars, 1914-1945
GC T 6:30-8:30, Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Blanche Wiesen Cook & Gerald Markowitz, [50700]
[Cross listed with Hist. 75700]

Given the urgent need to understand the global and domestic implications of this critical historical moment, our course will focus on the legacy of empire, the international connectedness of the Great Depression, the challenge of racial justice, the quest for economic dignity and workers' rights, the movements for women's freedom and equity as they unfolded in the first half of the 20th century. The course will emphasize social movements, and employ biographical studies as they illumine the civil rights, women's rights, homosexual rights, unionist and internationalist struggles in the era that comprises the Harlem Renaissance, issues of war and peace, the New Deal, and the Cold War.

WSCP 81000 - Globalization, Health and Human Rights
GC T 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Rosalind Petchesky [50701]
[Cross listed with Pol Sci 86409]

Who will get antibiotics to counter anthrax and who will not? Who will get drugs for AIDS and who will not? The answers contain an enormously complex story about the interlinkages between international/transnational politics, macroeconomics, political theory, and global public health. "Globalization, Health and Human Rights" is an advanced research seminar whose goal is to understand the implications of various concepts of justice (gender, economic, racial) for the global politics of health and the human right to health. It is open to students majoring in political science, women's studies, or public health, particularly those with an interest in any of the following: international relations, political theory, gender studies, globalization, and social and economic inequalities in health status and health care. After an introductory exploration of various approaches to globalization (or global capitalism) as the context of international health policies, we shall examine in turn: normative frameworks of health as a human right or health as a "global public good"; economic frameworks, particular that of "health sector reforms" and the role of international institutions (especially the World Bank and the WHO) in their promotion; and the impact of transnational NGOs and social movements-especially women's health and HIV/AIDS groups-in transforming the prevailing discourses and politics of global health. Finally, we shall do an in-depth case study of the issue of access to essential, life-prolonging medicines as it relates to trade, intellectual property rights, social (racial, gender, class) in/justice, the human right to health, and global terrorism.

Work in the course will involve participation in eight weeks of common readings and discussions of the general background themes described above, along with intensive research, both individual and collaborative, into specific case studies. Students will select individual or team research topics and design based on consultation with the instructor and will be responsible for producing a research paper of publishable quality and length by the end of the semester. The final six weeks will be devoted to oral reports in class on individual/team research projects.

WSCP 81000 - Home, Homelessness and Homelands
GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Leanne Rivlin [50702]
[Cross listed with Psych. 80100]

The focus of this seminar is on people's connections and attachments to places, particularly to their homes, their homelands and the implications of their loss. We will begin with an analysis of theories of home, its meanings and functions, its changes over time and its roles in people's lives. We then will consider the implications of threats to home and the loss of home and explanations for the increases in contemporary homelessness. Finally, we will address homelands, raising questions regarding contestations over territories, and the significance of homelands in light of increasing global concerns. Through readings on history, theory and research, exploration of the interests of class members, as well as the work of outside guests who have studied these issues, we will try to clarify the implications of place meanings and place attachments.

WSCP 81000 - Social Justice and Social Development in Education
GC M 11:45-1:45 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Michelle Fine & Colette Daiute [50703]
[Cross listed with Psych. 80100]

This interdisciplinary course focuses on theory and research to analyze critically and intervene ethically in the everyday questions of social justice and development in public education. Providing an integration of perspectives on social justice and social development from disciplines including social/personality psychology, developmental psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political science, the course creates a foundation for research and practice in urban education. Theory, research, and examination of community needs to provide the foundation for developing research questions grounded in practice for new knowledge about education. As a workshop for scholars of urban education with a critical eye on inequities that affect schooling, community life, educator practice, youth development and a creative commitment to change, this course revolves around the development of student research questions, with insights from the virtual laboratory of New York City and other sites for the finest and most devastating forms of public education systems where questions of race, ethnicity, language, gender, sexuality, finance inequity, school size, testing, school violence, and student voice are everyday concerns. Defined as social theory devoted to examining critically the distribution of educational opportunities, processes and outcomes, in ways that will improve the conditions and opportunities of oppressed people, social justice studies address institutional systems, policies and practices, and the organization of educators and youth in response to these systems. Building on socio-cultural and socio-cognitive theories, social development studies address issues of diversity and critical reflection in the development of educator and student knowledge and skills required for participating in challenging circumstances and creatively extending material and social capital toward the development of social institutions in service of the intellectual, social, and political development of children and families. The integration of social justice and development can be found in the issues that confront urban schools, urban educators and urban youth, whose opportunities are seriously limited by discrimination, poverty, and social resources. Course work includes reading, class presentations, research projects, and class presentations.

 

WSCP 81000 - The Study of Lives I: Lives as Portraits
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Suzanne C. Ouellette [50704]
[Cross listed with Psych. 80100]

The study of lives has always held an ambiguous position in Psychology. On the one hand, it is difficult to imagine a Psychology, the discipline devoted to human behavior and the study of mental and emotional processes, not concerned with people's lives. On the other hand, important representatives and structures of support and socialization within Psychology have often dismissed the study of lives as not sufficiently rigorous; and as more appropriate to the Arts and Humanities than to a discipline, like Psychology, that seeks to be a Science. This course will take seriously both points of view. We will review several of the serious endeavors within Psychology to do the study of lives. We will also take seriously those psychological critics of the study of lives and leave psychology to see what goes on about lives within the Arts and Humanities. The first part of the course will consider the study of lives in Psychology through contributors like Freud, Gordon Allport, Robert White, and Erik Erikson; and more recent work in political psychology and psychologies inspired by feminist, phenomenological, and hermeneutic-interpretive theories. The second part of the course will take us to the Humanities and the Arts and a consideration of how painters across several centuries have approached the making of portraits. We will look at paintings as well as critical and historical commentary on painting. Important guides in these territories outside Psychology will include writers like Meyer Schapiro, William Rubin on Picasso, and John Berger who has considered portraiture across time and cultures.

The final and third part of the course will seek to integrate all of this material and develop a way of doing the study of lives within Psychology that takes advantage of what our journeys through painting have taught us. Students will experience this first hand by applying the integration in their own studies of others' lives. "Lab" experiences in the course will include the collection and analysis of life study data, and writing about a selected life.

A Preview: A sequel to this course is also being planned that will move into what psychologists might learn from literature, and how novelists and biographers have taken up the task of writing about lives.

WSCP 81000 - Gender & Power in Families
GC M 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Julia Wrigley [50705]
[Cross listed with Soc. 83300]

This course will focus on forms of inequality within families, including, most particularly, inequality in access to money, inequality in household maintenance work, and inequality in child rearing. It will consider how gender affects power relations in all these areas. The course will confront the theoretical and empirical question of the extent to which the family can be considered as having one social and economic identity, with family members sharing a common interest. It will explore the joint and yet separate economic and social positions of those within families. Topics covered will include women's ability to maintain economic independence within families, family economic strategies and how they affect individual members, household labor and who performs it, and childrearing and its contribution to inequality within and between families. The varying power of men, women, and children will be assessed in different types of families, including heterosexual, gay, and lesbian families. These issues will be discussed in the light of feminist and other social theories.

WSCP 81000 - Social Welfare Policy and Planning
Hunter T 2:00-4:00 p.m.,Room TBA , 3 credits, Prof. Mimi Abramovitz [50706]
[Cross listed with SSW 71000]

The course applies historical, ideological and theoretical models (including feminism) to the study of social problems and social welfare policies. In a seminar fashion, students critique various definitions of social problems; examine the impact of race, class, gender and heterosexist power relationships on the definitional process; and explore the implications of social problem definition for social welfare policy analysis and application. Using the intellectual frameworks developed in class students study and analyze a social problem of their choosing in class presentations and in a final paper.

WSCP 81000 - Women and Social Welfare Policy
Hunter T 9:00-11:00 a.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mimi Abramovitz [50707]
[Cross listed with SSW 85000]

This course introduces students to US. social welfare policy from the perspective of women. First we look at contemporary attitudes towards women's rights, definitions of women's oppression as articulated by different feminist perspectives and the role and function of the welfare state in wider society. Drawing on this foundation we explore how the ideology of gender shapes the design of social welfare policy and delivery of social services focusing on several contemporary social policy issues (such as welfare reform). Students explore other issues in the written assignment. Finally, the course examines role of women in the development of the welfare state, as well as low-income women's social welfare activism. The course pays special attention to diversity issues particularly the impact of social welfare policies and programs on women of different races, classes, and sexual orientations.

WSCP 81000 - Cultural Theory and the Documentary Film
GC R 6:30-9:30 p.m., Room C419, 3 credits, Professor Alison Griffiths [50708]
[Cross listed with Theatre 81500]

This is a lecture course examining documentary cinema through the lens of cultural theory. The course is organized around three key topics: the documentary archive and the ethnographic gaze; national identity and documentary aesthetics; and experimental and postcolonial documentary practice. The course offers students a broad introduction to cultural theory, drawing upon such theoretical frameworks as historiography, race, gender, social class, nation, ethnography, and postmodernism. Films screened in class will encompass the following genres: silent ethnographic film, Griersonian documentary, feminist documentary, direct cinema, auteurist documentary, postcolonial documentary, activist video, and mainstream documentary. The course considers how these films circulate within and across historical, social, and cultural spheres and evoke discourses of "truth," "realism," and "authenticity" through their representational forms and cross-cultural readings. List of required texts available in the Certificate Programs Office.

WSCP 81000 - Passing, Lynching and Jim Crow: Oscar Micheaux and His Circle in U.S. Cinema
GC W 6:30-9:30 p.m., Room C-419, 3 credits, Professor Michele Wallace [50709]
[Cross listed with Theatre 81500]

This course will draw upon the recently rediscovered films of, and the newly published scholarship on the black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. We will examine his writings and his career within the context of contemporary race imagery of race and its characteristic social manifestations (passing, lynching and Jim Crow segregation). Primarily, we will employ comparisons of his films with such films as Uncle Tom's Cabin (Edwin Porter's in 1903 and William Robert Daly's in 1914), D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), Dudley Murphy's musical shorts, King Vidor's Hallelujah! (1929), Imitation of Life (John Stahl's in 1934 and Douglas Sirk's in 1959), Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind (1939), Harve Foster's and William Jackson's Song of the South (1946), Clarence Brown's Intruder in the Dust (1949), Otto Preminger's Porgy and Bess (1956), and Robert Mulligan's To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). List of films to be screened and required texts available in Certificate Programs Office.