The Graduate Center

The City University of New York

Course Descriptions

 Fall 2008




Women’s Studies Certificate Program

Coordinator: Anne Humpherys, Room 5116 (817-8328, 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 experience of both women and men in terms 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, including lecture series and forums. Students are also invited to participate in the research programs and seminars at the Center for Women and Society at The Graduate Center.


.WSCP 71700 - Proseminar: Multicultural/Transnational Feminisms

GC      T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Rupal Oza and Saadia Toor [93670]


Multicultural/Transnational feminisms will explore the gender dynamics of racial, ethnic, and economic relations of power in domestic, international, and transnational settings. We will examine feminist scholarship produced by and about American women of color, Third World women, and other social and political actors whose experiences and thinking have shaped contemporary ideas about gender, power, and international political economies. We will explore how both self-identified feminists and people who do not consider themselves feminists write about and understand gender, justice, human rights, tolerance, agency, imperialism, and other relevant topics. We will also examine how women and self-identified feminists practice solidarity across and within national boundaries, paying attention to the possibilities and constraints that shape transnational feminist activism. We will look at both empirical and theoretical texts from a range of academic disciplines. We will explore some of the following questions: How do racial. sexual, and national identities change the meanings of gender and feminism? Who should be the arbiter of "equality," "fairness," and "human rights"? How have conceptions of citizenship both changed and remained the same in the contemporary world? What ethical questions shape the practices of feminism and feminist politics both domestically and internationally? How has human rights discourse been deployed? What is the relationship between modes of production, political economy, and gender politics?


WSCP 80801 - Feminist Texts and Contexts

GC W 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA , 3 credits, Profs. Sandi Cooper and Susan O’Malley [93671] [Cross listed with MALS 72100]


We propose to restore the tradition established when women’s studies began as a concentration at the Graduate School – interdisciplinary approaches to the themes in all its courses. Usually at least two faculty from different disciplines participated in the classroom to work out new angles of analysis of traditional or canonical knowledge or to forge new visions. Our course will build on that pedagogy, using historical, literary and critical modes of analysis to explore western traditions of feminist thinking.

Text and context, that is the close reading of classic feminist texts in their historical environment, will provide our methodology. Authors as diverse as Christine de Pisan (14-15th century, C.E.) and Virginia Woolf (20th century) will be explored as significant literary innovators as well as major political voices. Students will be expected to examine their impact on the wider culture.

Two differently trained scholars functioning in each class meeting will be supplemented by invited guests.


WSCP 81000 - Gender, Class and the State

GC W 11:45 a.m.- 1:45 p.m., Room TBA , 3 credits, Prof. Ida Susser [93672] [Cross listed with ANTHRO.71300] Permission of the Instructor is required


This course will review anthropological perspectives on gender and power. It will then proceed to discussions of gender, capitalism and the state, gender and nation and the current literature of gender and imperialism. As we proceed to discuss issues of women and gender in contemporary states and the U.S. in relation to empire, the readings will become necessarily much more interdisciplinary.

   

 

WSCP 81000 -Modernisms, Visual and Verbal:1900-2000

GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mary Ann Caws [93674] [Cross listed with Eng. 76000]

 

Touching on an obviously wide range of topics, this investigation of various kinds and styles of what we generally call "modernism," and "post-modernism" will adapt itself as it goes along to the interests of the participants. The convergences with such movements as Symbolism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Existentialism, Concrete Poetry, and the like (or the unlike) will not be avoided.  Such questions as: what about the "pre-modern" and its dating, what really matters to make something "modern," is there a "neo-modernism" or/and a "pseudo-modernism," how have the generally considered high points of this hundred-year scope changed, and when, what changes in the so-called canon are important as the history of modernisms will underlie the conversations, whose title is plural in order to leave the range as open as possible. Some crucial localities can be predicted in the two different and interconnecting realms of art and text -- listed alphabetically, in the understanding that the representation of one kind or style may be very limited: Simone de Beauvoir,  Jorge Luis Borges, André Breton, Joseph Cornell, Robert Desnos, Marcel Duchamp, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Henry James, James Joyce, Stéphane  Mallarmé, Henri Matisse, Tom Phillips, Pablo Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

 

 

WSCP 81000 - The Lyric Essay

GCGCT 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum [93675] [Cross listed with Eng. 86400]

 

This seminar, an introduction to experimental critical writing, aims to help students develop their styles and to uncover the rhetorical possibilities traveling under the name “essay.” In lieu of a final paper, students will write, each week, a two-page lyric essay, always in response to a specific assignment. What we will call provisionally the “lyric essay” is a hybrid form, borrowing from poem, story, drama, diary, rant, and manifesto. Often autobiographical, a lyric essay reveals an idiosyncratic personality, sidesteps expository protocols, and obsessively attends to its own unfolding. Our reading may include a focus on the philosophical essay as a lyric performance—unstable, divided, fitful, stammering, explosive, misleading. Possibilities for the syllabus are works by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Dorothy Wordsworth, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gertrude Stein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Colette, Robert Walser, James Baldwin, Jacques Lacan, Jorge Luis Borges, Elizabeth Hardwick, Lydia Davis, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson. No auditors. 4 credits only.

 

 

WSCP 81000 - Global Decadence

GCGCM 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Richard Kaye [93676] [Cross listed with Eng. 86000

 

Although critics invariably consider Decadence in terms of British and French literary texts—and only then as a brief “mauve interregnum” (in John Updike's words)--this seminar explores Decadence as an internationally pervasive set of ideas, movements, techniques, and figures, many of which have maintained a keen afterlife in modernist and post-modernist texts. In addition to focusing on Anglo-American Decadent writing, the class will explore French, German, Italian, and Russian literary Decadence along with a work from Latin America. In the writings of Huysmans, Mallarmé, and Baudelaire, Decadent scenarios and tropes seem to exist outside of history, as both naturalist and realist techniques are skewered, (although in the anarchist writer Octave Mirbeau’s semi-satiric fiction, Decadence becomes a politically cognizant mode.) In fact, the European turn-of the-century is an ideologically complex period of pervasive fears and fantasies, in which excesses of language and erotics dominate, along with such sensational figures as the New Woman, the homosexual bachelor, the Anarchist, the Oriental, the overreaching colonialist, the cult-inspiring aesthete, the vampire, and the femme fatale. Fin-de-siècle writers navigated a world in which theories of “degeneration” and sex scandals preoccupied the popular imagination. In the writings of Pater, Symonds, and Wilde, Aestheticism emerges as a robust movement that increasingly becomes linked to Decadent peril. The course will explore how British and American women novelists sought to situate themselves within urban Aestheticist and Decadent cenacles invariably defined as male. Additionally, we will consider two German novellas—Thomas Mann’s “Blood of the Walsungs” and Georg Trakl’s “Desolation"--as well as Strauss’s operatic adaptation of Wilde’s “Salome.” The influence of Wilde will be traced elsewhere in Europe, where writers variously respond to the playwright's writing, public downfall, and posthumous myth. Modernist poets and novelists such as Yeats, Eliot, and James, meanwhile, critiqued and refashioned Decadent figures, tropes, and strategies. Finally, the seminar will take up twentieth-century revisions: Nabokov’s “Lolita” as a tragicomic Salome narrative, Philip Roth’s novella “The Ghost Writer” as an homage to James’ “The Author of Beltraffo”, and Will Self’s rewriting of “Dorian Gray” in “Dorian". Issues of translation will be considered.

Among the other texts we will consider: Hardy, “Jude the Obscure,” Huysmans, “Against Nature”; Octave Mirbeau, “The Torture Garden,” Baudelaire, “Poems” (Selections); Wilde, “Picture of Dorian Gray,” “Salome”; Mallarmé, “Poems,” (Selections); Stoker, “Dracula”; D'Annunzio, "The Child of Pleasure"; Yeats, "Poems" (Selections); Eliot, “Poems” (Selections); Schreiner, "Story of an African Farm," Kuzmin, “Wings”; José Lezama Lima, “Paradiso”; “The Dedalus Books of Russian and German Decadence"; Showalter, ed. “Daughters of Decadence.” Critical and theoretical texts will include Gautier, “Preface to ‘Mademoiselle de Maupin,” Nordeau, “Degeneration” (Selections); Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” Bataille, “Literature and Evil,” Talia Schaffer, “The Forgotten Female Aesthetes” (Selections); Richard Ellmann, “The Uses of Decadence,” Richard Gilman, “Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet," Linda Dowling, “The Decadent and the New Woman,” Michael Riffaterre, “Decadent Pardoxes,” Laura Engelstein, "The Keys to Happiness," Leo Bersani, "The Culture of Redemption." Mid-term paper and a final paper.

 

 

WSCP 81000 - Women’s Writing: Women’s Modernist Documentaries

GCT 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jane Marcus [93677] [Cross listed with Eng. 78000]

 

Concentrating on non-fictional works by Rebecca West - Black Lamb and Gray Falcon, Nancy Cunard – The Negro Anthology (1934) [in photocopy form, using the 800 page original edition, NOT the reprints]- and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, The Years and the Scrapbooks, we will discuss these three projects as modernist documentary projects.

The work of women photographers like Lee Miller, Gerda Taro, Kati Horna and Dora Maar and the work of war journalists will be examined – Martha Gellhorn, Josephine Herbst, etc. Possibly women’s historical novels will fit into this project as well.

 

 

WSCP 81000 -Representing Bodies in Early Modern England

GCGCT 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Tanya Pollard [93678] [Cross listed with Eng. 82100]

 

This course will examine how writers imagined and represented bodies in early modern England. Conceptually, bodies changed dramatically in the period: the longstanding humoral model, inherited from the Greek physician Galen, was confronted with challenges from Vesalian anatomy, Paracelsan pharmacy, Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, and new illnesses and medicines introduced by international travel and trade. Amid all these changes, bodies on page and stage were dissected, dismembered, drugged, displayed, disciplined, adorned, painted, and ravished. We will examine how different genres represent these and other bodily states, with attention to the body's relationship to the mind, the emotions, the environment, and literature itself. Readings will include tragedies (including The Duchess of Malfi, The Revenger's Tragedy, and Hamlet); comedies (including The Taming of the Shrew, Bartholomew Fair, and Volpone); and erotic epyllia (including Venus and Adonis and The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image); as well as selections from cookbooks and cosmetic manuals (such as Platt's

Delights for Ladies), antitheatrical polemics (including Gosson's School of Abuse), medical texts (such as Crooke's Mikrocosmographia, and Culpepper's A Directory for Midwives), and conduct books (including Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman). Assignments will include a presentation, occasional brief written responses, and a final paper.

 

 

WSCP 81000 - Proust 1

GC      T 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Eve Sedgwick [93679] [Cross listed with Eng. 87100]Permission of the Instructor is required.

 

This is the first half of a year-long seminar organized around a close, start-to-finish reading of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. We will be considering a wide range of the issues, motives, and ambitions embodied in the novel, including its complicated relation to the emerging discourses of Euro- American homosexuality. Other preoccupations that I hope will emerge through our discussions include the changing possibilities of novelistic genre; narratorial consciousness; texture; habit and addiction; experimental identities; adult relations to childhood; the spatialities of present and past; the vicissitudes of gender; the bourgeois maternal in relation to such other roles as the grandmother, the aunt, the uncle, and a variety of domestic workers; the uses of paganism; alternatives to triangular desire; the languages of affect; phallic and non-phallic sexualities; the phenomenology and epistemology of oneiric states; the relations between Jewish diasporic being and queer diasporic being within modernism; and the affective, phenomenological, and philosophical ramifications of an interest in the transmigration of souls – to name but a few.  Readings will be in English, in the old translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, though with reference to the French text as well.

 

 

WSCP 81000 - Readings in Black America Literary/Cultural Criticism and Theory

GCM 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Robert Reid-Pharr [93680] [Cross listed with Eng. 80300]

 

This seminar will introduce students to some of the more significant of recent critical and theoretical trends within the study of Black 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 Black 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, among others: Paul Gilroy, Candice Jenkins, Jacqueline Goldsby, Claudia Tate, Saidiya Hartman, Michelle Stephens, Madhu Dubey, and Daphne Brooks.

 

 

WSCP 81000 - Romanticism and the Ethical Imagination

GCW 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Nancy Yousef [93681] [Cross listed with Eng. 84200

 

This course is at once a study of major romantic authors and of the interaction of ethics and literature considered as a problem of literary history and theory. We will address ourselves to the challenging revisions of enlightenment aspirations that make the period so tumultuous, and the texts it produced so rich. Fundamental questions first mooted in philosophy find new urgency and complexity in romantic literature even as they are fought over the in political sphere: the force and limits of sympathy, the necessity of trust, the foundations of equality.

The course is divided into three parts. We will begin with a study of key pre-romantic formulations of the problem of self and other in Hume, Rousseau, and Kant. We will then consider responses to the French Revolution as symptomatic of the convulsive revaluation of terms such as "compassion" and "community" in writings by Burke, Wollstonecraft, Godwin and Hegel. The third section of the course will be devoted to case studies in the core of the romantic canon, focusing on Wordsworth, the Shelleys, and Jane Austen.

Important historical events and cultural developments that upset established forms of domestic, communal, sexual, and political relations will be touched on, but our main concern will be the evident conceptual imperative to establish the bases ("natural," "conventional," "contractual") of relationships between individuals as manifested in a range of imaginative, theoretical, and political writing. At once comparative and interdisciplinary, the course offers an opportunity to explore methodological and historical approaches to the relationship between ethics and literature (secondary readings will include Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Jessica Benjamin, Stanley Cavell, Martha Nussbaum, and Cora Diamond).

 

 

WSCP 81000 - Early American Women’s History, 1607-1815

GCR 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Carol Berkin [93682] [Cross listed with Hist. 75000 & ASCP 82000]

 

This course will examine the lives of American women – European, Indian, and African- from the colonial period to the antebellum era. The readings and discussion will focus on demographic patterns, family structure, gendered division of labor and female work patterns, gender ideologies, legal status, and women’s religious experiences. Careful attention will be paid to regional, racial and class differences in shaping women’s lives. We will discuss the central historiographical debates in the field as well as methodological problems in reconstructing women’s past.

Course Requirements: Students will write a 3-5 page critique of each week’s reading assignment. Students must be prepared to present their arguments regarding the reading in class discussion.

 

 

WSCP 81000 - The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity and Globalization

GC      W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Eugenia Paulicelli and Joseph Glick [93683] [Cross listed with IDS 82300]

 

The aims of this interdisciplinary seminar are Threefold:

To show the complexity in the production and consumption of fashion; to investigate the mechanisms of cultural production; and to examine the interaction between personal, national, and transnational identities. Fashion is inextricably linked to time space relations as shown in the seminal work by David Harvey, Bourdieau, Bakhtin, Barthes and others. Fashion is a previledged lens through which to gain a new understanding of cultures, and individual lives, as well as the mechanisms regulating cultural and economic production in the past and in the present. Fashion is a process in two senses: it is a market-driven cycle of consumer desire and demand; and it is a modern mechanism for the fabrication of the self. It is in this respect that fashion operates as a fulcrum for negotiating the meeting of internal and external worlds. Fashion is also key in gaining an understanding of the current shifts in the global economy and markets, as well as in the projection of identity and aesthetics. In the world of cultural production and the media fashion has always been and still is linked to a desirable model of modernity, style and chic (e.g. Paris in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries; Milan and Italy from the late 1970s onwards; Antwerp and Belgium for avant-garde design in the 1990s, new York sportswear and ready to wear from the inter-war period onwards etc. These are just some examples of the several case studies under examination during the seminar, and of what seems to constitute the power of fashion to portray and invent national and global identities, branding particular countries, lifestyles and cities on a global scale. The seminar will also encourage students to do fieldwork in NYC and produce original research.

 

 

WSCP 81000 - Comparative Gender Policy

GC      W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Joyce Gelb [93684] [Cross listed with Pol.Sci. 83502]

 

This course analyzes various public policies related to gender in a comparative perspective. While we will attempt to define “gender related policies” from the broadest possible vantage point, among the policies currently to be considered are sexual politics including reproductive rights and violence against women; family policies including child care, parental leave and child support; and equal opportunity policies including anti sex discrimination as well as sexual harassment.

The scope of the course will include analysis of policies in Europe and the US, as well as selected Asian and Latin American nations , though the scope will be truly international. The course will also highlight the importance of transnational impacts on national policy making. The focus is on the conditions and factors which help to create “women friendly” policies .

There will be one major research paper and other assignments to be determined.

 

 

WSCP 81000 - Social Injustice

JJM 2:00 -4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Michelle Fine/Susan Opotow [93685] [Cross listed with Psych. 80103] Permission of the Instructor is required.

 

In this course we will read theoretical and empirical work that raises questions of social injustice. This includes reading social psychological and sociological writings, class-based analyses, feminist

theory, critical race theory, and recent work on sexualities. The course will be organized as a research collective, in which we will review questions of theory, methods, ethics, collaboration and the

research-policy nexus. Students will be asked to pursue a piece of original research (individually or in collaboration) for the class on a question of social injustice, and they will be expected to produce a comprehensive critical literature review by the class’s end.

 

 

WSCP 81000 - Social Personality Psychology 1

GCW 9:30 -11:30 a.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Suzanne Ouellette [93686] [Cross listed with Psych. 74000] Permission of the Instructor is required.

 

This is a required course for all first year Social-Personality students. We will read and discuss materials that well exemplify the (a) link between the intellectual concerns of personality psychologists and social psychologists, (b) the need to approach human behavior through a variety of levels of analysis, moving from the individual through the cultural level, and (c) the critical importance of an historical approach in research. Students will be introduced to some classic texts in behavioral and social science as well as contemporary examples of broad-based psychological research. 

 

 

WSCP 81000 - Sex/Gender and Sexual Orientation Identities

CCT 2:00-4:00 , Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Margaret Rosario [93687] [Cross listed with Psych. 80103

 

Sex/gender and sexual orientation constitute some of the most basic identities that individuals have. These identities develop early in life, are hypothesized to involve multiple determinants at various levels of analysis (e.g., biological, psychodynamic), and have profound implications for the individual’s life in their own right and given the sociocultural climate in which they unfold and are experienced. This course aims to address the identities’ determinants, development, and implications for mental and physical health, and positive adaptation. The intersection of these identities and, time permitting, their interaction with other important identities (e.g., ethnic, religious) will be considered with respect to identity development and implications for health and positive adaptation.

 

 

WSCP 81000 - Racism and Prejudice as Context in: Developmental and Social Inquiry

GCW 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Deborah Vietze [93688] [Cross listed with Psych. 80103]

(Description coming soon)

 

 

WSCP 81000 - Issues in Contemporary Social Theory: Intimacies 

GC       W 6:30 -8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Patricia T.Clough [93690] [Cross listed with Soc. 80000]

                          

Inspired by Ann Stoler’s Haunted by Empire, a collection of essays that render the way in which the categories established and enforced in colonial settings were actually lived on the ground, in spaces, times, and relations of intimacy, this course takes intimacy as a register of the way sociological categories work ‘through the requisition of bodies and the working out of new habits of heart and mind,’ that is, as a matter of affect. Beginning with Stoler’s collection of essays focused on colonizer/colonized North America, moving to post World War II U.S. and on to the contemporary moment of a rigidified neo-liberalism, the course will look at influential sociological concepts and their production of categories, trying to trace their effects on intimate times, spaces and relations. Needless to say the course will engage how sociological categories are entangled with the making of raced, gendered, sexed and classed populations as central to governance and economy. These entanglements will be a primary focus of attention but others will include sociological framings of intimate relations, spaces and times in the study of urbanism, family, religion, education, medicine, war, financialization, consumption and cyberspace. Such explorations will be a matter of examining social theory and method and their ontological effects on the sociality of intimacy.

 

 

WSCP 81000 - Cultural Sociology 

GC       W 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Cynthia Fuchs Epstein [93691] [Cross listed with Soc. 86800]

The theme of Culture and empirical work on culture have grown in the last 20 years. Such topics as cultural practices and processes, symbolic and classificatory systems, repertoires of action, of contention, webs of significance, and cultural structures are topics comprising the “cultural turn.” in sociology.

We shall read the work of scholars who have conceptualized these topics, sought research sites and methodologies for exploring them in such arenas as music, art, fashion, communications, celebrity culture, sexuality, gender distinction and politics. For example, DiMaggio and Crane on the institutionalization of cultural categories, Zerubavel on cognitive sociology, Alexander on myths and narratives, Douglas and (Alexander) on the sacred and profane, Bourdieu on cultural capital, Brubecker on groups and ethnicities, Geertz on thick description and a webs of significance, Schwartz and Wagner-Pacifici on contested meanings of memorials, Lamont and Epstein on symbolic boundaries and status, Friedland on religious ideology and kinship, and Kunda on corporate cultures.

 

 

WSCP 81000 -Contemporary French Social Theory: A Synthesis of Struggle  

GC       M 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Marnia Lazreg [93692] [Cross listed with Soc. 80000]

This course traces the influence of debates on national identity, ideological representation, and the social consequences of rapid industrialization on the evolution of postwar French social theory.  It further examines how the collapse of the French empire and the emergence of the May 1968 movement helped to re-orient social thought and paved the way for the absorption of American methodological and theoretical concepts.

Theories will comprise phenomenology, structuralism and post-structuralism, practice theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, semiology, feminism and post-coloniality. Students will be encouraged to develop in-depth knowledge of two theorists and explore central issues from a comparative perspective.

Major theorists whose work will be discussed: Marcel Mauss, Claude Levi-Strauss, Lucien Goldmann, Etienne Balibar, François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Roland Barthes, Henri Lefebvre, Jean Baudrillard, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Michelle Perrot, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze.

Requirements: active class participation and a substantive term paper.

 

 

WSCP 81000 - Psychosocial, Cultural and Political Aspect of Disability

GC       T 6:30 -8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Barbara Katz Rothman [93693] [Cross listed with Soc. 86800]

 

This foundational course is an introduction to the emerging, multidisciplinary field of disability studies. Subjects covered include:

1.          The roots of disability studies in the Disability Rights Movement and political activism and self-advocacy amongst people with disabilities;

Emergence of disability studies within the university and other academic settings and incorporation of the experience of disability and the perspectives of people with disabilities into the field;

2.          The relationship between disability studies, women’s studies, and ethnic studies and the special challenges faced by women and minorities with disabilities;

3.          The relationship and challenge of disability studies to fields of professional practice;

4.          Links between disability studies and the humanities, and;

5.          The key role of disability studies in articulating and realizing the legal and human rights of people with disabilities, furthering the principles of normalization, self-determination, inclusion and independent living for people with disabilities, and formulating public policy.

This course is offered in partnership with CUNY’s J.F.K., Jr. Institute for Worker Education

 

 

WSCP 81000 - Social Welfare Policy and Planning I

H         T 2:00- 4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mimi Abramovitz [93694] [Cross listed with SSW 71000] Permission of the instructor required.

 

This course is an advanced introduction to social welfare policy in the United States. It reviews the history of the U.S. welfare state, contemporary social welfare policies, forces contributing to the expansion and contraction of the welfare state, and alternate welfare state models. It develops a framework for analyzing social welfare policy and the skills for critical analysis. Special attention is paid to dynamics of race, gender and class and to feminist theories of the welfare state.