Courses and Syllabi
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Mount Allison University, Women’s and Gender Studies
This course examines feminist critiques and strategies relating to the production of knowledge, with an emphasis on epistemology, decolonization, and community-based research. It introduces the methods, techniques, and ethics involved in feminist research and analysis. The emphasis is both theoretical and practical; students therefore engage in the process of assessing and conducting feminist research.
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Mount Allison University, Women’s and Gender Studies Program
This course introduces students to the fields of feminist, queer, and trans game studies. It begins by introducing students to game studies as a discipline and to the main analytic tool we will use in this class: close playing. We will familiarize ourselves with feminist and queer theories of games and play before moving into several weeks focused on topics at the intersection of game studies and feminist and queer theory during which we will play and analyze various games. Themes include representations of gender, race, and sexuality in videogames; failure as a queer mechanic; sexual videogames; game-making as autoethnographic method; and utopias/dystopias. Assignments are centered around practicing close play, thinking critically about videogames, and writing analytically. They include weekly play logs, a game analysis paper, and a game-making assignment focused on understanding the rewards and challenges of exploring feminist and queer issues through games.
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Mount Allison University, Women’s and Gender Studies Program
This course explores the interconnection of gender, sex, and sexuality with media and digital cultures. We explore how the production and consumption of mediated representations of gender, sex, and sexuality shape and are shaped by our lived experiences. We will begin by discussing feminist approaches to studying media and digital cultures before moving into several weeks focused on timely topics and debates related to gender, sex and sexuality in media and digital cultures. We will consider objectification and “the gaze”; representation and visibility; the gendered politics and labour of ‘content creators’; the deplatforming of sex; and gendered audiences and fandoms. Beyond weekly readings focused on theory and media analysis, this course will ask students to engage with a range of media texts. One of our primary goals will be to develop competency and confidence in doing media analysis.
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Mount Allison University, Women’s and Gender Studies Program
This course examines human bodies in historical and contemporary socio-political contexts, investigating gender and embodiment both as an expression of individual identity and a production of complex social processes. Drawing upon scholarship on body politics in the interdisciplinary fields of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, we will consider how bodies are simultaneously gendered, raced, classed, sexualized, and politicized through interpersonal, social, and institutional processes, including law, culture, science, medicine, and globalization. We will consider a wide variety of topics including body modification, women’s participation in sport; fatness and fatphobia; the experience of illness and disability; and the relationship between bodies and technology; among others. By engaging with a variety art that focuses on the body or using the body as part of a creative process, we will aim to think critically about how we inhabit our own bodies and how and why this comes to matter politically and socially.
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Carleton University, Department of Law and Legal Studies
This course introduces students to key issues, theories and debates concerning gender, feminism and the law, primarily in Canada. Approaching law as a site of regulation and constraint, as well as a tool for feminist practice, we will consider how the law shapes and is shaped by the lives of cisgender and transgender women. We begin by unpacking the premise of “women and the law” and consider the current vitriolic legal debates about gender and attempts to use the law to exclude transgender women from public life. We will also consider who gets left out of the “women and law” conversation (e.g., pregnant transgender men). The course introduces students to a range of theoretical approaches to women and the law and examines topics ranging from incarceration; reproductive rights and “birth tourism”; human trafficking; #metoo and defamation law; law, activism and emotion; and the “decertification” of legal sex.
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Carleton University, Department of Law and Legal Studies
In this course, we will examine the foundation and implementation of health law and policy in Canada. The course is divided into two modules. We will begin with several weeks focused on understanding the main principles of health law and policy in Canada and the legal regulation of healthcare. Topics in this module include: jurisdiction in Canadian health law; Medicare and Pharmacare; and informed consent and clinical trials. We will also examine how social inequity intersects with and affects these legal principles – we will focus particularly on the ongoing effects of colonialism on the healthcare system and on the governance of healthcare. In the second half of the course, we will consider the everyday implications of these principles by examining key issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Topics include: intellectual property and vaccine development; vaccine mandates and ‘passports’; policing the pandemic; and COVID-19 in prisons.
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Carleton University, Department of Law and Legal Studies
In this course, we examine how reproduction is regulated, contested, and controlled in Canada. Moving beyond the binary framing of pro-choice versus anti-choice, this course draws on reproductive justice frameworks to examine a wide range of issues that impact the choice to have or not have children, and the ability to parent children in safe and sustainable communities. We will consider how law, social structures, and institutions affect goals such as greater bodily autonomy and choice, and safety for parents and children. The goal of the course is to put the legal governance and regulation of reproductive health into conversation with community-driven debates about reproductive justice. We will also focus on how reproductive justice is imbricated with other key sites in the struggle for social justice. Topics include abortion, surrogacy, sterilization, parenting, and the impact of racism, ableism, colonialism, carceral politics, heteronormativity, and environmental racism on reproductive rights and justice.