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Fall 2009 applications deadline: September 2, 2009 Read how to apply Contact 617.324.2085 for more information or write gcws@mit.edu Fall 2009Spring 2010FALL 2009 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS:Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women's and Gender StudiesFALL & SPRING, Tuesdays, 1:00 - 4:00 PM / 9.9.00 - 5.10.10 A writing workshop for dissertation writers. Classes will include presentation and discussion of students’ work-in-progress. Discussion will move back and forth between theoretical considerations and practical ones as we address three subjects central to dissertation work: data and the archive, methodology, and explanation or interpretation. Students will be asked to reflect on ways that feminism and gender studies have affected their discipline’s views of what data are considered relevant and on the question of what body of materials is best suited to answer the questions raised in each of their dissertations. We will also consider general issues of scholarly method, methodological issues that feminism and gender studies have raised, and methodological issues prominent within the major topics of the participants’ different disciplinary fields. The inquiry into explanation and interpretation will ask how dissertation writers convince various audiences that their work is significant. Each student will also give an oral presentation that has been consciously adapted for an interdisciplinary audience. Enrollment is limited to ten students. FACULTY Janet Z. Giele is Professor Emerita of Sociology, Social Policy, and Women’s Studies at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University. Her research focuses on the changing life course of women and the emergence of American family policy. She is the author, editor, or co-editor of Women: Roles and Status in Eight Countries (1977), Women and the Future (1978), Women in the Middle Years (1982), Women and Work: The Continuing Struggle Worldwide (1992), Two Paths to Women’s Equality (1995), Methods of Life Course Research (1998), Women's Equality in the Workplace (2004), Changing Life Patterns in Western Industrial Societies (2004), and The Craft of Life Course Research (2009). 
SPRING 2010 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS:Gender and Poverty in the United States Tuesdays, 5:00 - 8:00 PM / 2.2.10 - 5.4.10
The course provides multi-disciplinary social science approaches to understanding the intersection of gender, poverty and inequality primarily in the United States. The course will be an advanced reading seminar that explores various (including feminist) approaches to theorizing, measuring, experiencing and researching poverty. The course will also examine models, policies, and strategies to reduce poverty and inequality. The course will weave discussions throughout about how these approaches relate to students’ training in various graduate programs and the methodologies students will explore (and ultimately use) in their own research. FACULTY Randy Albelda is a professor of economics and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Social Policy at University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research and teaching covers a broad range of economic policies affecting low-income women and families. She is the coauthor of the books Glass Ceilings and Bottomless Pits: Women’s Work, Women’s Poverty, Unlevel Playing Fields: Understanding Wage Inequality and Wage Discrimination, and The War on the Poor: A Defense Manual. Deborah Belle is Professor of Psychology at Boston University. Her research has focused on stress and depression among low-income mothers, women's social networks and supports, and women in science careers. Her books include Lives in stress: Women and depression, and The after-school lives of children: Alone and with others while parents work. Lisa Dodson is research professor in the sociology department at Boston College. She teaches and conducts research about low-income mothers and families. She wrote Don’t Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women and Girls in Poor America and recent articles include “Wage Poor Mothers and Moral Economy” and “Poor Women and Habits of Hiding: Participatory Methods in Poverty Research.” Her forthcoming book is The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert the Unfair Economy.
SCREEN WOMEN: Body Narratives in Thursdays, 6-9 PM / 2.4.10 – 5.13.10 The cinematic body of the woman has long been the central focus for theories of spectatorship, psychoanalytic film theory as well as feminist media and cultural studies. As such it provides rich material for an interdisciplinary conversation not only about socio-cultural and psychological constructions of gender, sexualities, and power but also about the pathologies of body disturbances and eating disorders which have become increasingly prevalent among women and girls. Using popular film and related media as our texts this course will investigate “hot button” issues in the contemporary discourse about women and body image in images of excessive mothering, adolescent sexuality, obesity, diet culture, transformative surgery, body makeovers, and gender reassignment in order to answer the following question: how are contemporary debates surrounding the body both reflected in, and informed by, popular culture representations? Students can expect to come away from the class with a deeper understanding of the cultural influences that shape media products and familiarity with feminist and feminist media theory as it relates to the topic of embodiment and body image. FACULTY Emily Fox-Kales, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist who specializes in the treatment of eating disorders and body disturbances in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She also is on the faculty of Northeastern University where she teaches film, gender and cultural studies in the Cinema Studies program. She has served as Film Editor of the journal Gender & Psychoanalysis and published on psycho-social narratives of the woman’s body. Her forthcoming book is Body Shots: Hollywood and the Culture of Eating Disorders. Suzanne Leonard is Assistant Professor of English at Simmons College, where she teaches film studies, feminist theory, and women’s literature. Her published articles have appeared in Women’s Studies Quarterly, MELUS, and in various anthologies including Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Duke UP, 2007) and Feminism, Domesticity, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2008). Her forthcoming book on Fatal Attraction (2009) is an inaugural text in Wiley-Blackwell’s series, Studies in Film and Television. Feminist InquiryWednesdays, 5:30 - 8:30 pm / 2.3.10 – 5.12.10 This course investigates theories and practices of feminist inquiry across a range of disciplines. Doing feminist research involves rethinking disciplinary assumptions and methodologies, developing new understandings of what counts as knowledge, seeking alternative ways of understanding the origins of problems/issues, formulating new ways of asking questions and redefining the relationship between subjects and objects of study. The course will focus on methodology, i.e., the theory and analysis of how research should proceed. We shall be especially attentive to epistemological issues--pre-suppositions about the nature of knowledge. What makes research distinctively feminist lies in the complex connections between epistemologies, methodologies and research methods. We shall explore how these connections are formed in the traditional disciplines and raise questions about why they are inadequate and/or problematic for feminist inquiry and what, specifically, are the feminist critiques of these intersections. FACULTY Modhumita Roy is Associate Professor of English and Director of the undergraduate Women's Studies program at Tufts University. Jill McLean Taylor , Ed.D. is a Professor of Education, and Women's and Gender Studies at Simmons College, and chair of WGST. Read how to apply Contact 617.324.2085 for more information or write gcws@mit.edu Fall 2009 application deadline: August 28, 2009 |
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