Courses

Current/Upcoming Microseminars

GCWS Micro-Seminars are five-week, un-graded, graduate-level reading, writing, and discussion-based graduate seminars organized around specific themes in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Specifically, they provide students and instructors the opportunity to delve deeply into ideas not encountered in existing courses at their home institutions. Seminars are open to member institution graduate students, seniors in WGS or a related major, and to faculty. Priority enrollment will be given to graduate students.

2018-2019 Microseminars:

SPRING
Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony
Taught by Heike Schotten, Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Massachusetts, Boston
Tuesdays, 6:30-8:30 PM (3/19/2019 - 4/16/2018)
*Meets at MIT*
Application deadline: March 1, 2019
Full description, dates, and location information available below.

Micro-seminar structure and location:
Seminars meet for two hours, once a week, over five consecutive weeks at one of our GCWS member institutions. Specific building and room assignments are listed with the micro-seminar descriptions where available. 

Enrollment and assessment:
Participating students will receive a certificate of completion from the GCWS, stamped with the MIT seal. No credit is associated with participation in these seminars. These micro-seminars focus on participation in the absence of formal assessment and provide opportunities to explore subject areas in an in-depth, concentrated manner.

Eligibility:
Graduate students enrolled in any department and degree program at GCWS member institutions may apply.  Undergraduate seniors doing work in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies or related major are eligible and encouraged to apply. Faculty may also join, space-permitting.

How to apply:
Students will apply through the GCWS web site through the GCWS microseminar application page.

 

Full micro-seminar descriptions below:

Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony

**This Micro-seminar will meet at MIT**

Link to MIT campus map

Tuesday evenings, 6:30-8:30 PM

Spring 2019 dates:
March 19
March 26
April 2
April 9
April 16

How does moralism operate at the very heart of US imperialism and settler colonialism? How does this moralism seep into and absorb the categories of life and death itself, constituting a distinct form of biopolitics? How does the seemingly rational and commonsense sanctity surrounding the “value of life” in US “terrorism” discourse reflect our nation-state’s commitment to erasing indigenous people(s) and anti-colonial resistance? And how and why does queer theory aid in the project of detecting and overcoming all of these hierarchical moralisms? In this microseminar, we will engage the recent book Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony (Columbia UP: 2018) and the primary texts that sustain its inquiry in order to address some of these questions.

Faculty Leader:
C. Heike Schotten is Associate Professor of Political Science and an affiliated faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research interests lie at the various intersections of queer theory, Nietzsche studies, biopolitics, the War on Terror, and liberatory critical theory. Drawing on each of these areas, her research theorizes the various meaning of and possibilities for liberation within the specific contexts of U.S. imperialism, U.S. settler colonialism, and historically still-hegemonic Euro-American constructs of knowledge and knowing.

 

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Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 14N-211
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: 617-324-2085