Please note: Many of the following courses have prerequisites - either in the home department or Women's Studies -specific, if taking as a WS course. Check the academic calendar for more information.

Course Schedule 2009-10

Fall 2009

 WS 101 Gender, Equality, and Difference 

Prof: Dr. Ann Braithwaite

Time: T & Th 11:30-12:45

This course provides an interdisciplinary, multicultural introduction to the discipline of Women's Studies, with a focus on the concepts of equality and difference. It explores how these concepts have been thought about and debated, and how they have informed theories about a variety of social identities. It looks at their implications for a number of issues, including bodies and body politics, sex, work, family, sports, health, and popular culture.

WS 211 (Special Topics) Food and Cultural Studies

Prof: Dr. Ann Braithwaite

Time: T & Th 2:30-3:45

Course description TBA

WS 242 Philosophies of Love and Sexuality (Phil 242)

Prof: Dr. Pamela Courtenay-Hall

Time: T & Th 1:00-2:15

This course explores philosophical issues related to love and sexuality as constructed and experienced in particular cultural and historical contexts in Anglo-American culture. Topics may include analysis of love and sexuality as portrayed in music, literature, film and art; kinds of love; conceptions of self and community underlying different accounts of love; sexual activity as expressive, communicative, sacred, profane, athletic, goal-oriented; the commodification of sex; competing conceptions of sexual health and sexual liberation; conservative, liberal, radical and feminist perspectives; ethical issues in intimate relationships, families, sex-trade work and pornography.

WS 261 Sex, Gender, and Society (Soc/Anth 261)

Prof: Valerie Campbell

Time: T & Th 4:00-5:15

This course examines gender (the social concept of masculinity and femininity) and compares it to current views about sex (the biological distinction of female and male). Several sociological and/or anthropological issues are examined, such as the biological bases and evolutionary development of sexual differences; abortion; homosexuality; sexual violence; and affirmative action. Cross-cultural information is introduced throughout the course.

WS 374 Qualitative Research Methods (Psych 374)

Prof: Dr. Colleen Macquarrie

Time: T & Th 8:30-9:45

The purpose of this course is to help students gain a theoretical, practical and critical understanding of qualitative research methodology, and to teach skills for the execution of research projects based upon qualitative data. Qualitative research is research that focuses upon understanding, rather than predicting or controlling phenomena. Nine different paradigms of qualitative research methodology, their implications, and applications, are examined in this course. These paradigms are: data display, grounded theory, phenomenology, ethnography, psychobiography and historiography, psychoanalytic approaches, narrative psychology, hermeneutics and textual deconstruction, and social constructivism. Political and ethical issues are also highlighted in order to problematize and promote more critically informed inquiry.

WS 391 Psychology of Women(Psych 391)

 Prof: Dr. Fiona Papps

Time: T 2:30-5:30

This course will focus on women's development throughout the life span. Topics will include: views of the nature of women, biological influences, the socialization process and its consequences at the individual, interpersonal relationship, and societal levels, as well as recent alternative views of the psychology of women.

WS 403 Theorizing Feminisms

Prof: Dr. Ann Braithwaite

Time: W 1:30-4:30

This course explores a variety of feminist theoretical approaches, focusing especially on Anglo-American second-and third-wave feminisms. It provides comparative and critical analyses of how a number of different feminist theories have attempted to understand and explain gender divisions within society, examining the differences between, for example, liberal, radical, cultural, lesbian, psychoanalytic, Marxist, socialist, postmodern, third-wave, and post-feminist approaches.

WS 409 (Special Topics) Medical Anthropology: Culture, Sickness, and the Body (Anth 401)

Prof: Dr. Jean Mitchell

Time: T & Th 2:30-3:45

This course provides an overview of medical anthropology and its approaches to understanding human illness and healing systems in a cross-cultural context. Students examine theoretical and applied approaches to topics which include: ethno- medical systems; biomedical models; symbolism in the healing process; the interrelationships of gender, class, and race in the cultural construction of illness and well being. The impact of colonialism and globalization, infections and inequalities, as well as cross-cultural conceptualizations of the body, are also considered.

WS 451 Older Women's Experiences of Family Life (FNS 451)

Prof: Dr. Lori Weeks

Time: M & W 3:00-4:15

This course examines older women's diverse experiences in today's families and in the world as homemakers, wives/partners, mothers, caregivers, and as paid and unpaid workers. Family studies scholarship is examined critically for various themes such as the social construction of gender and validation of family diversity. The contradictory nature of the family as source of/venue for control and oppression versus support, validation, and empowerment is also explored.

Winter 2010

WS 211 (Special Topics) Global Youth Cultures (Soc/Anth 263)

Prof: Dr. Jean Mitchell

Time: M & W 3:00-4:15

The emergence of global youth cultures of desire, self expression, consumption and representation will be considered from a number of perspectives including gender, age and globalization.  Issues related to youth, which are a critical factor in understanding contemporary change, conflict, and cleavages, will be explored cross-culturally.  Attention will be given to theoretical developments as well as ethnographic case studies.

WS 221 Writings by Women (Eng 221)

Prof: Dr. Jane Magrath

Time: T & Th 1:00-2:15

Students explore a wide range of writing by women—poems, plays, novels, short stories, essays—in the context of historical and social concerns. The course normally concentrates on British, American, and Canadian women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but in some semesters may concentrate on women writers from other centuries and cultures.

WS 302 Constructing Difference and Identity

Prof: Dr. Ann Braithwaite

Time: T & Th 11:30-12:45

This course examines some of the differences between and among women, exploring how claims to various identities and politics have transformed Women's Studies. It analyzes essentialist assumptions about identity categories such as race, sex, gender, and sexuality, and examines their social construction and contemporary interconnections at the institutional level.

WS 311 Identity and Popular Culture

Prof: Dr. Ann Braithwaite

Time: T & Th2:30-3:45

This course introduces students to approaches to the study of popular culture and cultural studies, asking what is meant by the term “pop culture” and exploring it as a site of struggle and negotiation for a variety of identity groups. It explores both how social identities (gender, race, sexuality, and class) are constructed and represented in popular cultural objects and practices, and examines how those can make a difference to how people then interact with and in that pop culture. Course materials are drawn from advertising, popular events and trends, news items, film, TV, fan culture, zines, pornography, and the new communications technologies.

WS 385 Women in 19h Century Canada (Hist 385)

Prof: Dr. Sharon Myers

Time: M & W 1:30-2:45

This course examines the changes that have taken place in the historical roles of women in Canadian society, and the relationship of these changes to social, economic, and intellectual developments. Using both a thematic and chronological approach, the course examines women's roles from the beginning of the 19th Century to the achievement of suffrage in the 20th Century.

WS 409A (Special Topics) Cybercultures (Anth 403)

Prof: Dr. Udo Krautwurst

Time: T & Th 11:30-12:45

This course examines how cyberspace in its various guises (e.g., web pages, virtual communities) and its associated technologies create numerous and often conflicting identities while shaping and being shaped by local and global cultural forces. It provides students with the opportunity to reflect critically upon, and engage with, the symbolic meanings and social effects of cyberspace. The course examines recent anthropological theories of technology, and looks at the impact of social organization and cultural practices of communities around the world and on the identities of individuals within those different cultural contexts.

WS 409B (Special Topics) Social Justice in Psychology (Psych 432C)

Prof: Dr. Colleen Macquarrie

Time: M 3:00-6:00

This course examines the praxis (practice and theory) of social justice through psychologies of liberation and decolonization. The focus is on a critical understanding of radical moments of theorizing and action and will examine psychologies created to resist broad social systems of colonization and control. Students will interrogate contemporary issues of inequity embedded within systems of privilege and how these systems create as much as reflect psychological phenomena. Students will critically analyse, present material for class discussion, and write about the praxis of social justice through diverse frameworks. Students will work together on projects with an activist academic framework drawing heavily from citizen engagement approaches such as participatory action research.

WS 435 Gender and Sexuality (Psych 435)

Prof: Dr. Fiona Papps

Time: T 2:30-5:30

This course provides a critical examination of gender and sexuality. It explores the individual, interpersonal, and societal constructions of gender and sexuality within varying biological, cultural, and historical contexts; and uses psychological theory and research to analyze experiences and representations of gender and sexuality.