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This course introduces students to the central issues at stake in designing and carrying out gender research at graduate and postgraduate level and beyond. The course maps the history of debates about gender and feminist research, and asks what difference it makes to take gender as the subject or object of research. Of particular concern are the ethical and political issues arising from doing gender research with respect to representing others and seeking to influence and engage with broader social contexts. Students will be introduced to debates about subjectivity and objectivity, the relationship between researcher and researched, and asked to evaluate the usefulness of particular methods and approaches. Finally, the course focuses on the methodological challenges arising within interdisciplinary research.
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This course aims to enable students: to think critically about representations of gender in a range of different media; to apply a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of the media; to examine changing representations of gender in the context of wider social changes and to explore questions concerning the interpretation and use of different media and their products. The course focuses on examples largely drawn from Anglo-American media and usually includes topics such as news media and gender; gendered approaches to contemporary cinema; advertising and gender and critically explores terms such as 'postfeminism' in relation to media content. The course also considers themes such as the nature of contemporary celebrity and questions of media representations gender in relation to dimensions such as sexuality, class, race, age and (dis)ability.
Students will be expected to maintain familiarity with contemporary UK media.
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This course will provide students with a thorough knowledge of two key interconnected and intersecting literatures: gender and development and gender and globalisation. The course provides students with an introduction to the history of the field of gender and development studies (from women in development to gender, development and culture) and an examination of some of the consequences of contemporary economic, social and spatial restructuring and how globalisation is associated with widening social, spatial and gender inequalities. The course is organised as a number of themed blocks including Part 1: definitions and concepts; contemporary theories of gender, development and globalisation; gender, generation and poverty; postcolonial and anti-racist critiques and Part 2: work, migration and global divisions; regulating bodies; governmentality and security; and changes, challenges and policies. The course draws on a wide range of perspectives and considers diverse analytical tools for the analysis of gender, development and globalisation. Emphasis is placed on the analysis and theorisation of socio-economic and spatial aspects of change, particularly changes in working patterns, living arrangements, experiences and subjectivities. Empirical illustrations are provided through a series of case studies and readings of ethnographies linking global and local issues and the lives of people across the globe.
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The course provides students with an introduction to the field of gender, globalisation and development studies; it provides an analysis of how globalisation is associated with widening social, spatial and gender inequalities and an examination of some of the consequences of contemporary economic, social and spatial restructuring on the organisation of daily life in the Global North and South. The course is comprised of a number of themes: critical engagements and understandings of development ; contemporary theories of gender, development and globalisation; global integration and development - gender, and poverty; China and India; Work, development and global divisions; Gender and security; and Issues of embodiment The course draws on a wide range of perspectives and considers diverse analytical tools for the analysis of gender, development and globalisation. Emphasis is placed on the analysis and theorisation of socio-economic and spatial aspects of change, particularly changes in working patterns, living arrangements, experiences and subjectivities. Empirical illustrations are provided through a series of case studies and readings of ethnographies linking global and local issues and the lives of people across the globe.
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This course will provide students with an introduction to militarisation and its gendered basis and effects. Students will be introduced to social critiques of militarisation; militarised masculinities; feminist ethics and maternal thinking; representations of terror, war and violence; men's and women's experiences of conflict, violence and war; diversity issues within a variety of national militaries including issues of gender, sexuality and 'race'; and the gendered politics of participation in peace and anti-militarisation activities.
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This course equips students with an understanding of how feminist scholars have critiqued and sought to modify concepts and paradigms in mainstream social policy research. It provides an overview of mainstream theoretical explanations for the structure and evolution of welfare states and efforts to incorporate a more gendered perspective. Students will develop an understanding of how key concepts like citizenship, work, and well-being have been conceptualized and applied in the academic literature to document and explain gendered inequalities. The use of gender as a category of analysis is examined and attention is paid to the potentially modifying effects of other social hierarchies such as ethnicity and class.
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The course analyses the different ways in which gender is incorporated into national welfare states and the impact this on particular, national structures of gender inequalities. The course covers the theory and methodology of comparative studies and the applicability of existing comparative theories/methods to the analysis of gender. Consideration is given to how well existing typologies of welfare states fare when gender is the focus of analysis, and the role, if any, that the European Union has played in the development of more gender equitable outcomes in EU countries. A number of key areas will then be studied, including: the organisation of caring services including child care; family policy; provision for lone parents; the labour market and labour market policies; men and masculinities; and aging. In looking at these areas students will be encouraged to contrast the approach of different families of nations (e.g., Bismarckian regimes versus Scandinavia) as well as looking at the particularism of certain national approaches.
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Although population change cannot be described, understood, or responded to without taking into account the wider -- and profoundly gendered -- social, political and economic context, feminism and gender theory have had relatively limited impact on the development and direction of the field. This course explores the implications both theoretically and practically. Examining how population issues and their policy implications are described and understood, students will develop an appreciation of the potential contribution and impact that a feminist and gendered perspective has to offer. It will also examine the ways that feminists seeking to redress social and gender injustices have used demographic research to pursue their aims.
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This course provides students with an introduction to the ideas and analysis of Feminist
Economics in relation to economic processes at macro and micro levels. It particularly
emphasises the ways in which the feminist economics holistic understanding of the
economy, which includes reproductive work and care, influences economic processes at
macro and micro levels and profoundly influences gender roles, relations and differential
wellbeing. It also explores how both the neglect and the inclusion of this broader
understanding of the economy influences national and international economic policies and
their outcomes in different societies and people inhabiting different social positions in
these different societies.
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This full unit immerses students in the interdisciplinary area of sexuality and gender studies, with particular attention to the histories and theories of sexual identities and sexual regulation in the modern era. We combine sociological, anthropological, historical, cultural and literary approaches, and consider a range of issues such as regulation of sexual and gendered practices; migration and asylum; childhood and sexuality; emergence of gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans identities and struggles; queer and critical race perspectives; sexual rights and citizenship; representations and social movements. This interdisciplinary focus also means that questions of culture and representation are centred in similar ways to legal and policy contexts or social movements, and indeed their interaction is a fundamental focus of the course. The course is thus highly theoretical and demands a high level of conceptual interest from students.
The course shows how sexuality is central to the social sciences. Far from being a private, Western concern, sexuality is key to understanding questions of culture, representation, economics, health, policy, identities and communities and rights. The course will foreground both a wide range of theoretical perspectives on sexuality, and a series of case studies that illustrate key problems in thinking through sexuality, gender and culture. The course takes an intersectional approach, including grounding histories of sexuality in other histories such as those of colonialism, feminism, representation and economic struggles. It grapples with what it means to take a transnational approach to the topic, particularly in the second term, while critiquing assumptions about ‘Western’ sexual identity categories and histories.
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This half unit introduces students to the complex debates about sexuality in a global context and from a transnational perspective. Far from being a private, Western concern, the course locates sexuality as key to understanding questions of citizenship, rights, identity, mobility, new kinship formations and labour. The course is interdisciplinary, drawing on theory and contexts from Sociology, Critical Theory, Anthropology, Human Rights, Translation Studies, Feminist and Queer Studies, Postcolonial and Critical Race Studies, and Economics. It has a dual focus on theory and case studies (such as asylum, abortion, adoption, sex work and reproductive tourism), and foregrounds throughout how our analysis of the social world changes when we consider sexuality and gender. The course is not focused on particular regions, but asks you to think about the question of ‘translation’ and ‘travel’ of ideas, concepts and texts across different geo-political (and sometimes historical) terrains. The course understands scholarly engagements with sexuality as raising ethical concerns of representation, and considers the significance of ‘where we speak from’ when conducting research in this field.
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This is the core course for all Gender Institute Masters and first-year PhD students and is team-taught by Gender Institute faculty. The course with a review of the formative influences on the development of gender theory, including the sex/gender distinction, race and intersectionality, economics and production/reproduction, theories of difference and the implications for analysis of a variety of sites including political representation, psychoanalysis and its impact on considering aspects of the social. The second term extends these foundations by providing further grounding in questions of structure and agency, sexualities, masculinities and rights. The course considers the impact of gender analysis on key areas of social science investigation, and develops these with particular attention to location, ethics and the importance of global or transnational dimensions. This course provides a thorough grounding for work across all other courses and for the dissertation module.
The aims of this course are to enable students to:
- Become familiar with the fullest range of gender theories with particular attention to the intersections of gender, sexuality and race;
- Consider gender theory from a range of disciplinary perspectives;
- Develop a critical appreciation of different theories of gender;
- Use gender theory to inform their appreciation of existing work in their own disciplines and in an interdisciplinary context;
- Use the analysis of gender relations as a basis for case study evaluation and research;
- Further, where practical, the development of gender theory, either in their own discipline or in an interdisciplinary context.
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This course provides a critical examination of peace and security issues affecting women in a global world. In particular, the course is influenced by a focus on the UN Security Council's Women Peace and Security (WPS) agenda which aims to prevent sexual and gender-based violence in conflict and post-conflict settings, and making visible the experiences of women who have often been obscured from political focus and denied legal or other redress. Consequently, the agenda sets out to increase the participation of women within both the processes of peace and reconstruction and in the security sector more generally. This course will examine these issues from a gender and feminist lens.
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GI426 - Gender and Human Rights
This course will provide the students with a transnational gender perspective on contemporary theories and practices of rights/human rights and humanitarianism. It brings together different sets of scholarship: gender theories, queer and postcolonial scholarship, theoretical perspectives on human rights along side with legal and policy perspectives--and will be of interest to students wanting to study the question of human rights in an interdisciplinary manner but also one that is crucially sutured to the question of gender.
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The GI499 Dissertation unit provides students with an introduction to key topics in relation to researching and writing a Masters Dissertation in gender studies. The workshops will introduce basic issues in research practice, ethical considerations, managing sources, and the process of research and writing. The sessions will consider some common challenges raised by quantitative and qualitative methods, and include policy research, understanding of regression analysis, interviews, discourse and textual analysis, oral and visual history forms of narrative, and visual and media analysis.
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