Courses
Introduces key issues, themes, and debates in feminist transnational theory, practice, and activism in contemporary contexts and how it has changed under socioeconomic, political, and cultural processes of globalization. Examines differences among women relating to race, class, sexuality, national identity, and political economy in reckoning with possibilities for sustainable social justice. Students interrogate the relationship between the local and global; the production of knowledge in different regional spaces; the pragmatics of political mobilization; the varying contours of “social justice”; and other key issues. Offers students an opportunity to discuss the impact of globalization, neoliberalism, and state and intimate violence on gendered politics and relations and to contend with the politics of difference, to debate its challenges, and to imagine possible futures for transnational gender justice.
Examines core concepts of medicine as a cultural system, then moves to anthropology of the body as it has been understood and shaped within healing systems. Medical anthropology is a subfield of anthropology that uses the four-field approach to examine cultural concepts and experiences of health, illness, treatment, and power cross-culturally. Emphasizes history and construction of biomedicine. Surveys traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, Voudon, Mayan curanderos, and other folk healing systems around the world. Explores medical pluralism, the common practice of seeking out and utilizing more than one therapeutic treatment style at one time; structural violence; and how healing systems interact with broader political and social systems globally.
Using Mexico City as a case study, this Dialogue of Civilizations explores the relationship between gender and migration with feminist and medical anthropological methods. Mexico City and accompanying excursions expose students to gender theories of race and migration in real-time and historical perspectives. In particular, we will understand how gender violence, climate change, gendered health risks and outcomes, neoliberalism, and structural inequality make up the real-world drivers of international migration for women, girls, LGBTQI+, and non-binary populations. The core literature draws on feminist and critical migration scholarship across several disciplines. We provide an interdisciplinary framework of teaching and learning on the ground, where students review empirical studies of thorough migration and nation-specific gender migrations, particularly by AfroDescendent and Indigenous peoples, each week for class. Excursions highlight the racial and gender dynamics and the social determinantes of health in migration as they happen in North America.
