Online courses directory (19947)

This course provides an analytic framework for understanding the roles that gender and race play in defining the work worlds of women and men in our society, including ways in which gender intersects with race and class. The course examines specific workplace-related policies through a gender/race lens, including welfare policy, comparable worth, affirmative action, parental leave policy, child care policy and working time policies. Students are required to investigate ways in which these policies address gender and racial inequities, and think critically about mechanisms for change.

This course explores stereotypes associated with Asian women in colonial, nationalist, state-authoritarian, and global/diasporic narratives about gender and power. Students will read ethnography, cultural studies, and history, and view films to examine the politics and circumstances that create and perpetuate the representation of Asian women as dragon ladies, lotus blossoms, despotic tyrants, desexualized servants, and docile subordinates. Students are introduced to the debates about Orientalism, gender, and power.

This course considers a wide range of issues related to the contemporary and historical use of technology, the development of new technologies, and the cultural representation of technology, including the role women have played in the development of technology and the effect of technological change on the roles of women and ideas of gender. It discusses the social implications of technology and its understanding and deployment in different cultural contexts. It investigates the relationships between technology and identity categories, such as gender, race, class, and sexuality, and examines how technology offers possibilities for new social relations and how to evaluate them.

This subject explores the legal history of the United States as a gendered system. It examines how women have shaped the meanings of American citizenship through pursuit of political rights such as suffrage, jury duty, and military service, how those political struggles have varied for across race, religion, and class, as well as how the legal system has shaped gender relations for both women and men through regulation of such issues as marriage, divorce, work, reproduction, and the family. The course readings will draw from primary and secondary materials in American history, as well as some court cases. However, the focus of the class is on the broader relationship between law and society, and no technical legal knowledge is required or assumed.

Does it matter in education whether or not you've got a Y chromosome? You bet it does. In this discussion-based seminar, we will explore why males vastly outrank females in math and science and career advancements (particularly in academia), and why girls get better grades and go to college more often than boys. Do the sexes have different learning styles? Are women denied advanced opportunities in academia and the workforce? How do family life and family decisions affect careers for both men and women?

Does it matter in education whether or not you've got a Y chromosome? You bet it does. In this discussion-based seminar, we will explore why males vastly outrank females in math and science and career advancements (particularly in academia), and why girls get better grades and go to college more often than boys. Do the sexes have different learning styles? Are women denied advanced opportunities in academia and the workforce? How do family life and family decisions affect careers for both men and women?

Does it matter in education whether or not you've got a Y chromosome? You bet it does. In this discussion-based seminar, we will explore why males vastly outrank females in math and science and career advancements (particularly in academia), and why girls get better grades and go to college more often than boys. Do the sexes have different learning styles? Are women denied advanced opportunities in academia and the workforce? How do family life and family decisions affect careers for both men and women?

Gender Through Comics: A Super MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) coming Spring 2013 that examines how comic books can be used to explore questions of gender identity, stereotypes, and roles. This highly engaging learning experience is designed for college-age and lifelong learners. The course, led by Christina Blanch of Ball State University, uses a study of comic books incorporating highly interactive video lectures, online discussions between students, and real-time socially driven interviews. Interviews with the comic industry's biggest names such as Terry Moore, Brian K Vaughan, Mark Waid, as well as others address questions of gender representations and constructions involving both men and women. To purchase the required materials for this course, please visit the Comixology page for Gender and Comic Books. View a video teaser about Gender Through Comic Books

In this course, we’ll explore what it means to work collaboratively in building a more sustainable and equitable society for all people. Students in this course will learn to acknowledge their context, privileges and disadvantages, and the different ways they have of knowing the world. In this course, learning and teaching will be generative, fluid processes. Much of the hard work of this course will be outside the classroom: reading, thinking, organizing and providing situated context for our ideas so our class colleagues can come to a fuller, richer understanding of our own shared and individual experiences. The students and instructor will come together to discover and explore the ideas shaped by the readings, and build emergent systems that provide deeper understanding of our own boundaries and possibilities.

In the course we will use a feminist interdisciplinary lens and invite students to look critically at how practices like privatization, shrinking public "safety nets", de-regulation, and the commodification of health services intersect inevitably with gender, race and class, for both men and women. We will draw on a blend of empirical studies, policy materials, films and guest speakers to examine specific health issues like menstrual health, corporate obstetrics, abortion, obesity, intersex, harassment and other forms of gendered violence, mental health and stress, parent-child attachment, as well as ethics and pharmaceuticals.

The Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies (GCWS)

This course is part of the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies. The GCWS at MIT brings together scholars and teachers at nine degree-granting institutions in the Boston area who are devoted to graduate teaching and research in Women's Studies and to advancing interdisciplinary Women's Studies scholarship. Learn more about the GCWS.

This course draws on different disciplines, conceptual frameworks, and methodological approaches to examine gender in relation to health, including public health practice, epidemiologic research, health policy, and clinical application. It discusses a variety of health-related issues that illustrate global, international, domestic, and historical perspectives, while considering other social determinants of health as well, including social class and race.

After decades of efforts to promote development, why is there so much poverty in the world? What are some of the root causes of inequality world-wide and why do poverty, economic transformations and development policies often have different consequences for women and men? This course explores these issues while also examining the history of development itself, its underlying assumptions, and its range of supporters and critics. It considers the various meanings given to development by women and men, primarily as residents of particular regions, but also as aid workers, policy makers and government officials. In considering how development projects and policies are experienced in daily life in urban and rural areas in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Melanesia, this course asks what are the underlying political, economic, social, and gender dynamics that make "development" an ongoing problem world-wide.

The course will focus primarily on contemporary discourses concerning gender inequality. Most of the readings assigned will be recent articles published in U.S. and British media capturing the latest thinking and research on gender inequality in the workplace. The class will be highly interactive combining case studies, videos, debates, guest speakers, and in-class simulations.

This course will provide students with an analytic framework to understand the roles that gender, race, and class play in defining and determining access to leadership and power in the U.S., especially in the context of the workplace. We will explore women and men in leadership positions within the corporate, political and non-profit sectors, with attention to the roles of women of color and immigrant women within this context. We will also look at specific policies such as affirmative action, parental leave, child-care policy, and working-time policies and the role they play–or could play–in achieving parity. We will further investigate ways in which these policies address gender, racial, and class inequities, and think critically about mechanisms for change. The course will be highly interactive, and will combine texts, theater, videos and visual arts.

What can we learn about science and technology–and what can we do with that knowledge? Who are "we" in these questions?–whose knowledge and expertise gets made into public policy, new medicines, topics of cultural and political discourse, science education, and so on? How can expertise and lay knowledge about science and technology be reconciled in a democratic society? How can we make sense of the interactions of living and non-living, humans and non-humans, individual and collectivities in the production of scientific knowledge and technologies?

The course takes these questions as entry points into an ever-growing body of work to which feminist, anti-racist, and other critical analysts and activists have made significant contributions. The course also takes these questions as an invitation to practice challenging the barriers of expertise, gender, race, class, and place that restrict wider access to and understanding of the production of scientific knowledge and technologies. In that spirit, students participate in an innovative, problem-based learning (PBL) approach that allows them to shape their own directions of inquiry and develop their skills as investigators and prospective teachers. At the same time the PBL cases engage students' critical faculties as they learn about existing analyses of gender, race, and the complexities of science and technology, guided by individualized bibliographies co-constructed with the instructors and by the projects of the other students. Students from all fields and levels of preparation are encouraged to join the course.

What can we learn about science and technology–and what can we do with that knowledge? Who are "we" in these questions?–whose knowledge and expertise gets made into public policy, new medicines, topics of cultural and political discourse, science education, and so on? How can expertise and lay knowledge about science and technology be reconciled in a democratic society? How can we make sense of the interactions of living and non-living, humans and non-humans, individual and collectivities in the production of scientific knowledge and technologies?

The course takes these questions as entry points into an ever-growing body of work to which feminist, anti-racist, and other critical analysts and activists have made significant contributions. The course also takes these questions as an invitation to practice challenging the barriers of expertise, gender, race, class, and place that restrict wider access to and understanding of the production of scientific knowledge and technologies. In that spirit, students participate in an innovative, problem-based learning (PBL) approach that allows them to shape their own directions of inquiry and develop their skills as investigators and prospective teachers. At the same time the PBL cases engage students' critical faculties as they learn about existing analyses of gender, race, and the complexities of science and technology, guided by individualized bibliographies co-constructed with the instructors and by the projects of the other students. Students from all fields and levels of preparation are encouraged to join the course.

This course explores how gender shaped the historical experiences and cultural productions in the North American West during the time it was being explored, settled, and imagined. The North American West of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provides a fascinating case study of the shifting meanings of gender, race, citizenship, and power in border societies. As the site of migration, settlement, and displacement, it spawned contests over land, labor disputes, inter-ethnic conflicts and peaceful relations, and many kinds of cultural productions.

The Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies (GCWS)

This course is part of the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies. The GCWS at MIT brings together scholars and teachers at nine degree-granting institutions in the Boston area who are devoted to graduate teaching and research in Women's Studies and to advancing interdisciplinary Women's Studies scholarship. Learn more about the GCWS.

This course seeks to examine how people experience gender - what it means to be a man or a woman - and sexuality in a variety of historical and cultural contexts. We will explore how gender and sexuality relate to other categories of social identity and difference, such as race and ethnicity, economic and social standing, urban or rural life, etc. One goal of the class is to learn how to critically assess media and other popular representations of gender roles and stereotypes. Another is to gain a greater sense of the diversity of human social practices and beliefs in the United States and around the world.

For women and girls, cross-border movement is compounded by many challenges such as sexual and gender-based violence, psychosocial trauma, and exploitation, including trafficking. How can a rights-based approach help us address such challenges?

Learn where to look, who to contact, and how to use research tools to begin an exciting and fascinating exploration of your roots.