The course maps the field of global feminist studies and offers critical tools to evaluate how feminists and women activists in different parts of the world are affected by and face the challenges posed by the global economic, cultural, and political changes related to globalization, migratory movements, and the racial regimes associated with them.

The course is structured around two modules: the first module establishes a theoretical framework that helps us assess the impact of colonialism, imperialism, racism, and economic power on contemporary postcolonial relations. Black feminism, Women of Color feminism, postcolonial, transnational, and decolonial feminisms, as well as Muslim feminism, are some of the theories we will cover in this module. By exploring the biases associated with racism, ethnocentrism, whiteness, and the lingering divide between ‘first’- and ‘third’ world feminisms, the goal is to identify and recognize the complex patterns of power and oppression inherit in Western and white feminist identity.

The second module takes into consideration feminist organizing and different forms of Afro-descendant and non-white women’s migrant activism in the global arena against femicide, gender violence and discrimination, and the emergence of feminist transnational and racial solidarity through social media and community-based, regional, and transnational organizing and activism for gender justice on such global issues as asylum and refugee status, racial violence, transnational domestic labor, and sex work.

 

Course Activities and Material

The course follows a seminar format, with students taking the lead in debating and conducting discussion. All readings are drawn from primary sources and available in E Book format and PDF. Each class will have a discussion comprising lecture topics and assigned reading and visual material from which students will choose to present on. Students will build community and a cohort by working collaboratively on a final project. Field experts and gender justice activists will occasionally be invited to be part of our course debates.

Students are encouraged to seek out primary sources for research projects in the form of the life-stories and testimonies of migrant women living around the world and narrated through a plethora of media, such as video-testimonies, written and oral interviews, blogs, social media, and literature. Academic articles, activist blogs, migration databases and institutional sites, as well as documentaries are among the secondary sources for this course. Students are encouraged to share and build from their own professional and personal experiences as scholars, activists, professionals, and world citizens.

Some of the materials for the course include readings from feminists of color such as Lila Abu-Lughod, Lila, Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Fadwa el Guindi, Inderpal Grewal, María Lugones, Andrea Smith, The Santa Cruz Feminist of Color Collective, Patricia Collins, Fatima Mernissi, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty.

Documentaries and film include Santuario: One Family’s Fight to Stay Together by Christine Delph and Pilar Timpane, 2019; Abrazos: Children of Undocumented Parents, by Luis Argueta, 2014; In the Shadows: Undocumented Immigration in America, by Dan Glynn, 2013; Papers: Stories of Undocumented Youth, by Anne Galisky, 2009; Immigrant Nation! By Esau Mendez. 2010.

 

Learning Objectives

Knowledge Outcomes:  

• Acquire and utilize key theoretical concepts in the study of feminisms, race theory, border studies, transnationalism, and migration studies.  

• Assess how the struggle for gender justice is connected to larger social, economic, political, and cultural forces, local & global. 

• Recognize how individuals worldwide are actively responding to gender and racial inequalities and social injustices, individually and collectively and how they have integrated feminist thinking in their work. 

Skills Outcomes:  

• Demonstrate cultural competency in critical theory and familiarity with key issues in different disciplinary realms, such as feminist theory, critical race theory, migration, diaspora, border studies, and transnational studies. 

• Apply a wide critical terminology to professional fields such as social work, nursing, education, public policy, and (non-)governmental organizations, among others.   

• Ability to advocate for humane policies regarding immigration, race, and gender justice grounded in an understanding of women of color’s expression and animated by feminist principles.   

• Awareness of one’s own standpoint in articulation of arguments. 

Values Outcomes: 

• Commitment to the principles of social justice as they apply to migration, race, gender.