Women’s & Gender Studies

The course explores contemporary Spanish art through the lenses of gender, identity, public space, and social change. Students examine how artists address historical memory, feminism, masculinity, and cultural representation through visual and public art, supported by museum visits, discussions, and critical analysis.  

This course increases awareness of the relevance of gender issues to their lives and developing a critical understanding of the multiple and contested meanings of gender in contemporary African and international contexts. It introduces key concepts concerning gender and sexuality, culture and identity, context and the dynamics of masculinity and femininity. It explores connections between gender, ‘race’, class, generation, and location and draws on a number of different resource materials: including visual materials such as documentaries, film and media, art. DP requirements: Students are expected to attend all classes, and to submit all required assignments by deadlines identified in the course curriculum. Assessment: Continuous assessment (essays, projects, tests, etc.) counts 100%.

The course examines gender, class, equity, and minority representation in contemporary Catalan cinema. Students explore how Catalan filmmakers portray social identities, inequality, cultural diversity, and marginalized communities, with attention to the role of cinema in shaping perspectives on contemporary society.

Why is ‘gender’ a global far-right obsession? How do algorithms amplify anti-feminist hate? This course combines theory and action—from dissecting memes to designing resistance campaigns. It examines how anti-gender movements weaponize digital platforms to spread disinformation, enforce patriarchal norms, and target marginalized communities. Through feminist, postcolonial, and disability justice lenses, students analyze global case studies—from #TradWife influencers to algorithmic oppression in the Global South. Students engage with theorists like Butler and Haraway, conduct hands-on research (e.g., TikTok comment analysis), and design counterspeech campaigns. Centering a transdisciplinary and decolonial approach, the course equips students to critique structural exclusion and imagine emancipatory digital futures.

Through the reading of scholarly texts, collective analysis of sources, and personal research, this course aims to address European integration through the lens of gender and how gender issues impact European integration. The course highlights the contribution of women’s networks to bringing European societies closer together, but also examines the place of feminism and reflections on gender in the development of European values, which today help to set Europe apart globally. Particular attention is paid to the different experiences of gender and feminism in Western Europe and in Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Berlin has long been imagined as a site of queer freedom, experimentation, and resistance. This course explores how queerness is shaped by and shapes urban space, using Berlin as a lens to examine intersections of sexuality, space, and power. Drawing from queer theory, urban studies, and architecture, students investigate how queer spaces are produced, contested, and remembered, and how they intersect with race, class, gender, and transnational histories. Through readings, discussions, exercise and fieldwork, participants critically reflect on what makes a space “queer,” who has access to it, and how Berlin’s reputation as a queer capital both reveals and obscures broader social dynamics. The course combines theoretical inquiry with experiential learning and invites critical engagement with the ethics of researching queer urban life.

This seminar seeks to trace the arguments and development of queer theory from the early 1990s when the term was first introduced to the present, including earlier texts that helped to shape the discourse. Special focus lies on the political and rhetorical strategies that these texts employ and how they establish queerness as a lens through which one can analyze US American culture and cultural productions. To test the scope and limits of a queer framework, students also ask themselves how queer theory relates to interrelated discourses such as feminism, transgender studies, intersex studies, critical race theory, and disability studies. The course discusses such topics as compulsory heterosexuality and heteronormativity, women of color feminism and queer of color critique, queer negativity versus utopianism, homonormativity and homonationalism, crip theory, and trans studies as queer theory’s supposed evil twin.

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the complex geographies of gender roles, relations and identities and different type of feminisms in the global South. As well as exploring the theoretical approaches to gender and development thought, and especially different types of feminist thought, the course also examines a series of axes of diversity in relation to people’s lives in the global South. It examines changing social and economic aspects of development on women’s and men’s (and where research exists on trans and non-binary) lives in relation to household transformations, population mobility, poverty, employment, sexualities, gender-based violence, and development policy and practice.

This is a special studies course in the field of women's and gender studies, with projects arranged between the student and faculty member. The specific topics of study vary each term and are described on a special study project form for each student. The number of units varies with the student’s projects, contact hours, and method of assessment, as defined on the student’s special study project form.

This course examines the role of sexual orientation and gender identity in politics drawing on multidisciplinary research on social movements, transnational rights advocacy, identity politics, public opinion and political behavior, as well as regional studies.