Current Special Topics Courses

Fall 2026

WGS 298 800: Critical Issues: Feminist Media Studies
Description: This course explores how media shapes—and is shaped by—ideas about gender, sexuality, race, class, and more. We’ll look at everything from zines, film and TV to social media, algorithms and AI, asking how media can reinforce stereotypes or open space for new voices and perspectives. Students will also discover how feminist approaches to media offer tools for critique, creativity, and social change.
Instructor: Patricia Jagger

GSJ 598 A01: Tech & Trans Studies
WGS 498 A01: Tech & Trans Studies
Description: Through a combination of collaboration, discussion, and critical making, students in this special topics course will explore how transgender life is mediated by and entangled with technology and media. From transition vlogs and voice training apps to DIY hormone networks and hashtag campaigns, the course will engage what scholar Oliver L. Haimson describes as “trans technologies”—tools, practices, and platforms that emerge from trans and gender diverse folk themselves. At the same time, we will critically examine the broader technological systems that structure (and, at times, threaten) trans life, including algorithmic visibility, platform governance, surveillance and gender detection software, sex essentialism, and misogynoir. Through readings, discussion, and creative experimentation with our own technical tools, students will analyze how trans people navigate, transform, and reimagine existing technological systems—and imagine how new technologies might be designed otherwise.

Note: No prior knowledge of trans or queer theory (or personal reckonings with queer identities) is required—only a willingness to experiment, make, and learn together! Join us!
Instructor: PS Berge

GSJ 598 A02: Nonviolence, Gender, & Social Movements
WGS 498 A02: Nonviolence, Gender, & Social Movements
Description: This course examines the use of nonviolent resistance strategies in social movements for women, gender and social justice in North America and across the globe. It seeks to analyze the myriad forms of making change that are available particularly for the everyday global citizen in both interpersonal struggles and larger scale movements. 
Instructor : Domale Dube

GSJ 598 A03: Indigenous Women and Feminism
Description: Draws on Indigenous theoretical frameworks, epistemologies, community expertise and knowledge to understand Indigenous women's participation in political movements and land and environmental activism.
Instructor: Lana Whiskeyjack

WINTER 2027

WGS 298 B01: Critical Issues: Black Feminism
Description: This course critically examines key ideas, issues, and debates in contemporary Black feminist thought. With a particular focus on Black feminist understandings of intersectionality, the course examines how Black feminist thinkers interrogate specific concepts including Black womanhood, sexuality, capitalism, criminality and punishment, media and popular culture.
Instructor: Domale Dube

GSJ 598 B01: Researching the Margins: Feminist Across Fields
WGS 498 B01: Researching the Margins: Feminist Across Fields
Description: Drawing on research collaborations around a Canada-wide SSHRC partnership – Partnership for Research with African Newcomers (PRAN-network.com) with researchers in education, music, social work, geography, educational psychology, Nursing and Public Health, this course will showcase various interactions between feminist scholarship and education, social science, and health disciplines. Students will explore the gaps exposed by as well as the contributions of these bidirectional relationships. More importantly, they will come to understand how feminist scholarship makes vibrant and rearticulates various ways of knowing, posing serious questions about how we view and pursue social justice for people and communities at the margins. 
Instructor: Philomena Okeke-Ihejirika

GSJ 598 X50 Feminist Storytelling & Participatory Media Inquiry
WGS 498 X50 Feminist Storytelling & Participatory Media Inquiry

Description: This course explores feminist storytelling as a critical and creative practice through participatory media approaches such as photovoice and digital storytelling. Students examine how stories are shaped by power, identity, representation, and lived experience while engaging in collaborative processes of media creation and inquiry. Through feminist theories, creative methods, and participatory practices, the course invites learners to question dominant narratives, amplify diverse voices, and develop new forms of storytelling that foster dialogue, reflection, and social imagination.

Instructor:  Patricia Jagger