2026 Summer
WGS337H5S - Special Topics in Women and Gender Studies: Cartographical Practices of Black Girlhood (Instructor: K. Hamilton)
In this course we look at Black girlhood studies as its own unique field of study. We will navigate the aliveness of Black girlhood and its epistemological possibilities for futuremaking. We explore the temporal implications of Black girlhood as existence and method geared both inward, to our interior lives, and the future (worldmaking, futuremaking, dreaming). We begin from the premise that Black aliveness is an invitation to imagine a Black world, create an opening for Black girlhood to be engaged in this same imagining as its premise.
WGS434H5F - Special Topics in Women and Gender Studies: Transnational Caribbean Feminisms (Instructor: R. Persadie)
What makes a Caribbean feminist and where does the regions story of feminist thought and action begin? In this fourth-year special topics course, together we will begin answering these questions through exploring the pedagogies and politics of Caribbean feminist thought from the early twentieth century to the current-day. Topics explored will include Indigenous Caribbean feminisms; Afro-Indigenous relationalities; climate change, ecojustice and racial capitalism; cross-racial solidarities; arts activism, popular culture and performance; the Haitian and Grenadian revolution; gender-based and intimate-partner violence; community organizing; queer and trans activism; memory and the sacred; US imperialism in the Caribbean; and transnational articulations of Black Power, the Black Radical Tradition and Pan-Africanism in the Caribbean. Case studies will explore feminist politics and practices in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Belize, Surinam, Haiti and their diasporas within North America through a transnational lens.