Gen&WS 524: Race, Gender, Health, and Medicine

Uses race and gender theoretical frameworks to understand peoples’ experiences with health and medicine. We start by conceptualizing race and gender as social categories and apply
these frameworks to how people experience health, wellness, and disease. We examine how healthcare and medicine are structured according to racialized and gendered frameworks. This course surveys a wide range of issues including reproductive health, body size, mental health, COVID, among other topics. Through readings, in-class discussions, assignments and personal reflections, students will use an intersectional approach to analyzing key debates in scholarship on health and medicine.

File: GenWS-524_Spring-2026_Ward_Syllabus.pdf.pdf

Gen&WS 528: Sexuality & Science

This interdisciplinary course focuses on scientific approaches to studying sexuality. We discuss current biological and neuroscientific research about sexuality, as well as feminist scholarship on these topics and critical responses to this research. Topics cover the intersections between biology (e.g., hormones, anatomy, neural activity, psychophysiology, evolution, etc.), sexuality (e.g., desire, dysfunction, arousal, bisexuality, orgasm, same-sex sexuality, pleasure, etc.), and feminist/critical scholarship about this research (e.g., feminist science studies, queer theory, feminist psychology, medicalization, etc.).

File: GenWS-528_Sexuality-Science-Syllabus_Fall-2024_Chadwick.pdf

Gen&WS 533: Gender, Race & Botany

With rising pandemics of mosquito-borne viruses like zika, malaria, dengue, and continuing searches for cures for Ebola, cancer, HIV/AIDS, and infectious diseases (like COVID-19), plants (in addition to animals) provide insight, inspiration, and often ingredients for possible cures. The World Intellectual Property Organization and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization have dedicated special programs for plant medicine, traditional knowledge (folklore) and genetic resources (biological specimens of plants). The high value placed on traditional knowledge, particularly from indigenous communities, has led to vandalism and biopiracy of plants (and animals) across national borders. There also deeper histories of plant knowledge and dispossession woven into the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the cotton and tobacco industry in the US South, as well as rubber from the Amazon rainforest that become crucial to world wars.

File: GWS-533_Gender-Race-and-Botany_Syllabus_2024.docx