Please consult the New School Course Catalog for a full list of current courses. Spring 2025 courses that count for the Gender and Sexuality Studies Graduate
Certificate are listed below; view an archive of past courses.
Spring 2025 Courses
Gender and Its Discontents, UTNS 5046
McKenzie Wark, Professor of Culture and Media
This is the required core course for the university-wide graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies and it is open to all the graduate students who are interested in sexuality and gender studies. Our starting point is the acknowledgement that sex- and gender-based modes of social organization are pervasive and, further, that their prominence and persistence are reflected in sex- and gender-conscious research across the humanities, the arts, the social sciences, design, and studies dedicated to social policies and innovative strategies for social intervention. We will expand on this starting point through both an in-depth survey of influential theoretical approaches to sex, gender and sexuality such as Marxist feminism, Black feminism, Native and Indigenous feminism, transgender studies, queer theory, and postcolonial and decolonial feminism, and by paying attention to the significance of different approaches. Topics to be explored include, but are not limited to: intersectionality, coalition and liberation, ecofeminism and Queer Ecology, equality and rights, exploitation and the division of labor, the construction of gender, performativity, gender images, narrative and identity.
Global and Environmental Politics & Policy, NEPS 5004
This course examines environmental politics and policy in the global field. It focuses on challenges concerning global environmental justice and sustainability transformations in the context of persisting inequalities and power relations, and in the face of mounting sociopolitical pressures for radical change. We will focus on challenges concerning biological and cultural diversity loss, forests and biomass, land degradation and agrobiodiversity, oceans, marine life and fisheries, waters and rivers, mining and energy, waste, toxicity and hazardous substances, and infrastructure development and urbanization, among other emergent issues. By locating these challenges within the increasingly complex apparatus of Earth system governance and policy and the global political ecology of the so-called 'Anthropocene' epoch, this course underlines tensions between global/intergovernmental and trans-local/grassroots approaches to environmental crises. The course examines these challenges of environmental politics and policies by highlighting tensions between technocratic and democratic policy-making, reformist and transformational approaches, hegemonic and subaltern methodologies, North/South cleavages, modernist and indigenous knowledges, Western and non-Western ecologies, state-based and social movement-based proposals, issue-specific versus intersectional solutions, and market-based versus commons-based policies and collective actions towards sustainability. After revisiting the histories and structural drivers of global environmental problems drawing on a range of critical, interdisciplinary, intersectional, ecofeminist, intercultural, decolonial and indigenous accounts, we move to focus on specific issue areas. We underline how the ever-expanding agenda of environmental challenges has come to imply radical and epochal change across all sectors. We examine how diverse global actors—whether (inter)governmental, non-governmental, civil society, social movement or market-based actors, have responded differently to such increasingly encompassing and urgent pressures for radical change. We also explore divergent prognoses and futures stemming from contending approaches to policy and collective action across scales (local to global) and across borders—whether spatial, cultural, social, political or disciplinary. Students will conduct a collaborative research project in relation to organizations or institutions engaged in environmental politics and policy with a global focus.
Women's Studies in French, NFRN 3725
Marie-Christine Masse, Assistant Professor of French
This undergraduate French language and culture course examines the politics and culture of gender, sex, and sexuality in France during the twentieth century through contemporary times. The course embarks on a foundational approach to the multi-disciplinary field of “Women’s Studies” by understanding the legacy of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) in France, and by studying a wide range of literature, art, and media. The course primarily focuses on classic and contemporary film, short literary texts, advertising and social media. By surveying French Feminist movements and theories, the course examines French language in relation to gender identity and related contemporary topics. Conducted in French. Proficiency: intermediate-high or advanced level proficiency in French is required.
Identity and Psychoanalysis, GPHI 6311
It is from a psychoanalytic perspective that this class will explore the logic of identification common in the United States--a country defined by social pressure to declare one’s identity. We can begin by assuming that nobody fully knows who one is. Claims of identity, which often collide with subjective experience, must be examined critically. If identity offers meaning and a sense of self, it can also diminish one's singularity, which generates a struggle for those whose gender expressions like clothes, body language, speech patterns, social interactions, etc., do not align with social expectations traditionally associated with the sex they were assigned at birth or for those whose bodies are racialized. This course is based on the critique of psychoanalysis and sexual difference that the instructor developed through their practice in Philadelphia’s barrio where they encountered populations marginalized by race, gender, class, or immigration status. With key readings from Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, Erikson, Benveniste, Althusser, Halberstam, Mock, Long Chu, Butler. Lichtenstein, and Preciado, this class will tackle the function of identification in the construction of the self from a cultural and psychoanalytic perspective; it will combine clinical insight, cultural analysis, and discussions of case studies. We will describe and analyze various experiences of embodiment, showing how these experiences modify identity at the sexual, social, and racial levels.
Psychology of Gender, GPSY 6359
Pantea Farvid, Associate Professor of Applied Psychology
How has Western psychology understood the concept of Gender? How have conceptualizations of gender changed over time? What is the relationship between sex and gender? What about gender and sexuality? This course provides an overview of the field of the psychology of gender from critical perspectives from within the discipline of psychology, as informed by Feminist Theory, Queer Theory, Trans* Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Disability Studies. In particular, we engage with four decades of feminist psychological theory, research and methodologies that have challenged what we study, who we study, how we study, and what we (think) we know about women, men, and gender in psychology. After interrogating the sex/gender binary, we examine the gender stereotypes that support this binary, and the consequences of these stereotypes for cognition, behavior, and affect. We explore the direct and indirect regulation and management of cis- and transgendered bodies, and the psychological implications of such regulatory regimes. Key topics include: constructing sex/gender; feminist research methodologies; intersectionality; gender & development; sex & sexuality; gender and mental health; body image & embodiment; gender & medicalization; and gender-based violence, intimate relationships, reproductive pathways, psychology of boys men and masculinities, among others.
Affective Fictions: Gender Ideology & Racial Fragility in Cont. Politics, GSOC 6245
We live in (yet another) age of backlash against feminism’s victories: reproductive rights have been rolled back, global alliances have been formed to attack sexual rights and reinstate religiosity, and gender studies courses – along with critical theory and queer studies - are being starved of funding or dismantled altogether. Governments are recriminalizing non-normative sexualities, redefining citizenship and reinventing authenticity. Austerity programs reinstate the traditional nuclear family as the basis of policy making. Anti-feminist/ anti-queer ideologies are centred on narratives of fear. Equality and hospitality (particularly towards migrants) are reframed as socially destructive, with white men being foregrounded as the victims. Right wing narratives weave into their politics the defense of family, the nation and ultimately the reproduction of the white race itself. This robust, even aggressive, set of ideas creates public discourses that work to cohere social groupings around reconstituted nationalism. In defense of a ‘way of life,’ a coded framing of white privilege, new languages of entitlements are emerging against liberal and left movements. This course addresses the fictions that attend to this new politics, rooted in fear and loss, and with powerful material effects. We will consider the ways in which racism is woven into the founding myths of nations in Europe and North America, as well as some postcolonial countries. We will ask whether feminism itself is complicit in foregrounding the concerns of white women at the expense of people of colour, and the affective languages that are imbricated in dominant forms of feminism. We will think through the kinds of affective and political strategies that might weave together different types of democratic and radical demands.
Becoming Visible, UTNS 5702
Gina Walker, Professor of Women's Studies
How do we represent “missing” earlier women when the systems for knowing we have in place have been built by, for, and about the lives of men? This course is an opportunity to translate empirical research into various media, beginning with multi-disciplinary data that provides evidence of individual women and their accomplishments from the past, and to experiment with the norms and forms of the making of History itself. For example, translations of recently excavated cuneiform letters from the 19th Century BCE reveal details of the experiences of named female weavers, managers, colleagues, wives, and mothers, some of these written by the women themselves. We learn that even then women were denied equal recognition as “professionals” with their male collaborators. Together, we consider “female biography” as a vehicle to interrogate what it means to represent the female past. The course does not presuppose knowledge in women’s history but instead assumes that students from a variety of disciplines and practices will want to roll up their sleeves and work through the complex challenges of making the legions of “unremembered women” newly visible, tangible, knowable, instructive, inspiring.
Political Economy of Gender: Theory and Policy, GECO 5035
Kirstin Munro, Assistant Professor of Economics
This course proceeds from the premise that “building a theory of women's liberation around the category of ‘women’ … is a mistake,” (Vogel 1973). Instead, we will expand our understanding of gender beyond the category of “women” to investigate the relationship between gendered divisions of waged/unwaged work and accumulation. A study of the 1970s Domestic Labor Debates will be the primary focus of our readings, providing the context for our evaluations of current Marxist-feminist political economy as well as the framework for students’ own application of political economic theoretical considerations to a present-day policy problem. Students will be expected to have carefully read or re-read Capital Vol. 1 Part VII (The Accumulation of Capital) and Part VIII (Primitive Accumulation) immediately prior to the start of the semester in preparation for this course.
Looking Beyond the Glass Ceiling, PSCE 5130
Kimberly Ackert, Part-time Assistant Professor
This seminar course is open to all design students but focuses on women transitioning from graduate degree programs into the professional work force. The format of the syllabus and course material encourage a direct and personalized interaction between professionals and students to discuss a wide range of issues from a female perspective. The course material includes historical references and case studies of women in all areas of design, a review of books and articles, as well as guest speakers and office visits. The course provides a platform to discuss and debate current events impacting women from a political and social point of view with the goal of recognizing challenges such as pay inequality and other forms of discrimination. Specific subjects include confidence building and developing the communication and negotiating skills required for women to thrive and succeed in professions that have been historically male dominated. Diversity in enrollment will contribute to the goal of a level playing field.
The Turn Toward Virtue, GPHI 6770
Alice Crary, University Distinguished Professor
The second half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first were marked by a striking increase of interest in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics and, more generally, in the question of the significance of virtue. What is at stake in this turn toward virtue? Is it at bottom nothing more than the articulation of a new approach in ethics to be set alongside utilitarian and Kantian approaches? Or does it call for a radical re-evaluation of deeply entrenched assumptions about moral thought and action? In this course, we will consider the writings of moral philosophers who present their stress on virtue as a call for a revolution in ethics. We will also pay close attention to the political and historical context for this revolutionary event. Our emphasis will be on works by Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, three of the twentieth century’s great moral philosophers (and also: three of its great women philosophers). We will also read work by Julia Annas, Annette Baier, Cora Diamond, Alisdair McIntyre, John McDowell, Michael Thompson, David Wiggins, and Bernard Williams.
Borders of Capital, GPOL 6253
Anna Reumert, Research Fellow
This graduate seminar examines how capitalism borders our world, and how we labor and organize our lives within those borders, and sometimes despite them. We will examine how capitalism “works”, what values it produces, and what it kills. To fuel this conversation, we will draw on a vast interdisciplinary curriculum of political and anthropological theories that examine the relationship between life and labor; from Marxist theories of accumulation and valorization through Black feminist reflections on reproduction and indentured labor to contemporary examinations of extractivism, incarceration and the deadly life of logistics. The course brings us, finally, to examine the future of labor with the advance of artificial intelligence and ecological ruin, and to consider the limits and possibilities of this ruin for the future of political action and collective existence. We will also be drawing from visual representations of these themes, as represented in contemporary popular culture.
Power, Politics, and Praxis, GANT 5410
Ujju Aggrawal, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Experimental Learning
This graduate seminar will examine the relationship of research and research methods to structures of power and social change, and learn about approaches to ethnographic and qualitative research rooted in Black, feminist, indigenous, decolonial, and ethnic studies. Drawing upon traditions of activist anthropology and militant research, we will explore questions of epistemology as they relate to methods, fieldwork, and political context and history. Students will develop a foundation in ethnographic research methods: what they are; how research methods relate to social theory; the factors involved in selecting certain methods; and how we enter and navigate “the field.” Some of the questions we will address include: How do we move from general research interests to specific topics and research questions? What is the relationship between the questions we ask, the theories we employ and the methods we engage? What are the ethics of research? What does accountability mean when it comes to researching inequality and injustice? How do we think through questions of positionality and reflexivity in research—and why do they matter? Because one of the best ways to learn research methods is a praxis-oriented approach, students in this course will have the chance to learn through doing: to practice, apply, experiment, and develop our understanding of methods (including interviewing, participant observation, analysis) through a mini fieldwork practicum.
Boundaries and Belonging, NINT 5888
Everita Silina, Assistant Professor of International Affairs
This is an Interdisciplinary course that critically examines human (im)mobilities by focusing on the physical, legal, and discursive construction of borders; the racializing and gendering components of citizenship and membership; the legal and political aspects of forced migration; the settler colonial legacies of racial capitalism; and the geopolitical effects of non-human factors and climate change on mobility. It is intended to further familiarize graduate students to concepts and methodologies drawn from political science, sociology, anthropology, history, international affairs, Black feminist theory and critical geography. Students are encouraged to bring in insight from their research for the final project.
Scholar-Activist Methodologies, NEPS 5042
Due to its past and present complicity in colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, Eurocentric academia has a complicated relationship with oppressed populations around the world. Given this relationship as well as the ever-mounting crises of late capitalist modernity, how can critical and radical scholar-activists sensitively yet effectively engage these populations? How can they balance methodological rigor, conscientious self-reflection, and their political commitment to progressive social, environmental, and global transformation? How can they make their work both accessible and actionable for communities, organizations, and movements marginalized or altogether disregarded by the transnational academic-industrial complex? This course addresses these pressing questions by attempting to re-frame research as accompaniment. Drawing inspiration from the Oaxacan Indigenous concept of acompañamiento (“accompaniment”) and the Zapatista concept of preguntando caminamos (“Questioning, we walk”), it invites students to consider how intellectuals situated within the neo-colonial and neoliberal university can, through their research, forge concrete and mutually beneficial bonds of affinity and solidarity with frontline and fenceline actors fighting capitalism, state violence, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, ecological collapse, and other interlocking oppressions. This course asks students to contemplate how they can accompany their interlocutors at every stage of the research process, from project design to field or archival research to the interpretation and dissemination of results. Students will review a range of texts on scholar-activist, decolonial, Indigenous, feminist, and other critical and radical approaches to research. Course materials will equip students with methodological frameworks that challenge the epistemological and axiological foundations of the typically depoliticized, extractivist research process as well as with particular methods that they can use in their own research projects. Students will have the opportunity to develop not only articles for scholarly publications but also editorials, policy proposals, creative interventions, and other research outputs that befit their personal, political, and intellectual goals.
Toxicity, Ecology & Health, NEPS 5029
Abigail Perez Aguilera, Assistant Professor and Chair of the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management Program
How do we describe a healthy environment? How does the presence of toxicity in communities change the dynamics of conviviality, life expectancy as well as the landscape? How do different regions around the world experience, overcome and sometimes completely change due to the presence of unhealthy environments, including toxic ones? How is the toxification of territories and environments embodied in bodies and communities of humans and other-than-humans? How do communities and other actors work to restore the interconnected health of territories, environments and bodies? These questions among others will be explored in this course relying on texts and resources that center analyses of toxicity, waste, risk assessment and risk management, health, community based activism, citizen science, gender and queer studies, posthumanism, critical studies of science and technology, critiques of racial capitalism, decolonization and depatriarchalization of knowledge, among others. This course creates a space to critically examine how toxicity has been interpreted, contested and addressed (or not addressed) within science, knowledge production, the production and politics of ‘expertise’, policy, governance, and community organizing. We will center environmental-health justice, subjugated knowledges, and community and global health approaches that conceive of body and territory as one. We will examine toxicity, waste and health both in the broad context of knowledge and governance, as well as through applied case examinations that connect toxicity, ecology and health in relation to contested interpretations, power/knowledge relations and responses from different actors, including scientists and scholars, the science-policy interface, policy makers, civil society and social movement actors, artists, and people from different communities affected by toxic environments. We will address matters of toxic embodiment through a territorial approach such as in examples of carcinogens, waste management and processing, toxified industrial and extractive sites and territories, among others. By taking an integrated territorial-community approach that ties health of body and ecology, we situate the critical engagement with toxicity in relation to broader projects of monumental modernity, developmentalism, racial capitalism and the decolonization of health.
Political Reporting & Writing, GPUB 5102
Natasha Lennard, Associate Director, Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism
This writing intensive course will explore a range of current and historic political writing, from political speeches and manifestos, to longform reporting and advocacy journalism, in order to develop an understanding of political writing as a varied set of genres. Some political texts (like Tom Paine's Common Sense, and The Communist Manifesto) have arguably changed the world. Some investigative pieces of journalism have had a similar impact (one thinks of how The Washington Post covered the Pentagon Papers, a previously secret history of the war in Vietnam). We will take a critical look at media coverage of elections, the White House and the Beltway, but will also focus on issues and stories far beyond this, including race and racism, the far right and left, #Metoo and feminism, immigration, the environment, LGBTQ struggle, and more.
Contemporary Sociological Theory, GSOC 5061
Benoit Challand, Professor of Sociology
This course offers an introduction to influential ways of thinking sociologically that emerged in the 20th and 21st centuries, and which develop on, and transform, original themes of the foundational period of “classical sociology”. Away from positivism and holism, interpretivist contemporary theories shed new light on the micro-foundations of “society” and of the self, with a growing attention to gender, race, fluid identity, questions of social reproduction and ecology. The course covers American and Continental sociological theory, as well as critical race and postcolonial theory. Overall, the course equips students with the ability to critically analyze contemporary sociological texts with a particular focus on how these texts apply theoretical frameworks to pressing issues of our time.
Intersections Between Management & Social Justice, NMGM 5104
Nidhi Srinivas, Professor of Management
The course facilitates an examination of how and if management and managers can be vehicles to advance social justice in different forms - ecological, economic, racial, sexual or gender, design etc. Grounded in critical social theories, it explores how and if someone interested in using management ideas to generate social justice inhabits a contradiction. And is it possible to think of management in terms of larger questions of social justice, to create workplaces and organizations in general that are more democratic and inclusive? The course requires students to attend or view recordings of the Management & Social Justice Conversation Series, ground them in the literature and take an actively engaged and critically reflective stance towards the topics and organizations we study. We will look at themes such as emancipatory management practices, forms of inclusion in workplaces, intersectional management practices, indigenous knowledge/politics, and ecological activism, and organizations. Students are encouraged to submit their final products to be featured in the conversation series for the following year.
Visions of a Post-Neoliberal Future Grounded in Human Rights, NURP 5050
Darrick Hamilton, Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy
At a pivotal moment of paradigm shift, many are asking, what will come next? According to many scholars and activists, the existing market-centric economic paradigm has failed: it has failed to deliver broad-based prosperity or financial stability, particularly for Black, Indigenous and other people of color. How do we forge a new economy that fosters broad prosperity with economic inclusion, civic engagement, social equity and human dignity at its center, regardless of identity? “Visions of a Post-Neoliberal Future” sponsored by the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, will bring leading thinkers, changemakers, policymakers, journalists, and activists to the New School to present their perspectives as part of the Henry Cohen Public lecture series. This course will explore the intersections of race, social stratification, and political economy in order to promote economic and racial justice. We will examine how the neoliberal economic framework came to be so powerful, permeating across academic disciplines, public policy debates, and mainstream discourse. Each lecture will assess how the existing paradigm has worked or not worked, with a particular attention to outcomes for Black and Brown Americans. Speakers will not only assess the problem -- they will offer new visions of the future. Students will develop critical thinking and leadership skills around a social equity agenda. Students will engage with some of the nation’s leading policy and social justice leaders from academic, philanthropy, foundations, government, and grassroots organizations. Students will be trained to write influential opinion-editorials and deliver public speeches around these issues.
Sensory Infrastructures, GANT 6095
Dana Burton, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Design
Close your eyes and tune in to the sensorium around us. This class invites us to explore the sounds, smells, tastes, touches (and more!) that constitute the many infrastructures that frame and guide our lives. From the design of public benches in parks, to the colonial economies of ice, the senses are powerful sites of influence and interaction. In this course, we will probe the thresholds between body, environment, and system.We draw inspiration from a spectrum of interdisciplinary methods and theories, such as: ethnography by reading work by scholars like Annemarie Mol, who delves into the social, political, and technoscientific aspects of disease; design with architects like Nerea Cavillo and colleagues who allow us to digitally encounter atmospheric spaces through grids and maps as a form of analysis, and biological inquiry with scientists like David G. Haskell who has written, podcasted, and co-produced compositions that immerse us in the experiences of nonhuman and human relations across a global milieu. Adjacent to this, we will use our own bodies as “theory machines,” as anthropologist Stefan Helmreich describes, to heighten and nuance our attunement to the realities of the present moment. Guest speakers, as well as site visits will be an integral part of our semester. Throughout, we will ask questions such as: What can a sensorial perspective open up for us in the rush of our everyday lives? Towards what kind of futures do sensory infrastructures allow and how might we engage with them? Class assignments will be cumulative towards a final project, which may take the form of a research-informed multimodal project or a research paper.
Colonialism, Modernity and Their Afterlives: Perspectives From the Central Core & Peripheral Fringe, GSOC 6239
Carlos Forment, Associate Professor of Sociology
This seminar introduces students to some of the most influential interpretations of colonialism (broadly understood) that have been advanced by thinkers in different intellectual-political traditions from across the central core and peripheral fringe. Studying the writings of Anglo-European authors (i.e.: uneven and combined development, imperialism, southern question, global color line, boomerang effect) alongside those of their Latin American, Indian and Pan-African counterparts (i.e.: nationalism, dependency, subaltern, post-colonial, de-colonial feminism) provides an opportunity to explore their many shared and divergent concerns as well as some of the subterranean continuities and discontinuities that have defined the boundaries of the age-old dispute on colonialism. In examining their writings, we focus on how each thinker analyzed the material and symbolic links between colonialism and modernity (i.e.: capitalism, liberal democracy, rational and universal principles), and the way their interpretation of them conditioned their depiction of and the differential hierarchies they established among and between countries, peoples, institutions and practices of the Global North and South. The purpose of this exercise, however, is not to ‘provincialize,’ ‘universalize’ or ‘particularize’ any one aspect or either region, as is commonly done by scholars today. Instead, it is to encourage us to reflect critically on the following two questions (and others closely related to them): A) does the anti-colonial perspective provide a convincing counter-narrative of the emergence and development of modernity (capitalism, liberal democracy, rational and universal principles), and is it capable of challenging the image it has of itself? and B) what are the consequences of relying on a ‘concept-interpretation’ that has been developed to analyze a specific issue or problem that surfaced in a given ‘place-time’ to make sense of a similar but somewhat different socio-political-cultural formation?