Course Information:
Spring 2008
WSS 240 (3662) /AAS 240 (7995) /LCS 240 (2543)
Days: Tuesdays/Thursdays
Time: 2:45-4:05 pm
Location: Education 125
Course Description:
This interdisciplinary course will define the terms classism, racism, and sexism and explore how they intersect to shape systems of dominance. Through historical, political and global consciousness, we will assess different social and cultural forces. We will also examine social constructions of race, gender, and class and how they create worldviews that discourage us from challenging the status quo. In the end, our goal is to dismantle our various “isms” and envision social change for social justice.
Women's Studies Department Goals and Learning Outcomes:
Students will demonstrate that they:
1. understand and can use intersectional feminist analysis.
2. understand what it means to place women at the center of knowledge-making.
3. understand how feminist pedagogy may be different from other forms of teaching.
4. understand the relationship between Women's Studies scholarship and feminist action.
For more information, please visit the website: www.albany.edu/ws
Course Goals and Learning Outcomes:
This course will parallel departmental goals and objectives in that students will:
1. dismantle the intersecting ideologies of racism, classism, sexism, etc.
2. conceptualize feminist social justice beyond gender equity and towards community and human dignity.
3. fully participate in the teaching process as active learners, peer educators, and public scholars.
4. apply scholarship in the classroom to activism beyond these walls.
General Education U.S. Diversity and Pluralism Requirement:
This course fulfills the General Education U.S. Diversity and Pluralism requirement; we will focus primarily on contemporary experiences in the United States, even as we explore historical developments of our contemporary moment. Courses fulfilling this requirement offer students perspectives on the diversity and pluralism of U.S. society with respect to one or more of the following: age, class, disability, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sexual orientation. Given that categories of diversity and pluralism intersect, approved courses will, wherever possible, deal with more than one category. Please keep in mind that "Classism, Racism, and Sexism" deals primarily with the intersections of these different categories.
Approved courses provide students with substantial knowledge of diversity and pluralism as expressed through social, political, ideological, aesthetic, or other aspects of human endeavor. Drawing on the experience of specific groups, courses explore the theories, dynamics, mechanisms, and results of diversity and pluralism, including the sources and manifestations of controversies and conflicts.