Tuesdays, 5:00pm – 8:00pm

Location: MIT building & room TBA
MIT Course Number: WSG.610

The aim of this seminar is to expose, interrogate and complicate feminist theories, epistemologies and methodologies that form the intellectual bases necessary to conduct feminist research. Given the ambitiousness of this goal and a commitment to interdisciplinarity, the course will NOT serve as a survey course, but rather, a carefully curated sampling of key works--some old, some newer-- that shape feminist scholarship. In this course, we will, collectively explore ways of feminist thinking, knowing, listening and speaking in the interest of producing knowledge that instigates change. The course is organized around very broad conceptual categories-- a sorting that will no doubt frustrate as much as it reveals the impossibility of establishing boundaries in such an urgently evolving and sincerely contested field of study and action. 

Faculty

Chris Bobel is Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her scholarship lies at the intersection of social movements, gender, health and embodiment, or how feminist thinking becomes feminist doing at the most intimate and immediate levels. Chris is co-editor (with Samantha Kwan) of Embodied Resistance: Challenging the Norms, Breaking the Rules, and author of The Paradox of Natural Mothering, New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation and the forthcoming The Managed Body: Developing Girls and Menstrual Health in the Global South. Chris is currently completing a co-edited collection (again with Samantha Kwan) titled Body Battlegrounds: Transgressions, Tensions, Transformations, and she is serving as lead editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies. To see a complete listing of Chris’s work and media mentions, go to https://works.bepress.com/chris_bobel/.