Current Special Topics Courses
Fall 2024
WGS 298 (Lec A3) – Asian Women and Life Writing
Explorations of race and gender from an Asian context through autobiographical expressions and life writing. Includes autofiction, study of memoirs, journals, confessions, diaries, personal essays, and oral histories.
Instructor: Clara Iwasaki
WGS 470/SOC 492: Queering the Social
Sex/gender/sexuality as a complex social constellation. This course will explore intersections between LGBT politics and social theory. We will examine how research on sexuality involves broader critiques of social institutions, norms, and identities. The course approaches “queer” as a method of sociological analysis and applies queer theory to contemporary social questions
Instructor: Robyn Lee
GSJ 598/WGS 498 Art, Activism, Social Justice
Description: The central goal of this class is to understand the ways that social justice movements affiliated with recent feminisms have used art to imagine new futures, to critique and challenge existing socio-political systems, and to transform the public sphere. Using examples from historical as well as contemporary feminist art, we will ask how the visual arts, performance, and a broad range of aesthetic practices contribute to the transformation of publics and the fashioning of counter-publics. Main topics that we will cover include: Feminist Art, Art in Public, Feminist Art Education, Institutional Critique, Art & Obscenity, Art & Environmentalism, Digital Feminisms, Art in Urban Spaces, Fibre Feminism, Feminist Galleries.
Instructor: Michelle Meagher
GSJ 598/WGS 498 Feminist Cultural Study: Musical Theatre
Description: Critical cultural analysis of historical and contemporary examples of English-language Musical Theatre, primarily from North America.
Instructor: Felice Lifshitz
WGS 498/CSL 370 Identity of Self in Relationships with Others
Description: In this course we will discuss and make art about how we build communities and social change. Each student will consider how their own gifts strengthen their communities, where their gifts are best put to use for change, and how our gifts complement each other. We will examine Euro-centric community institutions, and consider where they fall short of what we can imagine for ourselves. Kokum Bonny Spencer will share teachings on decolonizing our ideas of social change and reciprocity. Join us as we navigate the possibilities and limits of the idea of "community," and the roles we can play in creating the worlds where we can all thrive.
This is a Walls to Bridges course that is offered inside a federal prison (Edmonton Institution For Women) for both incarcerated and non-incarcerated people and requires an application. Please email lprins@ualberta.ca or hbzhang@ualberta.ca for more information and/or to apply.
Instructor: Lisa Prins
WINTER 2025
WGS 298: Black Feminism
This course critically examines key ideas, issues, and debates in contemporary Black feminist thought. With a particular focus on Black feminist understandings of intersectionality, the course examines how Black feminist thinkers interrogate specific concepts including Black womanhood, sexuality, capitalism , criminality and punishment, media and popular culture.
Instructor: Domale Dube Keys
Through a combination of playing, reading, collaborating, and their own making, students in this special topics course will dive into the world of trans and queer interactive media art. Students will engage experimental works from emerging game artists and zinesters that complicate our understandings of relationships, joy, community, bodies, resilience, sex, transformation, rage, (in)visibility, solidarity, and complex monstrosity. Students will create their own experimental, personal, and/or political games in crucial genres—including tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs), lyric games and game poems, visual novels, and more. Most importantly, we will ask: how can we can find space for trans and queer play in a cultural landscape increasingly hostile to trans and queer ways of being? To answer this, we'll explore how games allow us to play (and unplay) gendered systems and how we might create games and art that shift and transform as we do. 
FAQ:“But what if… not Gamer™️?” 
No prior experience making games or programming is required for this course! We'll be covering everything you need in class.
“But what if… not queer/trans?” 
Likewise, no prior knowledge of trans or queer theory (or personal reckonings with queer identities) is required—only a willingness to experiment, make, and learn together! Join us! 