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

WGS 470/MST 399 B1: Special Topics: Trans And Queer Game Design

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! ✨

WGS 470 B2/GSJ 570 B1: Queer Feelings
This course explores the increasing scholarly focus on affect, emotion, bodily intensity, and visceral experiences, challenging the traditional emphasis on discourse, language, and identity. Through the lenses of affect theory, queer theory, and other critical theories, the course examines the nexus between feelings, embodiment, and systems of oppression. This course will navigate the ways that the concept of “queer feelings” extends beyond the emotions experienced by queer individuals, encompassing broader bodily intensities that exceed, press against, and expose the relationship between what one ought to feel and systems of power. Students will finish this course with a deeper understanding of how feelings and bodily states are intertwined with cultural and political dynamics, exploring questions such as: How do our individual and collective histories shape how systems of oppression are registered on the body? What is the relationship between individual feeling, collective feeling, and political action?
Instructor: Randi Nixon
WGS 498/GSJ 598 SEM 850 Topics in Gender and Social Justice: Feminist Narrative Inquiry

This course will be offered online with synchronous class meetings online supported by Canvas and Zoom. Participation in the class Forum will be assessed.

Narrative inquiry is the study of experience. Narrative inquirers study both the living of storied experiences and the stories we tell about our experiences, accepting that the story is the fundamental unit of human experience. Storytelling is the way that people have always made sense of their experiences; narrative is both the phenomenon and the way of studying it. The well-known Canadian scholars Clandinin and Connelly (2000), define narrative inquiry as the reconstruction of a person’s experience in relationship both to the other and to a social milieu. In other words, narratives are always socially situated; constructed in shared understandings.

Feminist narrative inquiry is concerned with amplifying voices of the marginalized or oppressed, highlighting issues of identity, relationship and power. Feminist narrative inquiry is also an ethical, relational practice that asks whose questions concern us, and whose interpretations count most. As researchers, the narratives we study, collect, and co-construct suggest social action.

Using a feminist and intersectional lens, in this course we will learn about:

  • concepts of epistemology and positionality
  • the practice of feminist narrative inquiry in diverse fields
  •  the methods used to develop and analyze narratives, for example, narrative interviewing
  • ethical and process-related issues related to narrative inquiry
  • sacred stories and disruptive narratives
  • narrative writing

We will read a variety of narratives and narrative studies, and develop and analyze personal narratives through individual and shared writing sessions.

Instructor:  Katy Campbell

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