GENDER STUDIES

Director:
            Eileen Hunt Botting
Program Coordinator:
            Linnie Caye
Program Tel.: 574-631-4266
 
Objectives.  Gender Studies is an interdisciplinary academic program that analyzes the significance of gender—and the cognate subjects of sex, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality —in all areas of human life.  Gender Studies illuminates how gender and its cognates inflect the experiences of individuals as well as the development of practices and institutions. The Gender Studies supplementary major and minor provide the intellectual framework in which the analysis of gender and its cognates can be creatively and critically applied to the arts and humanities, the natural and social sciences, the professions and the workplace, and one’s personal, familial, and civic life.  Alongside our diverse array of courses drawn from across the university, our summer internship and academic-credit internship programs emphasize the holistic and practical life applications of a Gender Studies education at Notre Dame.
 
Course Requirements.  Students in the supplementary major are required to complete 24 credit hours distributed as follows:  “Introduction to Gender Studies”--GSC 10001/20001 (3 credits); “Introduction to Feminist and Gender Theory”--GSC 10002/20002 (3 credits); one Gender Studies “Diversity” course (3 credits); one Gender Studies “Humanities” course (3 credits); one Gender Studies “Social Science” course (3 credits); “Gender Studies Senior Internship”--GSC 45001-01 or “Gender Studies Senior Thesis”--GSC 48001-01 (3 credits); plus two other Gender Studies courses (6 credits).
 
Students in the minor are required to complete 15 credit hours distributed as follows:   one introductory Gender Studies course, either “Introduction to Gender Studies”--GSC 10001/20001 or “Introduction to Feminist and Gender Theory”-- GSC 10002/20002 (3 credits), plus four other Gender Studies courses (12 credits).
           
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
 
The following course description gives the number and title of the course.  Lecture hours per week, laboratory and/or tutorial hours per week, and semester credit hours are in parentheses.  The University reserves the right to withdraw any course without sufficient registration.
 
GSC 30309. Labor and America since 1945
(Cross-listed with AMST 30362, HIST 30856, IIPS 30922)
3 credits, Graff (3-0-3)
8:55–11:25 TR 6/17–7/31
CRN 3555; ID # GSC 30309 01
Last “add” date: 6/22
“Drop” dates: refund, 6/26; last 7/10
Enrollment Limit: 2
This course explores the evolving relationships of American workers to politics, the economy, and the wider culture since 1945. The United States emerged from World War II as the strongest global power, and its citizens subsequently enjoyed a long postwar economic boom that created what we might call the first truly middle-class society in world history. At the heart of that new society was the American labor movement, those unions like the United Auto Workers and the United Steel Workers who ensured that at least from of the postwar profits made it into the wallets of workers and their families. Today, however, unions represent only 8 percent of workers in the private sector. What accounts for the decline of organized labor since the 1950s? What has the decline of the labor movement meant for workers specifically, and the American economy and politics more broadly? How and why have popular perceptions of unions changed over time? What has been the relationship of organized labor to the civil rights movement, feminism, and modern conservatism? What is “globalization” and what has been its impact upon American workers? Through an exploration of historical scholarship, memoirs, and Hollywood films, this course will try to answer these questions. Students interested in politics, economic development, International relations, social justice, human rights, peace studies or mass culture are particularly welcome. NOTE: This course fulfills the university history requirement NOTE: This course fulfills the university history requirement or IIPS Area C.

GSC 30570. Slavery in the Atlantic World  CANCELLED 06/04/08
(cross-listed with  AFST 20274)
3 credits, Challenger (5-0-3)
1:15-3:45 MW  6/17-7/31
CRN 3789; ID GSC 30570 01
Last "add" date: 6/22
"Drop" dates: refund, 6/26; last,7/10
This survey course explores the nature and meaning of the Atlantic world. Covering the fifteenth century to the nineteenth century, it interrogates the role of coerced African labour in the birth of the Atlantic world.  Created as a consequence of the Columbian encounter, a main focus will be on the ways in which the common historical threat of trans-Atlantic slavery connected the economies, cultures and societies that bordered the Atlantic Ocean.  Thematically this course explores, in a variety of geographical sites, the varied and nuanced claims to humanity  that Afro descended peoples displayed against the systematic attempts to dehumanize and exploit their bodies. Africans throughout various communities in West Africa, North America, Brazil and the British Caribbean are the primary focal points of this course.