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Fall 2025

WGS 298 A01

Special Topics in Critical Issues: Gender, Health & Wellness: Indigenous Perspectives

This courage-based course critically examines the systemic and environmental impacts on gender diversity, health, and wellness from Indigenous perspectives in Canada. Students will be led through arts-based practices, literature, and lectures on exploring topics, ranging from language, land, kinship, culture, economy, racism, colonial trauma to activism.

Instructor: Lana Whiskeyjack

WGS 498/GSJ 598 A01

Bodies That Matter: Liminal States, Labor, and Capital

Whose bodies matter? Which bodies are disposable? Which bodies are subject to government regulation or global commerce? Whose bodies stubbornly persist? In this course examines depictions of bodies that are dismissed as “just bodies:” robots, coolies, sex workers as well as bodies that seem to linger on after they are gone: ghosts, and organ donors in Chinese, Sinophone, and Asian North American literature and film.

Instructor: Clara Iwasaki

WGS 498/GSJ 598 A02 - Feminist Approach to Health and Wellness

What is the difference between health and wellness? How do health care practitioners and the wellness community treat and understand girls, women, and the 2SLGBTQ+ community? Why have divisions between wellness communities and the health care sciences grown in the last few decades? What would a feminist approach to health and wellness be? This class will explore feminist analyses of how the medical model of health, health science research, and health care practices have often poorly served

and understood girls, women, and the 2SLGBTQ+ community. We will investigate explicit and implicit philosophies that motivate different approaches to health and wellness and how scientific, technological, and economic developments the understanding of our bodies.

Instructor: Talia Welsh

WGS 498 A03 -  Special Topics: Data, Power, Feminism

Examines the capacity of data to propose and produce social change.

Instructor: Deb Verhoeven

WGS 498/GSJ 598 SEM 800 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

WINTER 2026

WGS 298 B01

Critical Issues: Black Feminism

Description: 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 298 B02

Critical Issues: Queen Chinese Cinemas

Description: TBA

Instructor: Clara Iwasaki

WGS 498/GSJ 598 X50

Gender Social Justice: Complicity

Description: TBA

Instructor: Susanne Luhmann

WGS 470/MST 399 B01

Trans and Queer Games 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!

Instructor: PS Berge