The WASS course, Critical Gender Studies in the Life Sciences domains – WUR, is now online and registration is open!

Today, research in the life sciences done to support sustainable development is increasingly interdisciplinary and demands better understanding of roles of gender and other differences, such as race and colonial history. This course directly enables participants to develop, operationalize and integrate a critical gender framework into their own research. The manner in which participants work gender into their own research may then be independently replicated in integrating other relevant concerns.

The course (4 ECTS: European Credit Transfer System) covers the following topics:

• Introduction to Critical Gender/Feminist Studies in the Life Sciences
  • Historical perspective on and development of Critical Gender/Feminist Studies
  • Overview of key concepts: e.g., gender, intersectionality, queering/thinking beyond binary, decolonization, self-reflexivity
• Feminist epistemologies in Science and Technology Studies
• Feminist political ecology
• Feminism and social justice
• Decolonizing development

Each session involves a half day class and a full day of preparatory and out of class work (1.5 days total). As part of the out of class work within each session, participants are required to prepare a reflection paper. This should take one to two hours. Each session combines reading, lecture, discussion, participants’ presentation and writing a short paper.

This course will use relevant examples to examine issues in the life sciences domains historically, as well as both in the global South and the global North. Each module will use critical gender studies as an entry point and then attend to other intersecting diverse dimensions of inequality, such as race, ethnicity, social class, and nationality.

This course will be a seminar. It will be highly interactive and learner-centered, combining short lectures with group-based learning activity, discussion and presentation. A series of instructors with gender and diversity expertise from WUR will discuss the relevance of the topics in the life sciences domains discussed in our class to their own domains.

Contact person (Content): Chizu Sato
Contact person (Logistics): Marcella Haan