GSOC-518-401  NURSING, HEALTH AND ILLNESS IN THE UNITED
W 4-7          STATES, 1860-1985

Wall (wallbm@nursing.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: NURS-518

Distribution Course History/Tradition– Class of ’09 and Prior

This course uses nursing's history as a framework for analyzing gendered themes in health and health care since the Civil War. Thus, the ideas, events, people and institutions that have played a role in shaping the historical health care system are examined as part of an inclusive social context that considers the multifaceted meanings of women's work and women's experiences. Specifically, this course concentrates on the ways in which women have both challenged and collaborated with social structures and ideologies that were themselves gendered. This focus is presented as one way of understanding the complex interrelationships among gender, class, and race in the American health care system.

Content includes changing ideas about the nature of health and illness; changing forms of health care delivery; changing experiences of women as providers and patients; changing role expectations and realities for nurses; changing midwifery practice; changing segmentation of the health care labor market by gender, class and race.

 

GSOC 528-401           GENDER AND SCIENCE
T 1:30-4:30                              Lindee (mlindee@sas.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed: HSSC-528

With a special focus on methods, this course explores the rich literature on gender and technical knowledge

GSOC-555-401   WOMEN AND INCARCERATION
R 4:30-7:30                              Brown/Guidera/Durain (brownkm@nursing.upenn.edu)
                                               
Cross Listed: NURS-555

This elective course will afford students the opportunity to participate in service learning and health education in the Philadelphia prison system, in particular to incarcerated women.  Students will explore the social and historical framework and trends in the incarceration of women and the health status of incarcerated women.  During seminar discussions with experts in the criminal justice system and with staff and inmates at Riverside, the Philadelphia women's jail, students will explore the health, health care and health care needs of incarcerated women and identify specific areas in need of attention, especially with regard to health education.  In collaboration with Philadelphia jail staff and female inmates, students will design and implement
a health education project.

 

GSOC-566-640  LITERATURE AND LAW
W 6-8        Gamer (mgamer@english.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed:    COML/ENGL-566

This seminar will explore the relationship between two of our most powerful forms of social discourse, literature and the law. The two share conspicuous similarities: a tendency to represent, interpret, and criticize flesh-and-blood interactions; a reliance on story-telling; a fondness for precedent, evidence, and testimony. Yet the two are perhaps even more frequently in conflict with one another, particularly over questions fundamental to both -- how language works, what constitutes evidence and truth, and what kinds of advocacy and representation are desirable or harmful. Readings will begin in the ancient world and move forward chronologically to the present day. For the first weeks of the course, we'll explore the literary and legal bases of the ancient and medieval world in authors like Homer, Aquinas, Dante, and Machiavelli. How did these writers define fundamental terms like authority and jurisdiction? How did their different legal codes conceptualize issues still controversial today, like habeas corpus, trial, and torture? Around week five or six we'll move from these foundational texts forward in time to that most powerful legal and literary fiction, the republic of letters, asking how this modern fictional space underwrites our sense both of an independent judiciary and what we most often call "the public sphere" or "the court of public opinion." What do we expect of our laws or our literature? How do each manage to stay alive for posterity? What kinds of interpretive approaches should govern both? How might literature and law be said to regulate one another? Along the way we'll explore the law-making qualities of literature (its tendency to posit artificial forms onto lived experience even as it insists that those forms have value) and the literariness of the law (its ability to turn fictions into enforceable realities and its fondness for resolving conflict). Aside from the authors already listed above, our readings will likely include works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Giambattista Vico, Thomas Jefferson, Olaudah Equiano, Jane Austen, Wilkie Collins, Herman Melville, Angela Carter, Vladamir Nabokov, and Richard Brautigan, as well as several legal cases and critical essays. Required work will be two essays of around 8-10 pages each.

 

GSOC-572-401          LANGUAGE AND GENDER
R 10-12                                  Pomerantz (apomeran@gse.upenn.edu )

Cross Listed: EDUC-572

A critical investigation of the relationship between language, gender, and social structure which addresses the role of language in reflecting and perpetuating gender divisions.  Students' ongoing discourse analytic projects are integral to our exploration of issues related to sexism in and through language.  Implications for individual and social change are discussed.

 

GSOC-588-401   THE POLITICS OF WOMEN’S HEALTH

R 3-6                       Lewis/McCool (jllewis@nursing.upenn.edu )

Cross Listed: NURS-588

This course will utilize a multidisciplinary approach to address the field of women’s health care. The constructs of women’s health care will be examined from a clinical, as well as sociological, anthropological and political point of view.  Topics will reflect the historical movement of women’s health care from an obstetrical/gynecological view to one that encompasses the entire life span and life needs of women. The emphasis of the course will be to undertake a critical exploration of the diversity of women’s health care needs and the past and current approaches to this care.  Issues will be addressed from both a national and global perspective, with a particular focus on the relationship between women’s equality/inequality status and state of health.

 

GSOC-590-401    GENDER AND EDUCATION (ELD)
W 6:30-9:30      Kuriloff   (kuriloff@gse.edu)
 
Cross Listed: EDUC-590

This course is designed to provide an overview of the major discussions and debates in the area of gender and education.  While the intersections of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality are emphasized throughout this course, the focus of the research we will read is on gender and education in English-speaking countries.  We will examine theoretical frameworks of gender
and use these to read popular literature, examine teaching practices and teachers with respect to gender, using case studies to investigate the topics.

 

GSOC-595-601     WOMEN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN SOUTH ASIA
T 4:30-7:30                              Roy (railiroy@sas.upenn.edu)

Cross-Listed: SAST-295

One aspect of the position of women in Afghanistan and Pakistan is all too clear from the images and reports we see more and more frequently:  veiled (or cocooned in a burka), victim of an honor killing, an acid attack or a gang rape; subject to Islamic laws that devalue them.  But women in these two Muslim countries have sought to break the barriers of their rigidly patriarchal societies while refusing to surrender their identity as Muslims. Understanding how they have fared could hold the key to how women in South Asia and other parts of the Muslim world negotiate their autonomy and reclaim their right to participate as equal citizens on their own terms. At the same time, no women’s movement anywhere can develop in isolation. Therefore, this course will explore lines of conflict and co-operation between women and other groups in society, such as the rural peasantry, the urban poor, migrant labor, students and peace activists. 

 

GSOC-599    INDEPENDENT STUDY (GRADUATE LEVEL)  
Arranged                                  TBA

See Department for Permission and Section Number

 

GSOC-612-401   INTERACTIONAL PROCESSES WITH LGBT
              INDIVIDUALS
W 6:30-8:30                            Burnes (burnes@gse.upenn.edu)

Cross-Listed: EDUC-612

In the past quarter century, a growing awareness of the unique issues facing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals has become essential for practitioners in education and psychological services. This course will provide an introduction to a range of factors that shape LGBT experiences in educational and psychological service settings, and it will offer opportunities to consider and develop strategies for working with and advocating for LGBT constituencies. By analyzing LGBT encounters with the fields of psychology and education, this course recognizes both professions’ historically strained relationships with LGBT populations, while also acknowledging the possibilities for researchers and practitioners in each field to enhance their work through cross-disciplinary reflections on valuable lessons-learned. Although the primary focus is on how psychological and educational professionals can support LGBT individuals, the course may also interest those in related fields who want to gain a deeper understanding of LGBT experiences across social, cultural, institutional, and professional contexts.
This course is divided into three thematic units. In the first unit, a conceptual overview of the otherization of marginalized genders and sexualities is offered as a backdrop for understanding LGBT experiences, and snapshots of LGBT spaces and cultures afford contrasting examples of how LGBT populations have negotiated their marginalized status. In the second unit, the course focuses on psychological perspectives, first by offering theories of LGBT identity development, and then by exploring strategies for supporting LGBT individuals through LGBT-affirmative therapy. In the third and final unit, the experiences of LGBT individuals in a range of educational settings take center stage and provide the backdrop for considerations of anti-homophobic educational practices. Collectively, these three units are designed to provide students with some familiarity with LGBT life experiences, and to encourage students to apply that familiarity to educational and psychological practices.      

 

GSOC-790-401     CRITICAL THEORY
M 3-6                          Love (loveh@english.upenn.edu)

Cross Listed:  ENGL/COML-790

 

GSOC-806-401         GENDER, GLOBAL & MEDIA
M 4-6                                      Parameswaran

Cross Listed:  COMM-806

This seminar creates a forum for debate over the ways in which the cultural politics of gender structure the historical, economic and social landscapes of media globalization. Media culture, as the course readings seek to show, provides a fertile site to examine how globalized media practices articulate gendered imaginations. Adopting a transnational feminist perspective, the seminar specifically addresses the intersections between and among media technologies, representations, and institutions and the complex scripting of gendered meanings and subject positions in multiple locations in the global public sphere. Course topics include globalization and transnational and postcolonial feminist theories; gender, sexuality, and media; gender and labor in globalized media industries; femininity, consumerism, and global advertising; gender, global media, and morality; tourism, gender, and media economies; and gender, religion, and popular culture. For the major assignment, students will be expected to produce a research paper
that focuses on one of the following: a critical review of a set of theories or a body of empirical work in a specific region; textual analysis of media with special attention to influences of globalization; political-economic analysis of media institutions and corporate practices.