2024S WRDS 150A Topics

This course will aim to explore how different academic disciplines engage with the concept of nostalgia. Nostalgia is a word, or more usually a feeling, that most people have used or felt; however, very few understand its constant presence in everyday life. We will study nostalgia from its earliest appearance in academia as a form of mental illness in the seventeenth century and follow its growing influence over, and manipulation of, contemporary ideas of national identity, consumerism, class, social media and the environment. We will attempt to understand how the politics of memory, belonging and collective remembrance reflect and inform current political discourse.

Reproductive Justice

The recent Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) decision has drawn attention to the battle for abortion access in the United States. But, for many activists around the world, that battle is only one part of a larger effort to secure autonomy for families and pregnant people. As feminists of colour have long argued, reproductive justice includes the right to end a pregnancy, but also the right to "have children...and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities" (sistersong.net, n.d.). Unfortunately, these rights are often distributed unequally on the basis of race, class, sexuality, and ability (Davis, 1981; Luna and Luker, 2013; Silliman, 2004).

This course will explore fights for reproductive justice through international research in disciplines like history, sociology, and public health. Sample topics may include: the geopolitics of commercial surrogacy, the economics of parental leave, access to reproductive technology for queer and trans people, and structural racism in maternal healthcare and child welfare systems. While learning about these issues, students will also learn how to conduct scholarly research and write in a variety of scholarly genres. At the end of the course, students will work with secondary and primary sources to produce a research paper on a topic of their own choosing related to reproductive (in)justice anywhere in the world.

This course introduces students to academic reading and writing through analysis of scholarly discourses in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. We will focus our investigation on climate change and other global crises, and issues of responsibility concerning them, in the era of the Anthropocene. Coined at the turn of the 21st century, the word is compounded from the Greek anthropos (“human”) and kainos (“new”). The Anthropocene is the new epoch of humans: one in which planetary conditions are shaped by human activity rather than vice versa, humankind as a force of geological agency has overtaken physical geography and natural history, and the familiar distinction between man and nature no longer holds. A closer look at the scientific and semantic implications of the term, however, reveals it to be less straightforward than initially appears. Currently not officially recognized as part of the Geologic Time Scale, what should be understood or measured as the basis for the Anthropocene means different things to different disciplines. How do scholars from fields as diverse as geology, climatology, sociology, history, anthropology, and psychology, engage with the common idea of the Anthropocene? Do studies of pre-industrial greenhouse gas emissions, critiques of environmentally unsustainable trends of industrial, socioeconomic, and technological acceleration in an age of world capitalism, and theories of the end of human history at the limits of human “meaning” and modernity, ask similar research questions despite starkly contrastive methodologies? How are the discursive challenges posed by referring to singular abstractions (e.g., humans as a “species,” the sense of a “universal” history or geostory, the “Anthropocene”) represented across multiple disciplines, reflective of the conceptual difficulties which arise in accessing or preserving a nature no longer distinguishable from the human interventions that create and destroy it? How is our sense of what it means to be natural objects or human subjects, and what it means not to be, informed by how our discourses produce meaning?