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Gender, Health, and Environment (WGSS 2212)
Total Credits:
3
Lecture Credits:
3
Description:
This course explores how health and environmental politics intersect with concerns for gender equity. You will learn how growing concern for the protection of the environment and for the health of bodies have led policymakers and scholars to consider the ways in which gender, sex, and race mediate the interactions between and among humans, health, and the environment. You will consider contemporary issues, such as climate change, food and housing security, and healthcare management, as well as the fraught history of women and gender outsiders in medical research and environmental policy.
Topical Outline:
1. The interrelationships between gender, health, and environmental justice
2. The intersections of gender, health, and environmental injustices in the contexts of biotechnology, international development, war and violence, biomedical research, resource management, etc.
3. The social politics of vulnerability and exposure to health and environmental risk, as they reveal the significance of gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, nation, etc.
4. A consideration of how people interact with their biotic communities through observation and reflection, community development, and social action
5. The ways that these relationships are complicated by politics, history, social and cultural ideologies
Learning Outcomes:
1. Explain and contextualize health and environmental justice struggles within broader histories and debates about gender, economy, medicine, social and climate change
2. Assess the various linkages between and among health, environment, and social struggles (including those for gender, racial, sexual, and class liberation)
3. Describe how racism, sexism, heterosexism, imperialism, and other forms of oppression shape popular medical and environmental discourses
4. Examine the ways that bodies, health, and environments are gendered through the use of personal narrative, literary, and visual text
5. Evaluate the importance of alternate narratives for sustainability offered by women's and LGBTQIA social movements
Prerequisites:
Placement into
ENGL 1110 or completion of
ENGL 0900 or
ENGA 0900 or
ESOL 0051
MnTC: