Critical Gender Studies in the Life Sciences domains

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 covers the following topics:

• Introduction to Critical Gender/Feminist Studies in the Life Sciences
  a. Historical perspective on and development of Critical Gender/Feminist Studies
  b. 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 prepararory 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.

Participants are expected to write a short statement (max. 1 page A4) by Thursday September 9th to: 1) introduce who they are in terms of disciplinary background and education; 2) outline gender and diversity issues which are relevant in their own domain of study; 3) questions or issues on gender and diversity with which they would like to engage and why; and 4) expectations of the course and send it to Chizu, chizu.sato@wur.nl.

Former occurrences of this course

14 Sept – 19 Oct 2021