WGS 591 Feminist Inquiry: Strategies for Effective Scholarship/Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies

This course investigates theories and practices of feminist inquiry across a range of disciplines. Doing feminist research involves rethinking disciplinary assumptions and methodologies, developing new understandings of what counts as knowledge, seeking alternative ways of understanding the origins of problems/issues, formulating new ways of asking questions and redefining the relationship between subjects and objects of study. The course will focus on methodology, i.e., the theory and analysis of how research should proceed. We shall be especially attentive to epistemological issues¿pre-suppositions about the nature of knowledge and in their connections to methodologies and research methods. Further, we shall explore how these connections are formed in the traditional disciplines and raise questions about why they are inadequate and / or problematic for feminist inquiry.

3 Credit(s)