Are you interested in interdisciplinary research, especially that focused on gender? Are you just beginning to figure out your research ideas and want to incorporate gender? If so, the ULIB 301 course may be of interest.
ULIB 301: Gender in the Research Process
This course will provide an introduction to feminist research methods, including the application of gender-based research methods in different disciplines as well as the development of methods specific to the academic field of women’s and gender studies. Key questions include: What characterizes feminist research methodology? What does it mean to treat WGST as a discipline? What may be gained? What may be lost? What are the historical and contemporary impacts of feminist thought on other disciplines/professions? How do we organize, find, and evaluate information throughout the research process? How do we create information, and how does conceptualizing all of these processes as embodied challenge and shape ways of knowing and doing across disciplines and professions? The overall goal is to ground students’ participation in information economies within an understanding of how power, gender, race, sexuality, colonialism, indigeneity, socio-economic status, and other factors intersect during the production of research, with a focus on the methods used to generate knowledge.
Learning Outcomes -
After completing this course, students will:
- Articulate the traditional and emerging processes of information creation and dissemination in gender studies;
- Articulate how and why some individuals or groups of individuals may be underrepresented or systematically marginalized within disciplines and systems that produce and disseminate information; and how this exclusion structures the information produced.
- Analyze the impacts of feminist epistemologies, methodologies and praxis across a range of academic disciplines and professional fields;
- Evaluate how different disciplinary methodologies shape the types of research questions that can be addressed and the kinds of information produced to answer these questions;• Formulate questions for research based on information gaps or on reexamination of existing, possibly conflicting, information;
- Create their own process for investigating an area of interest that applies methodology from at least two different disciplines/fields to a research area.
