Feminist Inquiry is an interdisciplinary exploration of feminist ways of learning, thinking, collaborating, listening, and speaking in the interest of producing innovative scholarship and meaningful public engagement. Our seminar will study feminist approaches, theories, and epistemologies that form the intellectual framework necessary to conduct feminist research both within and across the disciplines. Students will produce a range of written work based on their course reading and research—for example, primary and secondary source analyses, teaching documents, and an academic article-quality research essay. We will learn to understand and teach our respective research foci through a feminist lens, and to extend this feminist approach into our public engagement outside academia.

Given the range and diversity of feminist inquiry, the course will not attempt to examine all areas of the field; instead, we will study a curated selection of works that range from the classic to the innovative. Throughout the course, we will consider the complexity and multiplicity of modern feminisms while learning to understand the core power dynamics of feminism across place and time.