GSF is excited to offer three new courses this upcoming spring semester. To highlight these never-before-seen opportunities, the course professors sat down to share why and how they believe these courses will interest you. These interviews are intended to provide not just a description of the class, but a glimpse into each professor’s motivations for creating their course, as well as their hopes for the Spring.
When you created this course what was your connection or driving factor to the topic?
Gelfand: “I created Feminist Podcasting after teaching courses that utilize visual media at Duke and seeing how fun and exciting it can be to explore questions of gender and sexuality through making videos. I hope in this course to explore the auditory side of things! Before my life in academia, I worked at non-profits dedicated to local community radio, hosted my own radio shows, and created audio documentaries. In my academic life, I have focused on oral history, queer history, and memory studies. In this course, we will learn from existing podcasts and make our own!”
In your view, what are you especially excited about with this particular course?
Gelfand: “In this course, students will get to build audio production skills and reconsider the media we encounter every day. Making media is a key tool for students to have in their portfolios and this course is a great way to be a beginner and learn! We will listen to many unique and thought-provoking podcasts, and we will examine how podcasts serve as a space of dialogue and public feminist thought. Simultaneously, we will also approach the podcast industry with a critical lens and use feminist, queer, and intersectional frameworks to study how the larger media industry perpetuates racism, sexism, and narrow ideas of masculinity. Gender, Feminist, and Sexuality Studies courses hugely help students think about the norms, assumptions, and expectations we feel viscerally in our lives. This course benefits students by providing a creative outlet and a community to discuss GSF topics. My goal is for students to learn a new skill, think about their studies from new perspectives, and create pieces they can share with a larger community across and beyond Duke.”
When you created this course what was your connection or driving factor to the topic?
Wilson: “The radical upheavals in activism, thought, and aesthetics of the late 1960s to 1970s (the “long 1960s”) continue to intrigue me. I’d love to be in conversation with students interested in the politics of that era in general.”
In your view, what are you especially excited about with this particular course?
Wilson: “In terms of feminist history, while other fields teach this moment – notably Black Studies, Gender Studies gives it relatively little attention. Why isn’t the field teaching and analyzing its origins in this explosive moment? However, this neglect presents a terrific opportunity for students to make their own original contributions. There’s a wealth of resources in archives, oral histories, art and music that are underexplored for students to use for their own analyses, including many in Duke’s archives. In general, I want to hear from students, what strikes you about passion and anger in this era’s writing and art? What do the then-radical visions look like through a 21st century lens – including, what flaws do we see? And does any of the feminist experimentation of the 1970s inspire us now?”
When you created this course what was your connection or driving factor to the topic?
Hasso: “I'm a Palestine scholar and I've never taught an entire course focused on my area of research expertise depth in work at three respected institutions. I thought it was about time to do so.”
In your view, what are you especially excited about with this particular course?
Hasso: “I plan to invite scholars and creatives such as filmmakers from Palestine and its diaspora to discuss their work, which we will read and view as part of the seminar. That's pretty exciting. From being in settler-colonial occupied Palestine recently, I was reminded how difficult it is for Palestinian intellectuals and artists to have time to focus on their creative and intellectual work in the midst of high teaching and advising loads and ongoing crises and violence, including on campuses. And yet they do. I wanted to provide a space for learning about that work and for them to share it with us. I also plan to organize a one-day hybrid public conference on sexualities as part of the seminar.”