I have retired and am not currently teaching at York University.
Prior to retiring I was teaching the following courses - all related in some way to my research interests.
ANTH4420 3.0 - The Gendered Politics of War
Fall 2015 in Dadaab (BHER project ) and in Toronto - asynchronously
In this course, we will look at how war is increasingly waged on the bodies of unarmed civilians. Where it was once the purview of male soldiers who fought enemy forces on battlefields quite separate from civilian homes, contemporary conflict blurs such distinctions, rendering civilian women, men, and children its main casualties.
In every militarized society, war zone, and refugee camp, violence against women and men is part of a broader continuum of violence that transcends the simple diplomatic dichotomy of war and peace. This continuum of violence dissolves any division between public and private domains. Sites of war and peace are ultimately linked; both can be sites of violence. Explicitly feminist analyses of gender in conflict situations address the politics of social and economic disparities and explore possibilities for changing power imbalances that include gender relations. This course links feminist analyses of gender to empirical studies that are grounded in particular conflict zones. Gender relations and identities are (re)produced by governments, militaries, militias, schools, sports, and media. Documenting the panoply of strategies that generate violence against civilian women and men in the name of the nation, the state, the economy, or the family is the first step towards changing hegemonic, seemingly transparent notions of what it means to be a man or a woman in a given society.
ANTH 5145 3.0 - Critical Approaches to Gender, Displacement and Mobility - my last course at York University
Time: Winter 2018- Wednesday 10:00 am-1:00 pm
This course examines contemporary anthropological and interdisciplinary thought related to gender, forced migration and the broader topic of displacement from political, economic, social and cultural perspectives. The course uses critical anthropological theories, feminist theories, diaspora theories, critiques of resettlement, integration and humanitarian processes, and a political economy approach in a study of displacement, and mobility. Displacement is a broad ranging term that encompasses a number of anthropological ‘movement’ concepts such as deterritorialization, creolization, diaspora, borderlands, mobility between identities, and between ‘home’, ‘homelessness’ and ‘homelands’. Displacements from home, neighborhood or country happen as a result of war, environmental or development-induced disaster, as a result of being trafficked or for livelihood and economic reasons. At times, some or all of these gendered and racialized events overlap and the challenges of displacement are compounded. The mobility of some groups of people across the borders of nation-states challenges borders and boundaries and the idea of monolithic national communities. The immobility of many others challenges governance, citizenship and rights approaches. The various discourses that have evolved around these and other displacement related phenomena, as well as the effects of these discourses on people, mobility, livelihood will be examined.
