Angela Willey

Recent and Upcoming Courses

• Feminism's Sciences

  For decades now feminists have insisted on the importance of thinking about science, nature, and embodiment to understanding the worlds in which we live and to imagining other worlds. I use "feminism's sciences" here to refer to the sciences feminists have critiqued, revised, reinterpreted, and reclaimed as well as to those feminist knowledge-making projects that have been excluded from the definition of science. The class will draw the parameters of feminist sciences wide here to include epistemological, methodological, conceptual, metaphysical, and other critical-creative insights of a wide range of feminist theories and projects. We will read about feminist concerns with knowledge, power, and embodiments to explore possibilities for a contemporary queer feminist materialist science studies. This class will be reading and research intensive. We will explore rich debates in feminist theories of science and materiality over the last several decades and today. You will practice interdisciplinary research as well as developing both written and oral communication skills.

• Monogamy

  Grounded in queer and feminist concerns with marriage and coupled forms of social belonging, this class will consider "monogamy" from a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. From the history of marriage to the science of mating systems to the politics of polyamory, the class will explore monogamy's meanings. Students will become familiar with these and other debates about monogamy, a variety of critical approaches to reading and engaging them, and fields of resistance to a variety of "monogamy stories" within and beyond the academy. The course will draw in particular on feminist critiques of the nuclear family, queer historicizations of sexuality, and science studies approaches to frame critical questions about what monogamy is and what discourses surrounding it can do. Through historical analysis and critical theory, the class will foreground the racial and national formations that produce monogamy as we know it. Students will develop skills in critical science literacy, interdisciplinary and collaborative research methodologies, and writing in a variety of modalities.