This two-credit PhD course is a mandatory requirement for students in the first year of the PhD program in Comparative Gender Studies. The course aims to critically interrogate the relationship between theoretical concepts, methodological approaches, and epistemology through critical reflection on processes of knowledge production and on our categories of analysis. In keeping with the objectives of the PhD program, this course will emphasize comparative and integrative approaches to research from different disciplinary perspectives, focusing on creating a sound basis for intellectual inquiry. The course will pay particular attention to the question of traveling concepts as a form of comparative analysis. Producing an interdisciplinary frame of thinking, where traditional modes of knowledge production are called into question, feminist theory is continually re-thinking its key concepts, thus creating changes in conceptual frameworks that have significant theoretical and methodological implications. This part of the course starts from Mieke Bal’s claim that concepts ‘if well thought though, offer miniature theories’ (Bal 2002, 22) that have to be used in a self-reflexive way. The course invites students to help shape the content of the course by selecting the concepts to be discussed in class as traveling concepts. The final paper asks students to present a comparative and critical analysis of a traveling concept central to their dissertation research
- Instructor: Jasmina Lukic