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Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies

Course | GEOG 477

Advanced Urban Geography

Geographic patterns and social processes within metropolitan areas. Canvases current research topics, methods, and theoretical debates in urban geography. Issues covered range across urban economic, political, and cultural geography.

Scholar

Alma Khasawnih

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Course | GWSS 332 / GEOG 332

Black Feminist Geographies

Stereotypes about blackness, gender, and sexuality are enmeshed with how we think, feel, and move about the landscapes we move through - and black people are often seen threatening presences that "need" to be policed, contained, and completely erased. This course considers how black feminist approaches to geographic space reveal ways that these restrictive understandings of blackness, gender, and sexuality are refused and redefined.

News | April 18, 2019

Climate change as a social justice issue in Seattle

This story was written by Urban@UW communications assistant Shahd Al Baz, as part of her research with our program. Social justice paradigms hold that structural barriers to economic development drive, and are driven by, environmental and spatial conditions. We need look no further than Seattle to see this, where patterns of environmental degradation intersect with…


Course | GEOG 490

Field Research: The Seattle Region

Field methods for contemporary urban research. Survey designs used in the analysis of transportation, land use, location of employment, shopping and housing, political fragmentation, and environmental degradation. Field report required, based on field work in the Seattle region.

Course | ARCH 466, GWSS 466

Gender and Architecture

Examines gender in the experience, practice, and theory of architecture and urban space with a focus on modern typologies: skyscraper, home, convent, bachelor pad, street, and closet. Draws from architectural and art history, social studies, design practice and theory, comparative literature, film studies, and queer theory.

Course | GWSS 333 / JSIS B 333

Gender and Globalization: Theory and Process

Theoretical, historical, and empirical analysis of how current processes of globalization are transforming the actual conditions of women's lives, labor, gender ideologies, and politics in complex and contradictory ways. Topics include feminist exploration of colonialism, capitalism, economic restructuring policies, resistance in consumer and environmental movements.

Course | AES 322 / GWSS 300

Gender, Race, and Class in Social Stratification

The intersection of race, class, and gender in the lives of women of color in the United States from historical and contemporary perspectives. Topics include racism, classism, sexism, activism, sexuality, and inter-racial dynamics between women of color groups.

Scholar

Kemi Adeyemi

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Scholar

Kim England

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News | March 15, 2024

Neighborhood Poverty May Impact Women’s Ovarian Reserves

Reported by Lori Solomon at Health Day News FRIDAY, March 15, 2024 — Living in a neighborhood with greater poverty in adulthood is tied to lower ovarian reserve, according to a study published online March 5 in Menopause. Anwesha Pan, from the University of Washington in Seattle, and colleagues aimed to examine the association between…


Course | GEOG 479

Race, Ethnicity, and the American City

Explores America's cities as sites where ethnic and racial interaction have generated specific patterns of opportunity and disadvantage in housing and labor markets; how ethnic identities and racial formations are changed by living and working in cities, and questions of assimilation, multiculturalism, and America's ethno-racial future.

Scholar

Ralina L. Joseph

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News | December 20, 2016

Reflections on Urban Environmental Justice in a Time of Climate Change

On November 7th and 8th Urban@UW, in collaboration with the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group (CIG), hosted a symposium to begin transdisciplinary conversation on the multifaceted dynamics and consequences of Urban Environmental Justice in a Time of Climate Change (UEJ). Below are some reflections from this event, and a sample of the resources we’ll…


News | August 28, 2018

Seattle Growth Podcast 5.4: Homelessness and City Hall

The fifth season of the Seattle Growth Podcast continues the wide-ranging conversation about the city’s growing homelessness crisis. Episode 4 takes you behind the scenes at Seattle City Hall as the City Council weighed a controversial “head tax” on companies to raise more money to address the crisis. City Council member Teresa Mosqueda shares her opinion on the failed campaign and…


News | April 4, 2023

Seattle Has a Dearth of Monuments to Women

Among hundreds of pieces of public art in Seattle, you’ll find few depicting real-life women from any point in history. The City of Seattle’s civic art collection, which includes more than 400 permanent installations, contains only one outdoor monument honoring a female historical figure. That sculpture is of Sadako Sasaki, who survived the Hiroshima bombing…


Scholar

Shirley J. Yee

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News | December 15, 2017

Skid Road: The intersection of health and homelessness

After years of caring for the homeless in the streets and dilapidated motels of Richmond, Virginia, nurse Josephine Ensign became homeless herself. Many of her patients were prostitutes—some as young as 15—and her conscience no longer allowed her to adhere to her clinic’s policies. Though she was Christian, she was fired for referring many of…


News | August 20, 2018

Student volunteers help expand UW’s outreach to homeless youth

It started with a Sunday afternoon café outside a community center last December — the University of Washington’s new initiative to reach homeless youth around the U District. In the eight months since, the UW’s effort, known as The Doorway Project, has offered a café in the neighborhood each quarter, while students have helped add services — from…


Course | GEOG 573

Urban Political Geography: Research Seminar

Covers both classic and contemporary theoretical debates and research on the relation between power, place, and the local scale. Considers both conventional sites (e.g., the local state) as well as new forms and locations of city politics (e.g., sexuality and the body).

News | March 28, 2018

Urban Scholar Highlight: Josephine Ensign

Josephine Ensign is a Professor in University of Washington’s School of Nursing and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, Affiliate Faculty in UW’s Certificate Program in Public Scholarship, and coordinator of Urban@UW’s Homelessness Research Initiative’s Doorway Project—which is hosting a popup cafe in honor of Earth Day on April 22!…


News | October 20, 2017

Urban@UW compiles Faculty Highlights Report for research, teaching and engagement on homelessness

As part of its recently launched Homelessess Research Initiative, Urban@UW has collaborated with faculty and staff across all three UW campuses to compile a broad-ranging selection of powerful and robust projects addressing homelessness from a research lens. Check out the Faculty Highlights Report to learn more about these efforts and the people behind them.


News | June 21, 2022

UW professors help lead Black Arts Legacies project

When Kemi Adeyemi, Assistant Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, signed on to help lead Crosscut’s Black Arts Legacies project, she brought a history of deep thinking on the role that the arts play in Black culture, and what the work of these artists can reveal. “Black artists tell us stories about what it…


Course | GWSS 385

Women and Activism in the U.S., 1820-1990s

Analyzes how U.S. social reform movements between the 1820s and the 1990s shaped discourses of gender, race, class, nation, and citizenship. Social movements include temperance, anti-prostitution, prison reform, dress reform, reproductive rights, eugenics, suffrage/anti-suffrage, abolitionism, labor, the "mothers' movement," civil rights, QBLTQ movement and dis/abilities, and evangelicalism.

Course | GWSS 345 / ANTH 345 / JSIS B 345

Women and International Economic Development

Questions how women are affected by economic development in Third World and celebrates redefinitions of what development means. Introduces theoretical perspectives and methods to interrogate gender and development policies. Assesses current processes of globalization and potential for changing gender and economic inequalities.

Course | GEOG 476 / GWSS 476

Women and the City

Explores the reciprocal relations between gender relations, the layout of cities, and the activities of urban residents. Topics include: feminist theory and geography (women, gender, and the organization of space); women and urban poverty, housing and homelessness; gender roles and labor patterns; geographies of childcare; and women and urban politics.