This module offers you an interdisciplinary and historicised understanding of gender theory and its implications for everyday struggles around gendered liberation. You will develop an understanding of the ways in which gender informs, and is informed by, other structural inequalities, drawing on key thinkers on gender from varied feminist traditions, including black feminisms, queer feminisms, trans feminisms and feminist disability studies.

This module explores contemporary feminist thinking in relation to earlier feminist debates, campaigns, writings, and forms of activism. You critically examine how feminist ideas, theories, and practices have developed over time, and how continuity and change are theorised within feminism(s). Drawing on interdisciplinary expertise across the Department and Faculty, the module encourages engagement with a wide range of sources - including archival materials at Glasgow Women’s Library—to analyse the historical, political, and theoretical significance of key feminist ideas, movements, and actors.

This module introduces key feminist theories of knowledge and research methodologies. You examine how feminist knowledge is produced within and beyond the academy, and explore the principles, practices, and ethics shaping feminist research. The module includes a visit to Glasgow Women’s Library, offering hands-on engagement with feminist archives and community-based knowledge-making. It also prepares you for the Gender Studies Research Placement.

The placement option provides you with the opportunity to put your gender studies learning and postgraduate research training into practice in the wider world, conducting a piece of research according to a brief devised with the placement organisation. This module runs every year.

This optional module allows you to work closely with a member of staff on a mutually agreed topic in the interdisciplinary field of Gender Studies. It is designed for students who wish to pursue academic interests that are not covered by existing option modules. Through a guided independent reading project, you will develop skills in desk-based research, critical literature review, and independent academic working, while gaining an advanced understanding of feminist theory and research in relation to your chosen topic. This module runs every year.

This module is designed to provide you with an understanding of how media and cultural contexts shape understandings and practices of crime, violence, victimisation and justice. You will leave with a critical understanding of media representations of crime and violence and skills to identify the ways in which media is used as a vehicle for crime, violence and/or justice.

This module explores social justice through queer and feminist perspectives, examining how power, inequality, and resistance are shaped across research, policy, and activist contexts. Students engage critically with questions of intersectionality, positionality, and knowledge production, and consider what it means to “queer” social justice in theory and practice.

Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship and academic-activist work, the module addresses topics such as education, climate justice, abolitionist thinking, and institutional equality frameworks. Through seminar-based discussion and independent assessment, students are encouraged to challenge taken-for-granted ideas about expertise, authority, and justice

This module explores the relationship between gender, health, and medicine from the nineteenth century to the present. You will examine how ideas about femininity and masculinity shaped medical knowledge, professional practice, and responses to health and illness in Britain, Ireland, and the United States.

Using a range of primary sources - including magazines, medical texts, film, and oral histories - you will develop critical skills in historical and gender analysis.

This optional module examines the complex relationship between gender and violence from a feminist and intersectional perspective. You will explore how violence is gendered, how gender can be enacted through violence, and how these dynamics are shaped by structural inequalities such as race, class, and gender identity.

Building on a shared conceptual framework, the module focuses in depth on sexual violence, using case studies drawn from Gender Studies, Media, Social Policy, Criminology, and Politics. Topics vary each year and may include sexual violence at music festivals, image-based abuse, so-called ‘honour’ violence, carceral politics, war and militarism, and feminist digital activism against sexual violence.

This module explores feminist challenges to global politics and International Relations. You will examine feminism both as a lens for analysing global political processes and as a transnational political force shaping institutions, movements, and policy.

The module introduces key feminist concepts, frameworks, and actors in global politics before critically engaging with issues such as conflict and security, international political economy, and global governance. Teaching is seminar-based, encouraging active participation and critical discussion.

This module will explore the way class, race, gender, sexuality and disability, as well as historical processes of colonialism, displacement, and migration, shape the creation, circulation, and reception of a wide variety of literary texts, as well as how literature can shape the public response to social and political incidents.

This interdisciplinary module explores storytelling, memory, and public history, combining theory with practical skills in how the past is researched, interpreted, and represented. Students examine the role of individual and collective memory in shaping heritage and public narratives.

Drawing on approaches from English, Creative Writing, Translation Studies, Journalism, and History, the module develops transferable skills in areas such as oral history, creative writing, and digital storytelling. You will critically reflect on whose voices are heard or marginalised - considering gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and disability - and produce a short public history project aligned with your own interests.