MSc Applied Gender Studies

This class seeks to understand contemporary feminist thinking in relation to debates, campaigns, writings and actions from previous generations of feminists.

It assists students on the MSc to historicise their understanding of feminism and appreciate how feminist thought and theories have changed over time.

It draws on strengths from across the School and HaSS whilst also capitalising on the proximity of Strathclyde to Glasgow Women’s Library to encourage students to use archival sources in their research and learning.

This class focuses on enabling students to interrogate how feminist knowledge is produced in and outside the academy, and understand the practices and principles of feminist research.

The module will include a half-day field trip to Glasgow Women’s Library where students will have the opportunity to engage with a range of colleagues working on different aspects of knowledge preservation, cataloguing and creation at GWL.

This class is designed to engage students with recent research on sexuality in a global context.

This continues to be a controversial topic with key global institutions and organisations from churches to the UN being unable to forge an internal consensus about the protection and acceptance of LGBTQ lives.

Through looking at non-fiction writing, this class will introduce students to key issue in the field through the perspective of writers who travel across real and gender/sexual border and boundaries.

This class aims to explore and assess contemporary feminist challenges to global politics.

The last few decades have seen the emergence of a feminist movement world-wide in scope, transnationally connected, and working in and against international institutions to combat gender inequality. There is now a substantial feminist body of scholarship on global politics, interrogating the ostensible gender blindness of existing academic work in this area (particularly as articulated in the academic discipline of International Relations) and expanding the range of issues, ideas and voices that count as ‘global’ and ‘political’.

This class considers feminism both as a lens on global politics and as a global political force. We begin our investigations by establishing key actors, in terms of the expansion and institutionalisation of feminist organising on a global scale and of feminist scholarship on global politics. We then discuss key feminist concepts and frameworks for making sense of global politics and the International Relations discipline, before critically evaluating feminist analysis of and activism on a range of substantive issues connected to conflict and security, international political economy and global governance. A final session will reflect critically on the impact of feminism on the theory and practice of global politics, and the challenges ahead.

The class is taught in seminars encouraging active student participation and assessed solely through coursework intended to facilitate active and deep modes of learning.

Advanced Oral History allows students to explore advanced oral history theory and practices as a valuable means of understanding the past. In weekly seminars, we'll examine the advantages and limitations of oral history as both a research methodology and an outcome by reading and discussing key texts written by leading oral historians and related practitioners. In addition, students will gain practical experience designing and implementing a mini oral history project directly related to their postgraduate dissertations. 

By the end of the semester, students will have submitted their dissertation project proposals for ethics approval and gained preliminary experience in conducting and analysing an interview of relevance to their dissertation topic. Students seeking careers in history, museum studies, human rights advocacy, international law, diplomacy, and journalism will find this course particularly relevant.

This class investigates the moving image since the ‘birth of cinema’ in 1895 as a crucial dimension of medical knowledge production and communication. Taking a global approach, it explores the intersection of medicine, health and the moving image across a range of themes, genres and media. It examines depictions of patients, disease and the human body in documentary and fiction film as well as the varied uses of film, television and video in medical research, training and public engagement. 

The class considers key case studies to prepare students for their own research at the nexus of film, medicine and health. Topics of discussion include public health, sex education, childbirth, psychiatry, the NHS, HIV/AIDS and world health. Class discussions of film clips and readings will be supplemented by field trips to the Moving Image Archive at Kelvin Hall and the historic Glasgow Film Theatre.

This class will engage students with literary and historical materials, and with theoretical work from animal studies. This will inform debates about the place, meaning and function of meat eating and debates about meat avoidance - and the emergence of vegetarianism as a social movement - from the early modern to the modern world.

You'll read a range of primary materials, including literary works and political tracts, and develop skills in textual analysis and critical and theoretical engagement.