Race, Class, and Gender

This course provides an examination of the interlocking nature of race, class, gender, and other social categories such as sexuality, ability, and immigration status. It also explores possible avenues for change by learning from the efforts, experiences, and histories of social movement building, grassroots organizing, and collective advocacy, so students can ground the intersectional analysis in everyday political struggles. The course consists of two parts. The first part of the course sets the theoretical foundation in the teachings of Marxist feminism, Black feminism, Third World feminism, and decolonial and Indigenous feminism to examine the interconnecting processes of racialization, gender relations, class formation under global capitalism, settler colonialism, and Western imperialism. The second part of the course examines how these processes manifest in everyday lives and how communities are addressing them collectively. Specifically, we focus on areas of border transgression, sex work organizing, housing justice movement, labour advocacy, migrant queer community building, and internationalist anti-colonial organizing. This course is both academically-oriented and community-based. It will incorporate field visits, event participations, guest speakers, films, and essays (op-eds and academic articles). Students are expected to prepare and conduct interviews, engage in reflective writing, and compose and analyse a major creative project. This course is an invitation to reimagine and enact alternative futures through collective practice. By the end of the course, students will have acquired a deeper theoretical understanding of feminist praxis and practical experience in community organizing, positioning them as agents of change themselves.

Syllabus

This course was designed for GSWS 314, Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at SFU in Spring 2025. See syllabus here.

Student Projects

In this course, students created final projects in a wide range of creative formats—from zines and podcasts to children’s books, quilting, tiktok videos, online course, etc. Each project explores a feminist issue or organizing effort, either expanding on course topics or introducing new ones, and aims to serve as an educational or organizing resource for specific communities and movements.

Project topics include undoing racial injustice for teens, transnational sex worker solidarity, transformative justice conflict resolution, crafting/quilting as resistance, Punjabi Sikh feminism, Indigenous people and the criminal justice system, internationalist intersectionality, and migrant worker justice. *Only projects shared with student consent are featured here.

To see projects, click here.