Fourth-year Honours Seminar
How do we transform rough ideas into solid, persuasive, and nuanced arguments? What does a critical analysis look like? How do we navigate the seemingly endless sources of information and stories that are available to us in order to develop a helpful archive from which to work? What’s the most effective way to present our key insights? This seminar is for advanced students in Women and Gender Studies who want to imagine and execute a major research paper. In the process, they’ll: reflect on and develop a research method; consider what’s motivating their research; work at the craft of clear, persuasive writing; workshop different stages of their papers; and practice the skills required to both give and respond to constructive feedback. This course is an opportunity to explore, in some detail, questions that feel particularly pressing to individual students and to further develop the necessary skills to express complex, original thought. By participating in this classroom community of thinkers and writers, students also experience firsthand how making knowledge is a relational, rather than isolated, endeavour.