Smith College's Moodle

This course explores contemporary economic interactions through a feminist lens. This feminist exploration of the economic structures will allow us to bring to the forefront the historical nature of capitalism as a system that relies on the exploitation of specific racialized and gendered groups. At the same time, the notion of the transnational will take us a step further in this exploration, linking geographies of power at various scales (local, national, regional and global). Through this approach, we will be attentive to the heterogeneity of identities and experiences that take place across global economic structures, while developing a critical understanding of capitalism’s capacity to shape us as gendered and racialized subjects. Throughout the semester we will focus on exploring the division between production and reproduction and we will look into feminist understandings of debt and current economic labor configurations. At the same time, we will pay attention to the different ways through which locally and globally women are resisting, rejecting, and confronting these configurations and developing alternative processes grounded on solidarity and collectivity.

We will assess the alternatives proposed by global social movements, from micro-finance to worker-owned cooperatives to workers associations, to shed light on the cultural fabric of the global financial economy. Assignments include a time-labor mapping of our day; a community-based research project on local and global political movements, a short paper, class-led discussions, final reflection project & collaborative assessment.