The Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies is offering a new course during Winter quarter: Intro to Critical Feminist Data Studies.
This course proceeds from the position that data studies and feminist thought are not just complementary, but necessary to each other. Understanding data through feminist thought aims to visualize more equitable collective futures. The course analyzes historical and contemporary data and reexamines their purposes at micro, meso, macro, and global scales. By first examining the processes of data production and visualization, then analyzing how our experiences are presented to us again as data, we contest the decontextualization which constructs data only as impersonally authoritative descriptors.
While some technical discussions may occur, students are not required to have previous backgrounds in the data sciences: our discussion will take GWSS social sciences and humanistic perspectives as their foundation. A set of relevant GWSS keywords will be developed throughout the course.