Interdisciplinary approaches to gender and diversity

Over the last thirty years, and with increasing momentum in the last decade, the concept of gender has become an integral part of academic reflections across all disciplines: from social sciences to humanities; from medicine to computer science. Stemming from the so-called second wave of feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, the academic and public debate around gender has since grown to incorporate other dimensions of identity, such as age, class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and body ableness. Across all disciplines, studying gender and diversity means to acknowledge that there is no “universal” human experience, and, consequently, to interrogate how subjective and social experiences are in fact informed by one’s own positioning within the social identity spectrum. How do various identity aspects intersect? How are the topics of gender and diversity contributing to reshaping the theory and practice of various professional and academic fields? What challenges and opportunities does this bring? These are some of the key questions that will run through this inter-faculty course, which relies on the multi-disciplinary expertise of lecturers from USI and from other national and international universities.

The course is structured along four inter-disciplinary axes:
Axis 1 – Thinking introduces students to key concepts and theoretical foundations of gender and diversity studies. This will provide a solid, yet accessible, common ground for students and lecturers to participate in the discussions and to confidently approach the subsequent parts of the course. 
Axis 2 – Seeing teaches students about the all-important theme of representation, understood both in terms of gender and diversity in terms of role-model visibility in different professional sectors.
Axis 3 – Making illustrates, through a selection of exemplary cases, how gender and diversity are effectively implemented in the professional practices of different sectors.
Axis 4 – Managing, presents and discusses the issues of gender and diversity from a management perspective, taking into consideration different type of economic organizations. 

•    To introduce students to key concepts of gender and diversity studies, by engaging them with a selection of works from seminal thinkers in the field.
•    To enable students to confidently apply key concepts of gender and diversity studies to the analysis of different case studies.
•    To familiarize students with the cross-cutting nature of gender and diversity studies and their relevance in a variety of professional and academic fields. 
•    To illustrate the ways in which the concepts of gender and diversity are concretely applied by researchers and professionals a variety of professional and academic fields

• Gender equality
• Reduced inequalities

In presence

The course is based on interactive lectures, with presentations from the instructors, guided discussions, and in-class mini-assignments. Since this aspires to be an inter-faculty course, students are expected to come prepared with the assigned readings and active participation is highly encouraged to elicit peer exchange and mutual learning among students from different disciplinary backgrounds.

In addition to in-class teaching involving third year Bachelor-level students, the course will include: 
1.    One public lecture given by one of the external lecturers, to be held in the evening and freely accessible by the general audience.
2.    One workshop per semester organized by the students during the regular hours of the course, with budget to invite guest speakers, open to all USI members.

Registration of in-class lectures will be made available on the iCorsi platform. 

Written assignments for class preparation (30%)

Final exam (70%): individual or group presentation of a topic presented during the lessons. Students choose one or more articles among the leearning materials will be provide them on iCorsi. The topic should be previously communicated to the course coordinator.