Fall 2025 courses
GWSS 105: Introduction to Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies - pdf
Multiple sections available
This introductory class is an interdisciplinary analysis of personal experiences and social and political institutions as they shape and are shaped by the intersections of gender, race, class, sex, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, citizenship, and ability on local, national, and global levels. Topics include the roles of biology and social construction in shaping gender and sexuality; sources of structural inequities; and feminist, queer, trans, anti-racist, and anti-colonial activisms.
Fulfills the "Ethical Reasoning and Responsibility" and "Human Diversity within the U.S." K-State 8 requirements.
Fulfills a "Social and Behavioral Sciences" requirement within the K-State Core and the Arts & Sciences "U.S. Multicultural Overlay."
GWSS 275: Gender, Race, and Sex in Science Fiction - pdf
Dr. Valerie Padilla Carroll
Online
This course explores the ways that gender, sex, sexuality, race, and class intersect in science fiction, including Afrofuturism, Asian futurism, Chicana futurism, and Indigenous futurism. Here, the ways that we imagine the future and the alien offer insight into contemporary concerns about gender, sexuality, race and racism, colonialism, imperialism, and justice.
Fulfills the "Social Sciences" K-State 8 requirement.
Fulfills a "Social and Behavioral Sciences" requirement within the K-State Core
GWSS 305: Fundamentals of GWSS - pdf
Dr. Rachel Levitt
Wednesdays, 3:55-6:45
This class is an opportunity to do a deeper dive into the best parts of feminist, queer, and transgender theories. Students will hone their ability to dismantle conventional assumptions about the world around them and acquire nuanced understandings of how to engage in intersectional social justice work.
GWSS 325: Queer Studies/Concepts, History, and Politics - pdf
Dr. Anh Alan Nguyen
Mon/Wed/Fri, 9:30-10:20
This course spotlights the negotiate processes of becoming and belonging. Employing intersectional lenses of reading queer desires, anxieties, complexities, relationalities, and (im)possibilities, we are going to inquire why queer is for everyone. Ultimately, we unveil queer intersectionality as a bridge to self-reflection, identity formation, inclusive promotion, community building, intergroup solidarity, and social transformation by learning from differences.
Fulfills the "Historical Perspectives" and “Human Diversity within the U.S.” K-State 8 requirements.
Fulfills the Arts & Sciences "U.S. Multicultural Overlay."
GWSS 435: Race, Sex, and Science - pdf
Dr. Harlan Weaver
Hybrid - Mon/Wed, 10:30-11:20
Science and technology are central to our lives. We use medicines that shape and save our lives; and machines increasingly monitor and shape our interactions and even our bodies. Also, science is used as powerful basis of authority; when "science says," people listen. This class examines how science, technology, and medicine shape and are shaped by race, gender, ability, sexuality, & empire.
Fulfills the Arts & Sciences "U.S. Multicultural Overlay."
GWSS 450: Stories of a Young Girl - pdf
Dr. Natalie Aikins
Tue/Thu, 2:30-3:45
Literature across many cultures documents the experience of girlhood and female adolescence. Reading these stories will help us to think through the unique experience of growing up female. This course will focus chiefly on Multiethnic Literature of the U.S. especially focusing on Latinx, Black, Asian American, Indigenous, and Jewish American, and European American stories. It may include the works of authors such as Daisy Hernandez, Cherríe Moraga, Carmen Maria Machado, Harriet Jacobs, Roxane Gay, Edwidge Danticat, Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sarah Winnemucca (Northern Paiute), Sydney Taylor, and Lucy Maude Montgomery.
AMETH 160: Intro to American Ethnic Studies - pdf
Multiple sections available
This course prepares students to function productively in our multicultural society and provides a deep understanding of America's race relations and how race and ethnic understandings have been shaped across history. We explore Native American, African American, Mexican/Latina/o American, Asian American, and white American historical dynamics. We offer you the opportunity to participate in some of the most difficult yet rewarding conversations in today’s America.
Fulfills the "Historical Perspectives" and "Human Diversity within the U.S." K-State 8 requirements.
Fulfills a "Social and Behavioral Sciences" requirement within the K-State Core and the Arts & Sciences "U.S. Multicultural Overlay."
AMETH 351: Top/Black Health & Justice - pdf
Dr. Keisha Clark
Tue/Thu, 9:30-10:45
Join us on an enlightening journey into health and justice within Black communities. This course combines engaging films, community projects, and stimulating readings to reveal how history, policy, and social structures shape health outcomes. Explore critical issues like health disparities and environmental justice and discover the proactive steps communities are taking to drive change.
Fulfills the "Historical Perspectives" and "Human Diversity within the U.S." K-State 8 requirements.
Fulfills the Arts & Sciences "U.S. Multicultural Overlay."
Fulfills an elective for Integrated Health Studies, the DEIB in Business certificate, and the Intercultural Competence Certificate.
AMETH 352: Top/Myths Legends Land - pdf
Dr. Spintz Harrison
Mon/Wed/Fri, 10:30-11:20
This course is presented from the American Indian perspective regarding tribal myths, legends, and lands. How these three concepts are intertwined with American Indian ways of understanding and life learnings. With Native people everything is connected to the land and treatment of people, plants, animals, and lands which result in the way things are today.
Popular myths include Sasquatch, Deer Woman, and Little People. Not so familiar are Giants, Witches, Lake Monsters, and other creatures that go bump in the Kansas night. The class concludes with landmark Supreme Court Cases on reservations lands that established significant results such as the basis of a true religion, and NAGPRA standards.
Fulfills the Arts & Sciences "U.S. Multicultural Overlay."
AMETH 353: Top/Music & Dance in Mexican America - pdf
Dr. Yolanda Broyles Gonzalez
Online, first 8-weeks
This course is a survey of the rich folk music and dance forms across the Americas, ranging from Aztec dance to cumbia, ranchera, corridos, reggaeton, banda, norteño, mariachi, to various salsa genres, and hip hop. This course contextualizes music and dance styles within historical, political, and broader cultural movement
Fulfills the Arts & Sciences "U.S. Multicultural Overlay."
AMETH 560: Top/Misrepresented in Media - pdf
Dr. Alicia Brunson
Online
Who are You? How do others perceive you? Do these two identities match? Explore how various forms of media represent you and other racial, gender, and class groups.
Fulfills the Arts & Sciences "U.S. Multicultural Overlay."
AMETH 560: Top/Pop Culture in Mexican America - pdf
Dr. Yolanda Broyles Gonzalez
Online, second 8-weeks
This course will examine various forms of Mexican American contemporary music, dance, foods, popular life philosophies, visual arts, spirituality, medicinal practices, and modern media in their historical and social contexts, including relationships to "mainstream" cultural practices and power relations.
Fulfills the Arts & Sciences "U.S. Multicultural Overlay."
STRAN 400: Transforming Society
Dr. Rachel Levitt
Mondays, 3:55-6:45
STRAN 400 explores how we seek to transform society through different approaches to social justice and uses different frameworks to assess claims about what we "know," what we should represent, what counts as intersectional justice, and the complex ways we navigate those commitments in practice. This semester we will use a diverse set of schools of thought to help parse out the ethical issues at play in these considerations, specifically, critical ethnic studies, feminist theory, queer of color critique, Native studies, Latinx studies, transgender studies, Black studies, Asian American studies, American studies, and settler colonial studies. What unifies these diverse literatures are considerations about how identity, knowledge, and power are impacted by race, gender, sexuality, nation, colonialism, and power.
Fulfills the Human Diversity in the U.S. and Ethical Reasoning requirements and counts towards the queer studies minor.