Fall 2026 courses
GWSS 105: Introduction to Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies
Multiple sections available
How do ideas about gender shape your daily life — from the clothes you wear to the opportunities you’re offered? How do race, class, sexuality, nationality, and ability intersect with gender to influence people’s experiences around the world?
In this course, we’ll explore how gender works — not just as a personal identity, but as something that shapes (and is shaped by) families, schools, media, governments, and global systems. Together, we’ll examine how biology and society both play roles in shaping ideas about gender and sexuality. We’ll also investigate where social inequalities come from and how they are maintained — and challenged.
Drawing from multiple disciplines, we’ll engage with feminist, queer, trans, anti-racist, and anti-colonial perspectives to better understand power, identity, and social change. Along the way, you’ll develop tools to think critically about the world around you and your place within it.
Whether you’re new to gender studies or looking to deepen your understanding, this course invites you to ask big questions, connect theory to lived experience, and imagine more just futures.
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 240: Activism and Social Justice
Dr. Rachel Levitt
Tue/Thu 1:30-2:20
In this course, you’ll explore social justice organizing through Indigenous, Queer, Feminist, Ethnic, and American Studies perspectives while analyzing activist movements and legal cases. Together, we’ll unpack how race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, citizenship, global location, and colonialism shape people’s lived experiences of justice and injustice. You’ll learn practical frameworks for evaluating complex social issues and for thinking critically about strategy, accountability, and meaningful change. Topics will include Indigenous sovereignty and reparations, prison labor and divestment campaigns, sexual violence and transnational accountability, and the role of hope and joy in sustaining movements. This course is ideal for students interested in activism, law, public policy, education, or anyone who wants stronger tools for understanding—and participating in—social change.
Fulfills a "Social and Behavioral Sciences" requirement within the K-State Core and the Arts & Sciences "Ethical Reasoning Overlay"
GWSS 325: Queer Studies/Concepts, History, and Politics
Dr. Rachel Levitt
Wednesdays 3:55-6:45
What does it mean to think about queerness beyond identity — as a way of understanding power, race, nation, and empire? Who benefits from “LGBTQ+ progress,” and who gets left out?
In this course, we’ll explore how queer studies has grown and changed over time. We’ll begin with some of the foundational texts in the field, then move into scholarship that pushes queer studies in new directions — including queer of color critique, queer migration and diaspora studies, queer tourism, and queer Native studies.
Together, we’ll ask big and sometimes uncomfortable questions:
- How have race and sexuality shaped one another?
- How are gender and sexuality used to define citizenship, belonging, and “modernity”?
- When does the global celebration of LGBTQ+ rights reinforce nationalism, colonialism, or consumerism?
- On whose behalf is “liberation” being pursued?
This course invites you to think critically about how queerness is connected to systems of regulation, violence, and resistance — locally and globally. We’ll examine how sexuality and gender are racialized within conversations about colonialism, migration, human rights, tourism, and Indigeneity, and how scholars and activists challenge dominant narratives. By the end of the course, you’ll have tools to analyze how power works across identities and borders — and to imagine more accountable, intersectional approaches to justice and liberation.
Fulfills the "Historical Perspectives" and “Human Diversity within the U.S.” K-State 8 requirements.
Fulfills the Arts & Sciences "U.S. Multicultural Overlay."
AMETH 160: Intro to American Ethnic Studies
Multiple sections available
How did the United States become the multiracial, multicultural society we live in today? How have ideas about race shaped that history? In this course, you’ll explore the historical and contemporary experiences of Native American, African American, Mexican/Latina/o American, Asian American, and white communities, and examine how race and ethnicity have been constructed, contested, and transformed over time. We’ll connect the past to the present, asking how earlier struggles over land, labor, migration, and citizenship continue to shape today’s conversations about identity, inequality, and belonging. This class invites you into some of the most challenging — and most meaningful — discussions happening in America right now. You’ll leave with a deeper understanding of race relations and stronger tools for navigating and contributing to our diverse democracy.
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: African American Perspectives
Dr. Keisha Clark
Tue/Thu 9:30-10:45
What would it mean to understand Black health not as a “disparity” to be managed, but as a site of struggle, knowledge, and liberation? This course confronts the historical and ongoing forces — slavery, medical racism, environmental injustice, carceral systems, and economic inequality — that shape Black health outcomes. Moving beyond narrow public health frameworks, we examine how Black bodies have been regulated, exploited, pathologized, and policed — and how Black people have theorized, organized, and cared for themselves in response.
Through scholarship, community knowledge, and lived experience, we will study Black health as central to Black freedom struggles. Health is not just about individual behavior; it is about power, land, labor, reproduction, and survival. Join Dr. Clark in critically rethinking what “health” means and why understanding Black health is essential to any serious vision of Black liberation.
Fulfills the "Historical Perspectives" and "Human Diversity within the U.S." K-State 8 requirements.
Fulfills the Arts & Sciences "U.S. Multicultural Overlay."
AMETH 560: Top/Misrepresented in Media
Dr. Alicia Brunson
Online - asynchronous - 16-weeks
Who are you — and who does the media say you are? When you see your community represented on screen, online, or in the news, does it feel accurate, distorted, invisible, or commodified?
In this advanced seminar, we dig deep into how film, television, news, social media, advertising, and digital culture construct — and misconstruct — race, gender, class, and identity. You’ll analyze how stereotypes are produced, how narratives become normalized, and how media industries shape what feels “true” or “common sense.” At the same time, we’ll explore strategies of resistance, counter-storytelling, and media creation that challenge dominant frames.
Designed for students ready for rigorous discussion and critical analysis, this course gives you the tools to decode representation, question power, and rethink the stories that shape our social world.
Fulfills the Arts & Sciences "U.S. Multicultural Overlay."
STRAN 400: Transforming Society
Dr. Rachel Levitt
Mondays, 3:55-6:45
What does “justice” actually mean — and who gets to define it? How do we know when social change is truly transformative rather than just reform?
In STRAN 400, we explore different approaches to social justice and ask hard questions about how change happens. Using queer, feminist, transgender, Indigenous, critical ethnic studies, and disability studies perspectives, we’ll examine how knowledge is produced: What counts as truth? Whose voices are centered? Who is left out? And how do these choices shape our understanding of fairness, rights, and liberation?
This course challenges us to think critically about representation and power — not just in theory, but in practice. Together, we’ll grapple with the ethical dilemmas that arise when building anti-colonial, abolitionist, and liberatory movements. What does it mean to dismantle harmful systems while also creating something more just? What tensions emerge in that process?
STRAN 400 is a space for deep discussion, careful analysis, and bold thinking. You’ll leave the course with stronger tools for evaluating social justice claims, engaging complex ethical debates, and imagining transformative futures.
Fulfills the Human Diversity in the U.S. and Ethical Reasoning requirements and counts towards the queer studies minor.