19 Dec I took the absolute best classes here

One of the things I’ve loved most about my stay here has been my classes. I am such a nerd, I know, and I love it! Back home I attend journalism school, and almost all of the stuff we do is journalism. I’ve had very very little academic classes if any. And I love my school, I love the hands on approach to journalism, because I think that is the way you learn a craft. But for my semester abroad I really wanted to emerge myself into a more academic understanding of things.

Back home I do a lot of work on gender equality and feminism, so naturally I wanted to take classes on that. I was also slowly starting to get interested in programming and how internet and democracy work together, so I wanted to take a programming class as well. I ended up doing the classes “Queer literature and media”, “Women, class and race”, “Feminist Theory” and “Introduction to computer programming”. Below I’ll give a short description of each and what I though of them.

Queer literature and media

This was such an interesting class. We watched a ton of movies and documentaries exploring the interesections of identity, sexuality, queerness, race, transnationalism, power and colonialism. Some of the movies I’ve seen in that class stuck with me for weeks because they were so powerfull. There is quite a bit of reading and the theory can be heavy at times, but once you get the hang of it, all of the readings are so powerful and really gives you a better understanding of queerness. I highly recommend!

Women, class and race

Wauw, what a powerful class. This class is more literature heavy than it is theory heavy. It is all about women of color in America, and how race, class and gender affect their lives. A lot of the work we did in class was about uncovering untold stories from our own families and from a journalism point of view, that was so powerful. The novels we read were incredible, nothing less, the ones that made the biggest impact on me were “Beloved” about slavery in America, “Comfort women” about Korean women and children in World War 2, who were sold into sex slavery and “Solar Storms” about colonialization and the stealing of land from Native Americans. Take this class if you get the chance!

Feminist Theory

I took this class because I have been working with feminism for some years already but I have never taken a single Women and Gender Studies class, so I have sometimes felt like I lacked the theoretical bagground knowledge. Well I definitely got that here! What I loves most about this class, other than the fact that the teacher was so caring and so inspiring, was that the text we read were almost always by women of color with an intersectional, transnational point of view. And if we read text that weren’t, we made sure to analyze them through a decolonization perspective. I felt so empowered every time I went to this class, because I felt like I was given knowledge that I could truly use in the continued struggle against patriarchy, white supremacy and settler colonialism.

Introduction to computer programming

This class was definitely my wild card and I was for sure un unsteady ground! I needed my large morning coffee to follow along, even though the professor was really nice and always explained the points multiple times. At the end I chose to do this class credit/no credit, because I had to prioritize my time, and I knew I could do a better job in this class if I wasn’t always afraid of getting less than an A. I’m really glad I took the course, I can write simple java programs now and understand things I didn’t before.

That was my round up, I can recommend all of the classes!