Evergreen State College, the site of racially-motivated May protests, offers a winter and spring 2018 course that examines math through a feminist lens.
Students who take “Women’s Work: Weaving Feminism and Math” can receive four credits in discrete math or four credits in algebraic thinking, depending on which quarter they choose to take the course.
The class “interrogates mathematics as a field of inquiry, asking what is recognized as math and what isn’t, who had and has access to math, and what privileges it gives access to,” according to the course description. “Through a grounding in feminist critiques (from critical theory, science studies, and women-of-color feminisms), we will examine how mathematical knowledge becomes legitimized and the ways in which power structures influence what counts as knowledge.”
Instructors Vauhn Foster-Grahler, Melissa Nivala, and Julie Russo also pledge to “delve into the origins and development of computer technology, and the gendered and racialized aspects of its production and consumption.”
The school requires students to participate in social justice-oriented community service in “Diversity and Dissent in Education and the Media,” another Evergreen course offered fall 2017 and winter 2018.
The course will examine the “social construction of race and gender and the stereotyping of immigrant students. In order to break down such assumptions, students will engage in community service, writing, and media analysis over the course of the program.”
Meanwhile, “Reproduction: Gender, Race, and Power” will investigate how abortion, contraception, and compulsory sterilization create “systemic racism.”
The course pledges to “collectively dismantle the idea that women are defined as such by an innate reproductive capacity.”
The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to Evergreen State College for comment on the courses, but received none in time for press.
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