INTRO TO COMP ETHNIC STUDIES
Introduction to the field of comparative ethnic studies.
- TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Shana Redmond
Wikipedia Info - 4 points
INDIGENEITY OF THE SOUTH
This course is designed to examine the politics and conditions of indigeneity in the South, specifically Latin America and the Caribbean. We begin with conquest and indigenous erasure in the Caribbean, tracing initial stances to the indigenous Other that inform nationalist ideologies of mestizaje, state-indigenous relations, including the politics of recognition. Engaging core theorists across diverse contexts, we trace the ongoing legacies of dispossession and its shaping forces on indigenous political subjectivities, while also tending to the collective and everyday forms of indigenous resistance, reclamation, and resurgence. As such, students in this course will a) Demonstrate knowledge of key theoretical perspectives at the following levels: (1) its analytical and explanatory importance for understanding indigeneity as site of political and structural conditions produced by the project of conquest, its colonial ideologies, and the nation-building project (2) their potential contributions to current social and political dialogues and debates around political conditions and practices of indigeneity in Latin America and the Caribbean; b) provide students with an understanding of the ways in which the colonial encounter undergirds the relations between states and indigenous peoples, and how these foundational antagonisms remain central to territorial conflicts, extractive development, and the politics of recognition; c) provide students with an understanding of indigenous representation (and erasure), collective and everyday forms of resistance.
- R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Shanya Cordis
Info - 4 points
LATINX RACIAL IDENTITY & CULTURAL PRODUC
LATINX RACIAL CULTURAL PR
The course will investigate the impact of racial identity among Latinx in the U.S. on cultural production of Latinos in literature, media, politics and film. The seminar will consider the impact of bilingualism, shifting racial identification, and the viability of monolithic terms like Latinx. We will see how the construction of Latinx racial identity affects acculturation in the U.S., with particular attention to hybrid identities and the centering of black and indigenous cultures. Examples will be drawn from different Latinx ethnicities from the Caribbean, Mexico and the rest of Latin America.
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Edward Morales
Info - 4 points
VIDEO AS INQUIRY
The goal of this course is to familiarize students with visual production, particularly video production, as a mode of inquiry to explore questions related to race, ethnicity, indigeneity, and other forms of social hierarchy and difference. The class will include readings in visual production as a mode of inquiry and on the basic craft of video production in various genres (fiction, documentary, and experimental). As part of the course, students will produce a video short and complete it by semester's end.
- W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Frances Negron-Muntaner
CULPA: 18
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points
COLONIZATION/DECOLONIZATION
Prerequisites: Open to CSER majors/concentrators only. Others may be allowed to register with the instructors permission. This course explores the centrality of colonialism in the making of the modern world, emphasizing cross-cultural and social contact, exchange, and relations of power; dynamics of conquest and resistance; and discourses of civilization, empire, freedom, nationalism, and human rights, from 1500 to 2000. Topics include pre-modern empires; European exploration, contact, and conquest in the new world; Atlantic-world slavery and emancipation; and European and Japanese colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The course ends with a section on decolonization and post-colonialism in the period after World War II. Intensive reading and discussion of primary documents.
- W 10:10 a.m.-noon
- R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Czarina F Thelen
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Instructor:
Emma Crane
h-index: 6 Info - 4 points
COMP STUDY OF CONSTITUTNL CHAL
This course will examine how the American legal system decided constitutional challenges affecting the empowerment of African, Latino, and Asian American communities from the 19th century to the present. Focus will be on the role that race, citizenship, capitalism/labor, property, and ownership played in the court decision in the context of the historical, social, and political conditions existing at the time. Topics include the denial of citizenship and naturalization to slaves and immigrants, government sanctioned segregation, the struggle for reparations for descendants of slavery, and Japanese Americans during World War II.
- R 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Elizabeth Ouyang
CULPA: 8
Info
- 4 points
RACE AND RACISMS
In this class we will approach race and racism from a variety of disciplinary and intellectual perspectives, including: critical race theory/philosophy, anthropology, history and history of science and medicine. We will focus on the development and deployment of the race concept since the mid-19th century. Students will come to understand the many ways in which race has been conceptualized, substantiated, classified, managed and observed in the (social) sciences, medicine, and public health. We will also explore the practices and effects of race (and race-making) in familiar and less familiar social and political worlds. In addition to the courses intellectual content, students will gain critical practice in the seminar format -- that is, a collegial, discussion-driven exchange of ideas.
- R 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Bahia Munem
Info - 4 points
MUSLIM ROOTS/ ROUTES IN THE AMERICAS
Muslims’ roots in the Americas are centuries old despite their presence being considered a recent phenomenon. This legacy emerges from migratory movements from the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia, which were precipitated by multiple and intersecting factors. This course will trace and examine the historical and contemporary waves of Muslim and Arab (forced) migrations into the Americas to explore how empire, globalization, and war have influenced the flow of people across borders and shaped policies and ideas of belonging in receiving nation-states. We will focus on Arab and Muslim identity in light of gendered, ethnoreligious, class, and national affiliations and investigate the racialization of Islam and the gendered-Orientalist constructions of Arabs and Muslims in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean (with particular emphasis on Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Cuba, and others). Through interdisciplinary texts and a comparative framework, we will trace how specific diasporic Muslim and Arab subjects have been imagined, received, incorporated or altogether rejected into host nation-states.
- W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Bahia Munem
Info - 4 points
SENIOR PROJECT SEMINAR
The Senior Project Seminar will focus primarily on developing students’ ideas for their research projects while charting their research goals. The course is designed to develop and hone the skills necessary to complete a senior thesis paper or creative project. An important component of the seminar is the completion of original and independent student research. The seminar provides students a forum in which to discuss their work with both the instructor and their peers. The professor, who facilitates the colloquium, will also provide students with additional academic support through seminar presentations, one-on-one meetings, and classroom exercises; supplementary to the feedback they receive from their individual faculty advisors. The course is divided into three main parts: 1.) researching and producing a senior project thesis; 2.) the submission of coursework throughout the spring semester that help lead to a successful completed project; 3.) and an oral presentation showcasing one’s research to those in and beyond the CSER community at the end of the academic year. This course is reserved for seniors who are completing a CSER senior project and who have successfully completed
Modes of Inquiry
in either their junior or senior year.
- W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Darius V Echeverria
CULPA: 1 Info - 4 points
Data, Race, Power and Justice
Data, Race, Ethics and Ju
For more than a century, scientists, policy makers, law enforcement, and government agencies
have collected, curated and analyzed data about people in order to make impactful decisions.
This practice has exploded along with the computational power available to these agents. Those
who design and deploy data collection, predictive analytics, and autonomous and intelligent
decision-making systems claim that these technologies will remove problematic biases from
consequential decisions. They aim to put a rational and objective foundation based on numbers
and observations made by non-human sensors in the management of public life and to equip
experts with insights that, they believe, will translate into better outcomes (health, economic,
educational, judicial) for all.
But these dreams and their pursuit through technology are as problematic as they are enticing.
Throughout American history, data has often been used to oppress minoritized communities,
manage populations, and institutionalize, rationalize, and naturalize systems of racial violence.
The impersonality of data, the same quality that makes it useful, can silence voices and
displace entire ways of knowing the world.
- F 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Brian Luna Lucero
Info - 4 points
Abolition: Theory and Practice
This course will follow the idea of abolition as expressed first through the eighteenthand
nineteenth-century struggle to end chattel slavery in the Americas, and then as it has come
to define the struggle against over-policing and mass-incarceration in the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries.
In the first half of the class, we will consider abolition in England and its colonies, Haiti,
Cuba, and the U.S. In so doing we will examine both primary sources from abolitionist print
culture (narratives by fugitives from slavery, speeches, poems, and polemical tracts), as well as
secondary sources by historians, literary critics, and political theorists. In the second half, we
will likewise read writing by activists (some incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, and some
not) alongside journalism and scholarship from the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of carceral
studies. Across both periods, Black writers will take up the bulk of our attention.
- M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Matthew Sandler
CULPA: 1 Info - 4 points
History of Childhood in the Americas
The transition from the protected status of childhood into adulthood in the United States varies across class, age, socioeconomic, and legal status, but how does law intersect with rites of passage in coming of age experiences with youths in Latin America? How have societies in the Americas define the shifting notions of childhood and adolescence and how have youths experience coming of age? This course will familiarize students with how legal regimes in Latin America and the United States define the fluid parameters of childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Students will learn to recognize the role of law and the contradictions in how youths experience the emotional, legal, political, and cultural transition of coming of age.
- R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Carlos G Zuniga-Nieto
Info - 4 points
Latinx Environmental Justice: Research i
This course explores national case studies of environmental and racial injustice in Latinx communities and their connection to climate change. Students in the course will analyze, interpret, and evaluate cultural symbols and arguments from migrant farmworkers; Black Indigenous in cities; Afro-Latina women in rural, island contexts; and others who confront the most serious consequences of environmental degradation and climate disruption. It addresses theories and concepts of environmental racism and environmental justice, underscoring how Latinx groups have challenged, expanded, and contributed to the environmental justice discourse in struggles over public parks and beaches, clean air, clean water, pesticide exposure, lead poisoning, and high environmental risks since the 1960s. The course will examine distinct Latinx histories and geographies through the lens of essays, art and sound installations, short stories, documentaries, poetry, short films, and digital multimedia projects to understand better the environmental attitudes and issues that impact Latinx groups in the historical and increasingly urgent challenges of climate change and environmental injustice.
- R 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
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Instructor:
Carlos G Zuniga-Nieto
Info - 4 points
CARIBBEAN HAUNTINGS: FROM CONQUEST TO NE
This course is designed to examine the foundational pillars of modernity in the originating site of the Caribbean: indigenous extinction and the logics of the plantation. Engaging core theorists that conceptualize the notion of the Human/Man, we trace the ongoing legacies of conquest, slavery, and indentureship and the bodily and territorial practices of dispossession in its wake. From a Caribbean feminist perspective, we engage the notion of sovereignty, state formation and statecraft, the politics of recognition, indigeneity, and antiblackness. As such, students in this course will a) Demonstrate knowledge of key theoretical perspectives at the following levels: (1) its analytical and explanatory importance for understanding the Caribbean as site of ongoing hauntings produced by the project of modernity; (2) their potential contributions to current social and political dialogues and debates around political conditions and practices in the Caribbean; ;b)provide students with an understanding of the ways in which the Caribbean as a site of extraction forms the core of relations between states and citizen-subjects, and are in turn central to imperial ideas and representations of the Caribbean c)provide students with an understanding of Caribbean representation, hauntings, political and otherwise subjectivities.
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Shanya Cordis
Info - 4 points
CINEMA OF SUBVERSION
Russian filmmaker Andre Tarkovsky said that “the artist has no right to an idea in which he is not socially committed.” Argentine filmmaker Fernando Solanas and Spanish-born Octavio Getino postulated an alternative cinema that would spur spectators to political action. In this course we will ask the question: How do authoritarian governments influence the arts, and how do artists respond? We will study how socially committed filmmakers have subverted and redefined cinema aesthetics to challenge authoritarianism and repression. In addition, we will look at how some filmmakers respond to institutional oppression, such as poverty and corruption, even within so-called “free” societies. The focus is on contemporary filmmakers but will also include earlier classics of world cinema to provide historical perspective. The course will discuss these topics, among others: What is authoritarianism, what is totalitarianism, and what are the tools of repression within authoritarian/totalitarian societies? What is Third Cinema, and how does it represent and challenge authoritarianism? How does film navigate the opposition of censorship, propaganda and truth? How do filmmakers respond to repressive laws concerning gender and sexual orientation? How do they deal with violence and trauma? How are memories of repressive regimes reflected in the psyche of modern cinema? And finally, what do we learn about authority, artistic vision, and about ourselves when we watch these films?
- R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Eric Gamalinda
CULPA: 9 Wikipedia Info - 4 points
INDIGENOUS PEOPLES:MOVEMNT/RTS
Indigenous Peoples, numbering more that 370 million in some 90 countries and about 5000 groups and representing a great part of the world’s human diversity and cultural heritage, continue to raise major controversies and to face threats to their physical and cultural existence. The main task of this course is to explore the complex historic circumstances and political actions that gave rise to the international Indigenous movement through the human rights agenda and thus also produced a global Indigenous identity on all continents, two intertwined and deeply significant phenomena over the past fifty years. We will analyze the achievements, challenges and potential of the dynamic interface between the Indigenous Peoples’ movement-one of the strongest social movements of our times- and the international community, especially the United Nations system. Centered on the themes laid out in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), the course will examine how Indigenous Peoples have been contesting and reshaping norms, institutions and global debates in the past 50 years, re-shaping and gradually decolonizing international institutions and how they have contributed to some of the most important contemporary debates, including human rights, development, law, and specifically the concepts of self-determination, governance, group rights, inter-culturality and pluriculturality, gender, land, territories and natural resources, cultural rights, intellectual property, health, education, the environment and climate justice. The syllabus will draw on a variety of academic literature, case studies and documentation of Indigenous organizations, the UN and other intergovernmental organizations as well as States from different parts of the world. Students will also have the opportunity to meet with Indigenous leaders and representatives of international organizations and States and will be encouraged to attend the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Select short films will be shown and discussed in class.
- MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Elsa Stamatopoulou
Info - 3 points
SUPERVISED INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH
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Instructor:
Atesede Makonnen
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Instructor:
Shirley Taylor
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Instructor:
Matthew Sandler
CULPA: 1 Info -
Instructor:
Michael Witgen
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Instructor:
Edward Morales
Info - 1-4 points
SUPERVISED INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH
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Instructor:
Kimberly K Phillips-Fein
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Instructor:
Matthew Sandler
CULPA: 1 Info -
Instructor:
Sarah Haley
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Instructor:
Matthew Sandler
CULPA: 1 Info -
Instructor:
Matthew L Jones
CULPA: 19
Info
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Instructor:
Stephanie McCurry
CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info -
Instructor:
Matthew Sandler
CULPA: 1 Info - 1-4 points
METHODS IN AMERICAN STUDIES
Conceived in the 1920’s and 1930’s, American Studies sought to make a synoptic account of the “national character.” Since the 1960’s, the field has turned towards a focus on various forms of inequality as the dark side of American exceptionalism. This course surveys the development of the field’s current preoccupations, covering a range of periods, regions, groups, and cultural practices that present productive problems for generalizations about U.S. identity. We begin with the first academic movement in American Studies, the myth and symbol school—and think through its growth in the context of post-WWII funding for higher education. We then move on to a series of debates centered at intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. We’ll close by examining the historical background of protest movements built around the identitarian concerns about rape culture and mass incarceration.
- T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Jessica H Lee
Info - 4 points