Whiteness, Sentiment and Political Belon
Whiteness, Senti Politica
Scholars of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race have long been preoccupied with the terms, categories, and processes through which the United States has excluded or qualified the citizenship of particular groups, including women, immigrants, indigenous nations, and descendants of enslaved Africans. Yet it has spent less time interrogating the unqualified content of Americanness, and the work that the imagination of a "default" American identity does in contemporary political life. This seminar introduces students to this problem through an unspoken racial dimension of American political belonging -- the presumed whiteness of ideal American citizens. Readings drawn from several disciplinary traditions, including anthropology, linguistics, sociology, history, and journalism, will ground students in the course's key concepts, including racial markedness, the history of racialization, and public sentiment. Students will mobilize these tools to analyze several cases that rendered white sentiment explicit in politically efficacious ways, including the "panic" incited by the destabilization of race-based residential segregation, the "paranoia" of conspiracy theorists, the "sympathy" associated with natural disasters, and the "resentment" or "rage" associated with the loss of racial privileges
- R 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Catherine Fennell
Info - 4 points
War, Gender & Migration
What are the lived experiences and historical contexts of war? How are war and peace gendered and racialized? How do war and conflict impact and complicate belonging and influence the movement of people across borders and boundaries? With these questions in mind, this course examines the dynamics of war and its aftermath through a complex intersectional lens of gender, race, sexuality, class, religion, and nation. We will also consider how war and conflict lead to forced migration. Most regions of the world are currently or have been, immersed in war and conflict. In order to better understand how and why wars are fomented and conflicts occur, we will examine U.S. wars as well as transnational conflicts and perspectives, while considering how the construction of “the enemy” is gendered and racialized. We will utilize readings from various fields of study to examine historical processes of war, conflict, and displacement. We will combine diverse texts and theoretical engagements, lectures, documentary films, discussions, and class-based activities to interrogate war and notions of subjectivity, alterity, and belonging across time, place, and space.
- W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Bahia Munem
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
Archives of Possibility
In part due to the rise of social and political movements challenging and reshaping colonial narratives about the past, the emergence of digital technologies, and unprecedented access to information, attention to archives has increased over the last decades. This course aims to familiarize students with theories, histories, and practices of archival-building as a mode of knowledge production and to explore questions regarding the relationship between archives and power. The course also examines how and under what conditions archives open up new possibilities by producing and circulating marginalized knowledge, narratives, and perspectives; promotes archival research, and familiarizes students with the basics of preservation in collaboration with the Rare Book & Manuscript Library. As part of the course, students will research Columbia's archives and build their own as part of this process.
- W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Frances Negron-Muntaner
CULPA: 18
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points
ASIAN AMERICAN & PSYCH OF RACE
ASIAN AMERICAN & PSYC OF RACE
This seminar provides an introduction to mental health issues for Asian Americans. In particular, it focuses on the psychology of Asian Americans as racial/ethnic minorities in the United States by exploring a number of key concepts: immigration, racialization, prejudice, family, identity, pathology, and loss. We will examine the development of identity in relation to self, family, college, and society. Quantitative investigation, qualitative research, psychology theories of multiculturalism, and Asian American literature will also be integrated into the course.
- T 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Motoni Katayama
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
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Instructor:
Karl Jacoby
CULPA: 2 h-index: 8 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
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
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
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
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