Africana Studies (AFST)

This interdisciplinary course is designed to introduce students to the arts as a sophisticated means of communicating personal and social understandings of identity. The arts are particularly adept at presenting nuanced and multi-layered explorations of complex realities, and identity (both self-created and imposed from without) is a major concern of artistic disciplines from across the globe. Topics covered will include selected aspects of Polynesian, West African, Native American and other American art. Students will have an opportunity to experience the richness of those arts from a vantage point of academic preparation, direct personal observation and experience, and the insights of those who work in the arts. Students will complete the course with the skills necessary to approach art forms and cultures new to them with increased confidence and with an appreciation for the brilliant and complicated way in which identity is reflected in art from across the world and across disciplines.

This course is for learners who have completed Beginning Swahili I and II. Although Swahili is a traditionally spoken indigenous language in east Africa, reading and writing can be empowering and important for languages which are regaining official status (as Swahili is an official language of Kenya and Tanzania, as well as the African Union). This class will build on the foundations covered in the first year of Swahili courses and incorporate literature authored by Swahili speaking people. Repeatable for advanced learners.

This is a topics course that covers a variety of cultural learning lectures and discussions related to the Swahili speaking people of Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda. Led by our visiting Fulbright instructor, participants will have the opportunity to gain authentic insights, perspectives, and experiences from an international scholar. Conducted in English, no Swahili language proficiency required.

Creole is spoken by an estimated seventeen million people. Creole is spoken on the islands of the Caribbean and the western Indian Ocean that were former or current French colonial possessions and in the countries where many of these former island residents have emigrated, including the United States, Canada, France, Dominican Republic, Bahamas and other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. Haitians are the largest Creole speech community of approximately eleven and a half million speakers. Creole language courses provide a valuable foundation for Notre Dame faculty, staff and students working to understand and address critical issues related to Haiti and the Francophone world, from language and culture to history and education, from engineering to public health. Creole language and literature are of increasing interest in the dynamic field of Francophone studies. Creole has also become a major area in the field of linguistics, especially in areas of language evolution, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Students attend class with an instructor (T-TH) and work on-line (MWF). The instructor will balance both spoken and written Creole as well as exercise reading and listening.

Creole is spoken by an estimated seventeen million people. Creole is spoken on the islands of the Caribbean and the western Indian Ocean that were former or current French colonial possessions and in the countries where many of these former island residents have emigrated, including the United States, Canada, France, Dominican Republic, Bahamas and other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. Haitians are the largest Creole speech community of approximately eleven and a half million speakers. Creole language courses provide a valuable foundation for Notre Dame faculty, staff and students working to understand and address critical issues related to Haiti and the Francophone world, from language and culture to history and education, from engineering to public health. Creole language and literature are of increasing interest in the dynamic field of Francophone studies. Creole has also become a major area in the field of linguistics, especially in areas of language evolution, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. This is a three-credit introductory language course. The instructor will balance both spoken and written Creole as well as exercise reading and listening.

Swahili is offered through the Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTs) Program at the Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures (CSLC). Class days and times are TBA and will be determined based on the availability of the students who have registered for the course. Days and times will be selected after all students have registered but before the add/drop period has finished. This course will be taught by a visiting scholar for whom Swahili is a native language. For more information, please visit the CSLC website (cslc.nd.edu) and select the "Students" tab.

On completion of the intermediate level course, students will use some of the following strategies to maintain communication, but not all of the time and inconsistently, able to ask questions, ask for clarification, self-correct or restate when not understood, circumlocute, recognizes and uses some culturally appropriate vocabulary, expressions, and gestures when participating in everyday interactions. Recognizes that differences exist in cultural behaviors and perspectives and can conform in familiar situations, understands main ideas and some supporting details on familiar topics from a variety of texts; comprehends main ideas and identifies some supporting details; may show emerging evidence of the ability to make inferences by identifying key details from the text; ccomprehends information related to basic personal and social needs and relevant to one's immediate environment such as self and everyday life, school, community, and particular interests; comprehends simple stories, routine correspondence, short descriptive texts or other selections within familiar contexts; generally comprehends connected sentences and much paragraph-like discourse; comprehends information-rich texts with highly predictable order; sufficient control of language (vocabulary, structures, conventions of spoken and written language, etc.) to understand fully and with ease short, non-complex texts on familiar topics; limited control of language to understand some more complex texts; may derive meaning by comparing target language structures with those of the native language; recognize parallels in structure between new and familiar language; comprehends high frequency vocabulary related to everyday topics and high frequency idiomatic expressions; may use some or all of the following strategies to comprehend texts, able to: skim and scan; use visual support and background knowledge; predict meaning based on context, prior knowledge, and/or experience; use context clues; recognize word family roots, prefixes and suffixes. Generally relies heavily on knowledge of own culture with increasing knowledge of the target culture(s) to interpret texts that are heard, read, or viewed.

Swahili is offered through the Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs) Program at the Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures (CSLC). Class days and times are TBA and will be determined based on the availability of students who have registered for the course. Days and times will be selected after all students have registered but before the add/drop period has finished. This course will be taught by a visiting scholar for whom Swahili is a native language. For more information, please visit the CSLC website or contact Dr. Denise Ayo, Director of Undergraduate Studies.

Swahili is offered through the Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs) Program at the Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures (CSLC). Class days and times are TBA and will be determined based on the availability of students who have registered for the course. Days and times will be selected after all students have registered but before the add/drop period has finished. This course will be taught by a visiting scholar for whom Swahili is a native language. For more information, please visit the CSLC website or contact Dr. Denise Ayo, Director of Undergraduate Studies.

Swahili is offered through the Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTs) Program at the Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures (CSLC). Class days and times are TBA and will be determined based on the availability of the students who have registered for the course. Days and times will be selected after all students have registered but before the add/drop period has finished. This course will be taught by a visiting scholar for whom Swahili is a native language. For more information, please visit the CSLC website (cslc.nd.edu) and select the "Students" tab.

An introduction to the seminar method of instruction accenting the organization and expression of arguments suggested by readings in sociology, political science, and psychology. Each of the seminars treats a particular sociological topic, such as family life, social problems, the urban crisis, poverty, etc. Africana Studies is a broad, interdisciplinary field of study looking at Africa, the African Diaspora, and the African-American experience. As a result of this breadth there are endless avenues for study and exploration within the discipline.

An introduction to the seminar method of instruction that explores the major methodologies of the historical discipline and which accents the organization and expression of arguments suggested by readings in historical topics.

In June 2020, prompted by the horrific killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, our nation awakened to the brutality of institutional racism and the violence to human dignity it has wrought in communities of color throughout America's history. The movement for racial justice was renewed in vigor with nationwide protests and calls for action. Although the protests of 2020 have largely been a response to a crisis surrounding police violence, the calls to action have focused attention on the breadth of systemic racism in all facets of American life. In this course, students will engage weekly with a single event or concept, drawn from a variety of disciplines, necessary to understand and dismantle systemic racism. The course centers around a weekly guest-lecture series featuring authors, public intellectuals, faith leaders, and external and internal members of the academy. In each guest-lecture class period, the guest expert provides a sophisticated introduction to a discrete racial justice topic. Some lectures address historical events not widely known (e.g., the Tulsa massacre or the arrival of the first slave ship in the Americas in 1619); others address current racial inequities (e.g., the wealth gap, health outcomes, criminal justice, voter suppression); still others examine broad concepts (e.g., intersectionality, Catholic teaching on racism). Specific topics to be determined by expert availability. This three-credit version of the course is designed for students who are interested in a more intensive study of each week's topic. Students will participate in once-weekly in-person seminar sessions with readings to accompany the speaker and topic for the week. Following each guest lecture, students will gather briefly via zoom to reflect and respond. Throughout the course of the semester, students will compose a variety of short papers, lead classroom discussions, and complete a final project incorporating independent research on related topics.

This course will serve as an introduction to the field of international development, with particular focus on the various disciplines that have contributed to and shaped the development discourse over the past six decades. Readings and lectures will draw from economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, environmental and technological sciences, public health and epidemiology, area studies, ethnic studies, and gender studies. A large component of this course will focus on in-class discussions and presentations that engage the broader debates within development studies in order to critically evaluate the development discourse. Required course work will include group or individual student projects that investigate current development issues and propose engaged solutions that incorporate social justice and human dignity.

Globally, the late 1960s were volatile and deadly. A decade that began with young idealism and revolutionary possibilities, ended with raised fists and the beginnings of violent terror. 1968 was particularly transformative. It was the year that Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated; the year that the Chicago Eight were arrested for conspiracy and inciting riots at the Democratic National Convention; the year that students across France brought the French economy to a halt; and the year that demonstrations in Northern Ireland demanding equal representation for Unionists and Nationalist escalated. In this course we will examine the political, religious, and cultural events of 1968-69 by exploring texts that were created during that period, and texts that have been created since to reflect the era. We will focus our attention on theatre, literature, music, and art created in the United States and Ireland that captures how class, generational, gender, and racial conflicts led to bloody violence.

An introduction to the field of global development, with particular focus on the various disciplines that have contributed to and shaped the development discourse. Readings, lectures, and discussions will draw from various disciplines, including economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, environmental and technological sciences, public health, law, and gender studies, among others. We will examine debates on the meaning and measurement of development; alternative approaches to, and methods in, the study of development; and attempts to address some of the main development challenges facing the world today. There will be a central focus on understanding "what works" in development. Working together in teams, students will conceptualize and design an international development project using "real world" constraints.

Through a multidisciplinary and cross-cultural exploration, this course will 1) introduce students to key concepts, themes, and theories in the field of Africana Studies; and 2) introduce students to the identities and experiences of black populations throughout the global African Diaspora. Over the course of the semester, we will tackle the following questions: What is Africana Studies? What are the historical, intellectual, and political origins of Africana Studies? What are race and ethnicity? What is blackness? What roles do class, culture, gender, nationality, and religion, play in blackness? What is the African Diaspora? What role does Africa play in blackness? How do the arts, humanities, and social sciences help us investigate, analyze, conceptualize, represent, and understand this thing we refer to as "blackness?" What are some of the historical, geographical, socio-political, and cultural points of divergence observable between populations of African descent throughout the Diaspora and what, if any, are the points of commonality that unite these dispersed populations?

A survey of selected seminal works of African-American literature.

How has science fiction blurred the boundaries of human existence and identity? Prominent Sci-fi author Octavia Butler once stated, "I was attracted to Science Fiction because it was so wide open I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining." What about the genre makes it free of these "walls" Butler speaks of? This course will seek to answer this question through exploration of 20th and 21st century speculative works like Tracy Smith's Life on Mars, Octavia Butler's Bloodchild, famous essays like Sam Delany's "Racism and Science Fiction", and Marvel's 2018 Black Panther film. Students will develop an understanding of how various writers have redefined Science Fiction by way of aesthetic movements like Afrofuturism, to urge readers to develop nuanced understandings of identity and futures of endless possibility.

This course explores various 20th and 21st century writers engaged in the work of civil disobedience and protest of all kinds.

Considering the contemporary rise in the aesthetics of the genre of black horror, this course will explore literary and artistic horror(s) that black artists examine in America. We will work to study how black horror reminds us of the power of crafting narratives in America. We will be watching numerous horror films and shows and reading numerous literary authors. We will be reading and working with authors like: Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, and many others. A close observation of this genre will allow us to question what constitutes horror and how is it connected to the humanities, law, and elements of science as well? This course is designed to help you build sound critical arguments and analysis by writing multiple genres of essays like a narrative essay, a close analysis essay, a podcast essay, and a final research essay.

This course will introduce you to contemporary poetry in a variety of media and formats and from an array of lively, diverse voices. Through in- and out-of-class assignments you'll learn how poets draft and revise; you'll practice techniques, genres and forms; and you'll generate a poetry portfolio of your own. Class format will include discussion, in-class activities, and opportunities for feedback on student work. This particular section of the course will focus on the African American and African Diaspora.

In the summer of 1946 French cinemas were flooded with the likes of The Maltese Falcon, Laura, and The Woman in the Window, films that had been delayed for international distribution because of the war. When Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton saw these American films made during the war, the critics decided that the films and their characters were "black" or "dark," thus defining the genre as film noir. In this genre, the mostly white characters occupy an indeterminate space, commit moral transgressions, and border on nihilism. In discussions of the noir genre, films and novels by and/or about black people are marginalized. Novels such as Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go or Donald Goines's Never Die Alone complicate the genre because the works are black in ideology and essence. These characters do not need to fall from grace to be black, they are black and, consequently, the pursuit of duplicitous lifestyles in black noir works tends to highlight the social injustices black Americans suffer in America making many black noir titles protests against mainstream white America as well.In this course, we will study black American literature that focuses the noir genre on black people themselves. Gritty, urban crime novels that attempt to expose inequities in black American lives and dispel the notion that a descent from whiteness results in blackness. Rather, the black people in these texts exist in darkness because they are living in alienated communities. We shall investigate how the noir genre is altered when "noirs" are the subjects and the authors. In addition to primary texts, the course will also engage critical responses to these works.

This course will introduce students to the main topics, themes, and debates in Atlantic history, focusing on Spanish and Portuguese America and the Caribbean. It will begin with an overview of slavery and other legal and labor systems in West Africa and the Americas, and then examine how and why the Portuguese and Spanish entered into a slaving trade in West Africa, and what ensued from contact with the American hemisphere after 1492. We will end with abolition and emancipation in the Americas. Along the way we will examine the rise and fall of "Indian" slavery, the cultural meanings of Blackness, the labor and economic conditions in urban settings as well as on rural plantations, and the strategies that enslaved people used to negotiate living conditions and achieve freedom. We will also pay careful attention to different kinds of resistance, including the formation of stable palenques of those who escaped slavery and a variety of rebellions, including the successful Haitian Revolution.

African peoples and empires have always been at the heart of transformative world events. Their wealth, ingenuity, and power reshaped the medieval global economy. Their enslavement and back-breaking forced labor fueled industrial and agricultural revolutions. Their struggle against western racism and imperialism awakened pan-African consciousness. And today, their creativity and entrepreneurialism drive popular culture and economic opportunity. In this course, we will explore the many ways Africans shaped the history of the world. We will do so by examining primary documents, reading African fiction, watching African films, and immersing ourselves in current trends in Africa.

More than a century before African slaves were trafficked to the Virginia colony in 1619, Christopher Columbus transported captured indigenous peoples to Spain from the New World. The dispossession and enslavement of non-Europeans in the colonization of the Americas was justified by Christians but also condemned by Christians with different economic and political interests. This development course in theology introduces students to the challenging intersection of faith, slavery, and freedom by exploring key figures, events, and movements that have shaped the complex historical legacy of Christianity in the Americas, a hemispheric past that remains ever bound together. In addition to Christianity's role in colonial expansion and racial ideology, the course especially considers how lived faith in God provided a catalyst for the empowerment and resistance of the oppressed and their advocates in shared struggles to attain greater social justice, racial equality, and political autonomy. From the "Protector of the Indians" Bartolomé de las Casas to César Chávez, and the "Black Moses" Harriet Tubman to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the course explores these and other extraordinary figures of hope in the Americas who gave their lives to protest social violence and promote authentic expressions of faith. In the course, students will engage this turbulent past through a contextual approach to theology that examines idolatry, migration, land, liberty, poverty, social sin, nonviolence, and solidarity as normative categories relevant for addressing contemporary social crises afflicting our nation and earth.

Pope Francis, in his 2013 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (EG), writes, "I dream of a ‘a missionary option' for the Church" (EG 27). Francis's admonition continues the insight from Vatican II's decree on mission Ad Gentes (AG), which defines the Church as missionary by its very nature because "it is from the mission of the Son and the mission of the Holy Spirit that she draws her origin, in accordance with the decree of the Father" (AG 2). Francis sees mission as the "authentic self-fulfillment" of the Christian life in the sense that, as the Latin American bishops have written in their document from the 2007 Aparecida Conference, quoted in EG 10, "Life grows by being given away, and weakens in isolation and comfort." Francis continues a longstanding impulse in the Church to urge the generous sharing of the Gospel with those at the margins, urging all Christians to be missionary disciples. This course will study the missionary activity of the Church, both historically and theologically. After a brief look at mission and evangelization in the New Testament and the early and medieval Church, we will then explore important moments of missionary contact in the Americas, Africa, and Asia in the modern (post-Columbian) period. Particular attention will be given to the operative theologies and practices of mission at work in such encounters, as well as to the practical effects of missionary activity. The course will conclude with a look at contemporary missionary practice and theory. The coming of Christianity to most of the world has often overlapped with the political, economic, and social processes associated with the term colonialism and related forms of intercultural contact. We will study the consequences of that overlap, along with the many theological issues raised, especially for Christians in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, with a particular focus on eastern Africa, where both instructors have lived and worked.

The purpose of this course is to introduce the student to the basic teachings and spiritualities of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. We will approach these religions both historically and theologically, seeking to determine where they converge and differ from Christianity on such perennial issues as death, meaning, the nature of the ultimate Mystery, the overcoming of suffering, etc. We will also examine some traditional and contemporary Catholic and Protestant approaches to religious pluralism. Our own search to know how the truth and experience of other faiths is related to Christian faith will be guided by the insights of important Catholic contemplatives who have entered deeply in the spirituality of other traditions. By course's end we ought to have a greater understanding of what is essential to Christian faith and practice as well as a greater appreciation of the spiritual paths of others. Requirements: short papers, midterm exam, and final exam.

A music appreciation course requiring no musical background and no prerequisites. General coverage of the history, various styles, and major performers of jazz, with an emphasis on current practice. Receive permission from the instructor (ldwyer@nd.edu)

This course will introduce students to the visual arts and expressive cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora. We will examine objects up-close at the Snite museum and use slides, videos, and musical recordings in class to root works more deeply in the historical and geographical context(s) of their production, display, and circulation. We will analyze canonical examples of monumental architecture, danced sculpture, and leadership regalia that define the field, while engaging with equal interest in the stuff of everyday life such as hairstyles, street fashion, even the music-blaring boom boxes of those often left at the margins of art history. Through the semester-long practice of looking at ?African things? with curiosity and intention, this course will build students? skills in visual analysis, critical thinking, and comparative writing with the goal of increasing their awareness as global citizens and inspiring further engagement in cross-cultural experience no matter the context.

This introductory course uses popular film as a primary text/medium to explore fundamental questions in the academic study of religion. In particular, we will be concerned with the ways that faith, spirituality, religion and religious experience are constituted and defined on film as well as through film viewing. Emphasis will be placed on film’s reflecting African Diaspora, Latinx & Caribbean cultures and the inclusion of religions outside of the Judeo-Christian canon for context and comparison. In discussing films from across a range of subjects and genres, we will engage in the work of mythical, theological and ideological criticism, while examining the nature, function, and value of religion and religious experience. We will also consider significant writers and traditions in the field of Diaspora Religions and develop the analytical and interpretive skills of the discipline. Given the depth and breadth of religious orthodoxies and faith-based practices existent throughout the Diaspora, students will be exposed to a variety of film genres including silent films, anime, documentary, drama, biography, comedy and horror.  Based on availability, and the student cohort’s familiarity or lack of material the scheduled films will include twelve to fifteen selections from the lists below. Weekly readings, writing assignments, and screening sessions are required.

In 1969 Nina Simone and Weldon Irvine wrote the anthem, To Be Young, Gifted and Black. Yet too often, to be Black has been seen or depicted as a predator, a thug, a fetish, or a threat. What are the implicit and explicit messages present in plain sight that contribute to how Blackness and Black people have been defined? This course critically engages with the “longue durée” of film narratives where Blackness is displayed or demeaned, and where the politics of identity, or its discrimination is present or foundational to the arc of a narrative. Relevant critical literature and material topical to the films themselves will complement the visual media, allowing for the potential to subtly illuminate aspects of the human experience, ritual practice, and socio-cultural, religious, or gendered behaviors. Attention will be given to cross-cultural mores, the distinction of communication modes, and references to ethnicity, race, class, and gender as relates to the cultures depicted in each film. This course has a co-req associated with it. You must register for both to be in the course.

This course is intended for students who have completed Beginning level Creole or who have attained equivalent competence in the language. In small-group teaching sessions, students will be prepared for conversational fluency with basic reading and writing skills, emphasizing communicative competence as well as grammatical and phonetic techniques. Our study of Kreyòl is closely linked to our exploration of how the language is tied to Caribbean society and culture. Evaluation of student achievement and proficiency will be conducted both informally and formally during and at the conclusion of the course. Those looking to develop or improve their language skills are welcome to the class. The program is designed to meet the needs of those who plan to conduct research in Haiti or in the Haitian diaspora, or who intend to work in a volunteer or professional capacity either in Haiti or with Haitians abroad.

This course is intended for students who have taken one semester of Intermediate Creole Language and Culture. In small-group teaching sessions, students will be prepared for conversational fluency with enhanced reading and writing skills, emphasizing communicative competence as well as grammatical variety and phonetic acumen. Our study of Kreyòl is integrated with an exploration of how the language is tied to Haitian society, culture, economy and politics and history. Evaluation of student achievement and proficiency will be conducted both informally and formally during and at the conclusion of the course. Those looking to develop or improve their language skills are welcome to the class. The program is designed to meet the needs of those who plan to conduct research in Haiti or in the Haitian diaspora, or who intend to work in a volunteer or professional capacity either in Haiti or with Haitians abroad.

This course will focus on the relationship between democratic institutions, peace, and economic/human development. While drawing on lessons from North America and Europe, we will focus largely on countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. During the semester, we will discuss and debate the merits of various explanations or hypotheses that political scientists have proposed to answer the following questions: Why are some countries more "developed" and democratic than others? Is development necessary for democracy or democracy necessary for development? What is the relationship between culture, development, and democracy? How do different types of political institutions affect the prospects for development and democracy? Should/how should U.S. and other established democracies promote democratization? By the end of the course, the objectives are that students (1) learn the most important theories intended to explain why some countries are more democratic and "developed" than others, (2) understand the complexity of any relationship between democracy and development, and (3) grow in the ability to think about and intelligently assess the strengths and weaknesses of strategies intended to promote democracy and development.

Analysis of selected problems in American society such as crime, narcotic addiction, alcoholism, delinquency, racial and ethnic conflict, prostitution, and others. Discussions, debates, films, tapes, and readings.

Many have claimed that the American educational system is the "great equalizer among men." In other words, the educational system gives everyone a chance to prosper in American society regardless of their social origins. In this course, we will explore the validity of this claim. Do schools help make American society more equal by reducing the importance of class, race, and gender as sources of inequality, or do schools simply reinforce existing inequalities and reproduce pre-existing social relations? Topics covered in the course include: unequal resources among schools, sorting practices of students within schools, parents' role in determining student outcomes, the role of schooling in determining labor market outcomes for individuals, and the use of educational programs as a remedy for poverty.

How is race embodied and how are bodies racialized? How do gender, sexuality, class, size, perceived beauty, and ability mutually influence embodiment? This course considers anthropological and historical studies of the body, with a critical focus on Blackness. We investigate how Black human bodies are othered, valued, dehumanized, and experienced, across time and space, with a particular focus on the United States. Euro-American philosophies have constructed Black people as transgressive, in a variety of ways, and all these ideas have been inscribed on and through their physical bodies. This normative discourse shapes how Black people interact with the social world, so we will discuss, challenge, and critique these narratives and also consider how the body can be used as a site of resistance. We will engage topics like athletic training, bodily modification and perceptions of beauty, biomedical technologies, labor, disability, and illness, through texts like academic writing, music, podcasts, essays, news media, and social media. Overall, this class demonstrates how bodies are key sites for understanding politics, power, social hierarchies, economics, and social change in our contemporary world.

This course examines representations of race, ethnicity, and ideology in the American cinema through a sociological lens. We will focus on understanding how film reflects and directs prevailing cultural norms and attitudes surrounding racial and ethnic relations. One goal is to uncover how racial and ethnic relations are reified on the silver screen through storytelling techniques such as narrative, style, aesthetics, and mise en scène. We will analyze the sociological context of each film to better understand the evolution of cinematic representations of race and ethnicity and what they mean for race relations and inequality in the broader society. This course will cover the American cinematic treatment of Native Americans, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Italian Americans through feature length screenings and clips of particularly poignant scenes.

The Bible, The Black Church, and the Blues - Exploring Three Africana Theological Matrices This course will build on the groundwork established in the Foundations of Theology course by providing exposure to three theological matrices that have had a decided impact on the development of Africana (i.e., African and African Diasporan) identity and culture in the North American Diaspora. The first is the symbolic universe of Africana biblical hermeneutics. The second is the Black Church. The third is that uniquely African American musical form known as Blues. Students will be given an opportunity to explore: the cosmological, ontological, anthropological, soteriological, and Christological assertions animating each of these milieus; their historical and contemporary points of intersection; and the ways in which each has influenced the other. Particular attention will be directed toward understanding the history of reception, interpretation, and appropriation of the Christian Bible by peoples of African descent; the evolution of the Black Church and the distinctive contributions made by Africana Catholics to it; and the emergence of Blues music, artists, and performance spaces as non-ecclesial loci of protest and crucibles in which Africana spiritualities of resistance have been and continue to be forged. Students will leave the course with a deeper appreciation of four issues, the implications of which are far reaching for those within the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant branches of the larger Christian family. The first is how culture and context shape the ways in which people read and appropriate sacred writings. The second is the impact that culture, memory, hermeneutics, and identity have on spirituality and ecclesiology. The third is the role that poetry and other art forms play as media for theological speculation and construction. The fourth is the pivotal impact that enculturation has on theology, pastoral care, ministry, and ecumenism.The class will also introduce students to those essential sources - both primary and secondary - methodologies, core questions, and debates foundational for a theological assessment of these universes of theological discourse. It will also expose them to three interdisciplinary subfields that span and inform the disciplines of Theology and Africana Studies: (1) the history of Africana biblical interpretation in North America; (2) Black Church Studies; and (3) Blues Studies.

This course will examine the Latino experience in the United States, including the historical, cultural, and political foundations of Latino life. We will approach these topics comparatively, thus attention will be given to the various experiences of a multiplicity of Latino groups in the United States. This course has an optional community-engaged learning component with La Casa de Amistad.

In light of the recent elevated conversation around race and society in the US during 2020, the course offering creates intentional space for students to engage the current conversation of self understanding, race, and society through the lens of Catholic Social Thought and Pope Francis' most recent encyclical Fratelli Tutti: Brother/Sisterhood and Social Friendship. With the university's continued commitment to a rich and diverse education for students that is engaging and equitable, we believe that the course offering not only reflects the institutions academic goals but creates a rich and timely offering in a critical moment of our country's history. Additionally, the increased undergraduate interest in conversations and engagement around race and society has been seen and felt in recent months in both the Office of Multicultural Programs and Services as well as in the Center for Social Concerns. Finally, our hope is to create a unique virtual learning space to students who traditionally may not have considered taking such a course like this before and or may be more available to engage in a course of this nature during this allotted time frame and through this type of medium.

This course will examine the interactions of culture and biology within sports. The anthropology of sports can help us gain valuable insights into broader social and cultural phenomena, the role of ritual in society, and illuminate how sports have been used to bring people together, but also to exclude people. We will begin with studying the evolutionary origins and non-human examples of play. We will then move into the prehistoric and historic foundations for sport. We will also discuss how people change their bodies, in good ways and dangerous ways, for a greater chance at success, and how those bodies are often more harshly judged by society. Finally, we will explore the ways in which contemporary sporting and fan practices are culturally ordered and/or challenge social norms. Drawing on case studies from around the world, we will pay special attention to questions of gender, race, genetics, nationality, health, equality, and human variation. In addition, students will be encouraged to think critically about their own sporting experiences, both as active participants and as fans, and how sports impact their lives.

This course is a practical and conceptual immersion into the world of contemporary sports journalism. Students will learn how to write and report for multiple journalism platforms, including newspapers, magazines and digital media. Students will practice a variety of reporting techniques and study writing styles ranging from features to news articles to profiles, while also taking a rigorous look at the legal, ethical and cultural issues surrounding the intersection of media, sports and society. In addition, students will gain hands-on sports writing experience by preparing articles for the university's independent, student-run newspaper, The Observer.

This course will explore the techniques of investigative journalism and produce high-quality public service projects based in the local community. It begins with a survey of the history of investigative reporting, from early 20th century muckrakers like Upton Sinclair to Woodward and Bernstein to new models in today's online world. Students will learn how to identify and judge potential investigative topics, work with databases to find solid documentation, interview a wide range of sources, and write stories appropriate to different journalism platforms. Students will work toward producing a piece that is publishable in a local newspaper or website

What does it mean when some of the sharpest insights about health justice come packaged in punchlines? Through satire, the hit-series The Boondocks elevates overlooked aspects of health and material security, transforming systemic failures into resonate comedic sequences. Through engagement with The Boondocks, this course explores the use of humor and other forms of cultural expression to challenge and reimagine our current healthcare practices. Additionally, this course examines how film, video, photography, drawing, and interactive media function as an archive of community health knowledge — ethnographic resources that illuminate the complexities of our social world. Students will explore pressing health issues as well as engage core readings in cultural studies and visual anthropology to develop analytic approaches that extend beyond summaries and plot descriptions. By emphasizing these interpretive skills, students will learn to extract health discourses from different cultural forms, recognizing how seemingly disparate texts — from academic articles to animated satire — collectively participate in broader conversations about well-being, justice, and community care.

In June 2020, prompted by the horrific killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, our nation awakened to the brutality of institutional racism and the violence to human dignity it has wrought in communities of color throughout America's history. The movement for racial justice was renewed in vigor with nationwide protests and calls for action. Although the protests of 2020 have largely been a response to a crisis surrounding police violence, the calls to action have focused attention on the breadth of systemic racism in all facets of American life. In this course, students will engage weekly with a single event or concept, drawn from a variety of disciplines, necessary to understand and dismantle systemic racism. The course centers around a weekly guest-lecture series featuring authors, public intellectuals, faith leaders, and external and internal members of the academy. In each class period, the guest expert provides a sophisticated introduction to a discrete racial justice topic. Some lectures address historical events not widely known (e.g., the Tulsa massacre or the arrival of the first slave ship in the Americas in 1619); others address current racial inequities (e.g., the wealth gap, health outcomes, criminal justice, voter suppression); still others examine broad concepts (e.g., intersectionality, Catholic teaching on racism). Specific topics to be determined by expert availability. Students prepare for the sessions by researching the speaker or topic and preparing thoughtful questions to be posed during the guest's visit. Students also participate in at least two small group discussions and, at the conclusion of the semester, are required to produce a short reflective writing piece. The entire course will be offered via zoom for all participants.

In June 2020, prompted by the horrific killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, our nation awakened to the brutality of institutional racism and the violence to human dignity it has wrought in communities of color throughout America's history. The movement for racial justice was renewed in vigor with nationwide protests and calls for action. Although the protests of 2020 have largely been a response to a crisis surrounding police violence, the calls to action have focused attention on the breadth of systemic racism in all facets of American life. In this course, students will engage weekly with a single event or concept, drawn from a variety of disciplines, necessary to understand and dismantle systemic racism. The course centers around a weekly guest-lecture series featuring authors, public intellectuals, faith leaders, and external and internal members of the academy. In each guest-lecture class period, the guest expert provides a sophisticated introduction to a discrete racial justice topic. Some lectures address historical events not widely known (e.g., the Tulsa massacre or the arrival of the first slave ship in the Americas in 1619); others address current racial inequities (e.g., the wealth gap, health outcomes, criminal justice, voter suppression); still others examine broad concepts (e.g., intersectionality, Catholic teaching on racism). Specific topics to be determined by expert availability. This three-credit version of the course is designed for students who are interested in a more intensive study of each week's topic. Students will participate in once-weekly in-person seminar sessions with readings to accompany the speaker and topic for the week. Following each guest lecture, students will gather briefly via zoom to reflect and respond. Throughout the course of the semester, students will compose a variety of short papers, lead classroom discussions, and complete a final project incorporating independent research on related topics.

This course offers an interdisciplinary survey of African-American and other African descendant women’s indigenous knowledge, development and maintenance of social structures, cultural preservation and spiritual engagement within their respective communities. Unfortunately and unconscionably Black women have been derogatorily referred to as “the mules of the world”. Valued for their work, and often not much else. They are venerated for their fertility and their central role they occupy as strong mothers and caregivers in the domestic sphere. Yet, concurrently they are often denied opportunity outside of the home. “Crossing over” occupying a position in more than one realm, much as Sister Rosetta Tharpe moved between secular and sanctified music often became the modus for survival. Maligned as jezebels, or sapphires, lazy and usury, as witches, or relegated to menial, semi-skilled labor. This course aims to interrogate and dispel some of the tropes and caricatures, by utilizing womanist and feminist theory to look closely at the role of Black women as agentive, sage and entrepreneurial. Alice Walker coined the term womanist in the 1980s. As Walker outlines it, a womanist is a person who prefers to side with the oppressed: with women, with people of color, with the poor. These are women who occupy several subject positions in society. By harnessing their “intersectionality” of race, gender, sexuality, class, and transnational identity we can interrogate the historicity and cultural specificity that they have faced in and outside of their communities. With particular emphasis placed upon the subordination that Black women face; and the effects of racism, colonialism, unequal forms of economic development, and globalization on Black Communities, the course aims to see and illustrate where and how Black women have risen above the limitations imposed upon them. To do this, students will engage in critical reading of a range of diverse texts—from memoir, essay, fiction, prose, cultural criticism and sociopolitical analysis. We will look historically and currently at black women’s roles in the home, their religious institutions and in some of the workplaces they occupy as sole proprietors, cottage industrialists, and street vendors. For an undergraduate student body this course will pull excerpts from several core texts that would tend to be read in full if offered on the graduate level.

Drawing on sociocultural and sociopolitical theories of literacy, we will investigate the ways in which literacy is a social, cultural, and political practice. Students will learn research based best practices in elementary literacy instruction, how to incorporate diverse multicultural literature into everyday instruction, and how to honor the rich and diverse literacy practices children bring to school. Students will unpack and re-imagine literacy learning and teaching for all students, particularly those who have been and remain marginalized through formal education due to race/ethnicity, social class, nationality/language, dis/ability, and other socially constructed inequities. Rooted in the assumption that power circulates in culture, literacy, and education, this course will look closely at the role of power in reading, producing and disseminating texts, as well as how power works through literacy in people’s everyday lives. We will address and challenge deficit discourses about children, families and communities, and explore ways to create a collaborative, supportive, and literacy rich classroom culture that encourages and enables children to become critical readers of the word and the world (Freire, 1970).

This interdisciplinary course will foreground the lives of the enslaved in colonial America and the Caribbean (inc. Haiti). We will consider indigenous Native-American and West African practices pertaining to enslavement and captivity, as well as the development of hereditary slavery in the colonies. Throughout, we will maintain a focus on understanding the lived experience of individuals who were captured/enslaved, with special emphasis on gender and material culture.

This course will focus on exercises, research and reading from a diverse range of historical and current influential environmental writings from philosophers, economists, environmentalists, theologians, political scientists, naturalists, and practitioners. Learners will analyze the impact that human actions have on the natural world–particularly through foodways, or the social, cultural, and economic practices of producing and consuming food. This course will also explore how our understanding of race/ethnicity, nature, and the environment influences human choices around food. And it offers alternative courses of action toward viable, ethical, and antiracist solutions to questions about sustainable farming, global economic inequality, and world hunger. Throughout the semester, participants will use the lens of race and ethnicity to study and discuss how these two concepts affect access to agricultural land, foodstuffs/ foodways, environmental justice and nature. A fundamental objective will be to create podcasts focused on student’s engagement with the course themes.

This course delves into the intersections of art, culture, and public health, particularly Hip Hop as a form of public health knowledge acquisition. Through an examination of various texts, archives, and research methods such as ethnography, autobiography, and social and oral history, students will explore how different forms of creative and cultural expression force us to reimagine what health justice looks like, feels like, and sounds like. Students will also explore how techniques from the digital humanities enable us to craft and share narratives, connecting us to the field of narrative medicine, and the ways that personal stories and lived experiences communicated through Hip Hop can shape and influence healthcare practices, policies, and our broader understanding of public health. The structure of this course is largely organized around an independent research project, where students will examine documents from a Hip Hop digital archive (or another digital archive of their choosing) and present their research at the undergraduate research symposium held in April. This project will allow students to apply theoretical concepts to real-world examples and contribute to the growing body of knowledge at the intersection of Hip Hop and public health.

This course will examine the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in global contexts. From the 1920s to the 1990s, Black Americans' activism, organizing, and political efforts shaped their relationship with the Black Diaspora and U.S. Foreign Affairs. This class will cover an array of topics and historical moments such as Communism and the Red Scare, WWII, the Cold War, the formation of the United Nations, African Independents Movements, and Apartheid. We will study various activists, scholars, celebrities, and Black travelers whose movements around the world transformed how they viewed the United States' treatment of its Black citizens. By the end of this semester, students will know how Black Americans understood civil and human rights on U.S. soil and abroad.

While taking a hemispheric approach to black writing, this course will examine the creation of the black first person through autobiography. Taking up classic texts from across the Americas and the Caribbean, such as Biography of a Runaway Slave, Child of the Dark, The Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Black Boy, we will explore the multiple ways in which black writers create the black rhetorical self. Why is the black "I" ubiquitous across African American writing of the hemisphere, and what are its implications in relation to race, gender, class, and community? What does it mean for a black narrator to announce her or himself as author or speaking subject? What does it mean to speak or write oneself into the public's consciousness, and why does it matter? What are the constitutive elements of a black rhetorical self, and how might they differ from other racial/ethnic identities?

This course offers a broad thematic overview of the history of capitalism from the early sixteenth century up to the late 1980s. As a discussion-based seminar, we will devote most of our conversations to discovering, analyzing and reflecting on the transformation of the U.S. from a newly-independent British colony, to the most influential economic power in the world. Topics and themes we will consider include: the rise of early modern transnational capitalism, European imperialism and trade, and indigenous dispossession after 1492; science and technological transformations; social and economic thought; slavery and servitude, broadly construed; and characteristics of prosperity, wealth, and economic flux. Our readings and viewings will be a mix of scholarly and primary sources, including an abundance of canonical literary and artistic material, such as novels, visual art, and film excerpts (e.g. Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879), Aaron Douglas's Building More Stately Mansions (1944), and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920)). Over the course of the semester, students will draw upon this eclectic combination of sources to synthesize the dominant historical dimensions of capitalism in and beyond the U.S. via four short essays (4 - 5 pages, double-spaced-between 1,100 and 1,400 words), and a final paper (10 - 12 pages, double-spaced) based on cumulative texts.

America, at its core, is an idea. The lands that became America have been imagined and in certain ways and constantly reimagined. The history of the ideas that made America is less a lesson in philosophy and more about a series of clashes between contending visions: Democracy vs. Republicanism; Free vs. Slave; Christian vs. Secular; Individual vs. Society; and Universal vs. Particular. This course traces a long arc from the Puritans to the Culture Wars to understand the ideas Americans draw upon to comprehend the world and act in it.Lectures and discussions will consider the notions of equality, democracy, pluralism, religious freedom, and the tensions between contending visions for America. Readings for this course will include autobiographies, speeches, sermons, canonical texts, lyrics, novels, newspaper articles, and poetry.

The title of Duane and Capshaw Smith's book, Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature Before 1900 captures the essence of this course and serves as our foundation. We will explore the long rich history of literature for African American children by African American authors and challenge deficit, dominant narratives about literacy practices of African American communities before 1900 up to the present day. The majority of the course will focus on literature for children from the 20th century up to recent publications, trends in children's literature that have provided a platform or silenced authors, and how social, cultural, and political factors have controlled whose work is published, which texts are published and distributed, and the impact this has on how individuals and communities view themselves and others. We will draw on a range of literary theories to analyze literature and each student will develop an in-depth author study of an artist of their choice with a strong focus on historical, cultural, and social influences and contexts. Throughout the semester, we will explore the power of literature for disrupting, transforming, and challenging negative and racist ideologies that perpetuate inequality and injustice in American society.

While it is a notoriously difficult concept to define, “race” is undoubtedly a powerful force in American life. Focusing on the late nineteenth century to the present, this course examines the ways in which racial ideas are formed, negotiated, and resisted in the arenas of American literature and popular culture. From the story of racial confusion in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) to contemporary cultural politics of performance and appropriation, this course will ask how popular culture actively shapes—rather than merely reflects—American ideas about race and ethnicity. A key aim of the class is to go beyond looking for “good” and “bad” pop culture texts to explore the deeper meanings of racism and antiracism. By closely engaging with a diverse set of theoretical, historical, and primary texts, students will learn to approach and analyze popular culture with a critical eye

What is a border? Who inhabits the borderlands? What function does the border play in the construction of a national or cultural identity? How do we bridge communities? How are borders represented, established, and challenged in the works of US Latino/a writers? These are some of the questions that this course will address within the context of US Latino/a literature and culture. Most of the course will focus on two geographical areas that we tend to associate with these concepts: the traditional US-Mexico border and the lesser studied Caribbean. Students will watch films and read literary works by Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, Dominican-American, and Cuban-American authors in order to gain a deeper understanding of how borders and borderlands inform contemporary discourse and culture. This course has a Community-Engagement Learning (CEL) requirement. Students are expected to sign up for tutoring at La Casa de Amistad once a week for 2 hours. The course will be taught in Spanish and is open to advanced non-majors. This course is for undergraduate students only.

This course explores the relationships among and between workers, employers, government policymakers, unions, and social movements since the end of World War II, as well as the ways in which those relationships have shaped and been shaped by American politics and culture more broadly. The United States emerged from the Second World War as the globe's unequaled economic and political power, and its citizens parlayed that preeminence into a long postwar economic boom that created, however imperfectly, the first truly mass middle-class society in world history. At the heart of that new society was the American labor movement, whose leaders and members ensured that at least some of the heady postwar profits made it into the wallets of workers and their families - and not just the wallets of union members, as working Americans generally experienced great improvement in wages, benefits, and economic opportunity during the quarter-century ending in 1970. During those same years, civil rights activists challenged the historic workplace discrimination that kept African Americans at the bottom of the labor market, confronting the racism of employers, unions, and the government, and inspiring others, primarily Mexican Americans and women, to broaden the push for equality at the workplace. Since that time, however, Americans have experienced a transformation in the workplace -- an erosion of manufacturing and the massive growth of service and government work; a rapid decline in number of union members and power of organized labor; and unresolved conflicts over affirmative action to redress centuries of racial and gender discrimination. Meanwhile, income inequality and wealth disparities have grown every year over the past three decades. What accounts for the decline of organized labor since 1970, and why have the people of the mythic land of milk and honey experienced declining upward mobility and widening gaps between the rich and everyone else? Are these phenomena linked? What has the decline of the labor movement meant for workers specifically, and the American economy and politics more broadly? How and why have popular perceptions of unions changed over time? What has been the relationship of organized labor to the civil rights movement, feminism, modern conservatism, and the fortunes of individual freedom more broadly? What is globalization, and what has been its impact upon American workers? Through an exploration of historical scholarship, memoirs, polemical writings, and films, this course will try to answer these questions and many others. It will also address the prospects for working people and labor unions in the twenty-first century.

The purpose of this interdisciplinary course is twofold: to examine the social context and cultural change of the sixties and to explore the various journalistic and aesthetic representations of events, movements, and transformations. We will focus on the manner in which each writer or artist witnessed the sixties and explore fresh styles of writing and cultural expression, such as the new journalism popularized by Tom Wolfe and the music/lyrics performed by Bob Dylan. Major topics for consideration include the counterculture and the movement--a combination of civil rights and anti-war protest.

Gender has been fundamental to the organization of nearly all human societies, but what gender has meant in terms of identity, opportunity, and economic activity has varied widely across time and space. This course will explore gender at work in US history, taking a chronological approach to show gender's evolution and ongoing intersections with class, race, age, religion, region, and sexuality from 1776 to the near present. The term "gender at work" expresses a double meaning here - first, it connotes that this is a labor history course, with an emphasis on the ways gender has operated at the workplace; second, it suggests the ubiquity of gender in shaping Americans' lives, experiences, and imaginations not only at the workplace, but also in formal politics, informal communities, and every space in between. By exploring the ways gender has been both omnipresent and contingent throughout US history, students should better understand - and perhaps act upon - seemingly intractable contemporary conundrums involving questions of equal opportunity and pay, household division of labor, work-life balance, and the proper relationships among employers, workers, households, and government.

This course provides an introduction to the history of American slavery. After examining the origins and transformation of Atlantic world slavery, the course focuses particularly upon slavery in the United States. Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the United States grew into the largest slaveholding society in the modern world. U.S. slavery's growth was driven forward by massive global economic transformations and territorial conquest. Yet, in the face of unprecedented violence, enslaved people themselves brought about the end of slavery and transformed the meaning of freedom in the United States. This course focuses upon this history from the perspective of enslaved people themselves with particular attention to struggles for freedom. Through an examination of this history and its legacies, the course will introduce students to histories of resistance.

Sports play a big role in American culture. From pick up soccer and the Baraka Bouts to fantasy football and the Olympics, sports articulate American identities, priorities, aspirations, and concerns. They reflect our dominant values but also highlight our divisions and serve as a means to question those values. Athletes, organizers, spectators, fans, and the media all have a stake. This course will examine sport's role in American society and culture thematically, covering the late 19th century to present and paying special attention to sport as a physical performance (including issues of danger, drugs, disability, spectatorship, and fandom), sport as an expression of identity (the construction of race, gender, class, community, and nation), sport as a form of labor (with issues of power and control, safety, and amateurism), and sport as a cultural narrative (how do writers, historians, and the media attach meaning to it?). We will examine history, journalism, documentary film, and television coverage; topics will range from Victorian bicyclists and early college football to Muhammad Ali. Requirements include reading and regular discussion, a variety of short analytical papers, and a culminating project in which students will choose one course theme to analyze through a topic of their own choice.

The United States has a long history of using its most cutting-edge science and technology to discriminate, marginalize, oppress, and surveil. The poorhouse and scientific charity of an earlier era have been replaced by digital tracking and automated decision-making systems like facial recognition and risk prediction algorithms. This course focuses on how automated systems are tasked with making life-and-death choices: which neighborhoods get policed, which families get food, who has housing, and who remains homeless. This course will examine black box tools used in K-12 education, social services, and the criminal justice system to better understand how these technologies reinforce and worsen existing structural inequalities and systems of oppression. Class meetings will be split between discussions of conceptual readings and applied work with technology systems. Readings for this course will draw on texts that include Safiya Noble's Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018), Virginia Eubanks' Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (2018), Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein's Data Feminism (2020), and Meredith Broussard's Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (2019). This course will also examine the advocacy and activism work undertaken by groups like Our Data Bodies, Data 4 Black Lives, Algorithmic Justice League, Auditing Algorithms, Big Brother Watch, and Chicago-based Citizens Police Data Project. Coursework may include response papers, hands-on work, and a final project. Familiarity with statistical analysis, data science, or computer science tools and methods is NOT a prerequisite for this course.

In 1964, when Martha Reeves sang, "Calling out around the world/Are you ready for a brand new beat?/Summer's here and the time is right/For dancing in the street," was she beckoning listeners to join a party or the civil rights struggle? Or both? From spirituals sung by enslaved workers to protest anthems shouted at union rallies, music has provided the soundtrack to social justice causes throughout American History. Whether performed by rank-and-file reformers or famous recording artists -- from Frank Sinatra to Nina Simone to Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, and beyond -- popular music has accompanied and sometimes fueled transformations in American politics, culture, and social life. In this course students will explore American popular music in its many forms -- blues, country, jazz, folk, rock, punk, disco, hip hop, tejano, and more -- to understand its power and limits as both a force for social change and a window into major themes of the American experience.

In 1975, the African-American writer Ishmael Reed put culture at the center of politics: “If I have your are evering my art, behaving like me and adopting my psychology, then I’ve got you. If I’ve got your head, I’ve got you.” Confronted with the whiteness of U.S. publishing and school curricula, Reed and his peers saw literature as a key front in this broader struggle over the making and unmaking of American identity. Yet the question of literature’s contribution to the struggle elicited stark disagreement. Would it counter racial stereotype with accurate representation or refuse the burden of racial representativeness? Would it lay claim to the American nation on behalf of the racially minoritized, or throw in with different political horizons? Would it address the white reader unfamiliar with the realities of racial oppression, or the non-white reader seeking a different relation to histories already lived? These disagreements would only intensify in the following decades as the call multicultural representation became increasingly institutionalized – with syllabi and publishing undergoing modest diversification, and universities framing racial difference as a strategic asset.Moving from the late 20th century to the present, our course attends to how these political ambitions and desires informed the writing, publishing, and teaching of American literature by writers of color. It asks how these authors not only engaged in activism by literary means, but also reckoned with the artistic and political dilemmas that attended this doubled pursuit. To this end, the bulk of our readings will draw from literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, including authors like Gloria Anzaldua, Percival Everett, Maxine Hong Kingston, Brandon Taylor, and Wendy Trevino.

Whether it is controversies about the removal of statues, bans on teaching the New York Times’s The 1619 Project, critiques of the musical Hamilton, or originalist interpretations of the United States Constitution, early America seems to have gained new prominence in debates about the present-day United States. But why does this period—which spans four centuries from approximately 1450 to 1850—hold such meaning today? And what does this history have to teach us about our present moment? In this class, we will learn about the vast, diverse, and complex world of early America and use this knowledge to better understand current issues and events. Like Americans today, early Americans dealt with pandemics, racial injustice, political corruption, and economic inequality. They adapted to changing markets, globalization, and climate change. What do their experiences have to teach us about navigating these issues in our own time?

In 2023, it is difficult to avoid the language of antiracism, and harder still to discern its politics. Is racism a matter of structure or intention? Culture or economics? What does racial justice look like? And what exactly are those structures anyways? Moving from the civil rights movement of the 1960s to the George Floyd Uprisings of 2020, this course introduces students to the history behind a freighted term. We will read classic and contemporary texts of antiracism, tracking how American activists, politicians, artists, and scholars wrestled with these questions in the twilight years of the welfare state, mass industry, and securely waged employment.

In this seminar we will examine the historical construction of gendered and sexual roles in the Spanish colonial world. This will entail thinking about gender and sexuality in the societies which “encountered” each other in the New World (European, indigenous American, and African), and also thinking about how that encounter produced new forms of racialized gender and sexual relations. Among the questions we’ll consider: how was the conquest gendered? How did colonial society produce masculinities and femininities? What gendered forms of power were available to women? How did Atlantic slavery contribute to new racialized notions of gender? How did ethnicity and casta (a status attributed to mixed race peoples), as well as gender and class, determine people’s sense of themselves and their “others”? What were normative and non-normative sexual roles in the early modern Americas?

Popular perceptions of Africa are almost wholly defined by the last century and a half of its history, first under the boot of European imperial powers and then struggling to rebuild sovereignty and stability in the post-colonial world. Apart from the slave trade, most often narrated as an American story that happens to begin in Africa, little of the continent’s rich pre-modern past earns more than a passing mention in global history. This course aims to shine a spotlight on these neglected stories and examine the many contributions of Africans to the course of human history. We will begin with Africa as the ancients knew it, a land of bright sunshine, proud empires, and legendary wealth. We’ll then examine the continent’s long history of trade with the wider world, both in goods and in people. Finally, we will consider the sources of the great upheavals that swept the continent in the 19th century and how they heralded the coming of colonization. Along the way, we will work with a wide range of sources, from legends and travelogues to fiction and film, in order to better appreciate the lives and perspectives of everyday Africans.

When Columbus stepped ashore in the Caribbean in 1492, he set in motion a process that led to the creation of wealthy Spanish and Portuguese empires in the Americas, the genocide of countless numbers of indigenous men and women, the enslavement of millions of African men and women, and the eventual formation of a variety of independent states competing in the world economy. In this semester-long survey, we will examine topics in this history that will allow us to consider how history is produced as well as what happened in the past, from various perspectives, from elite colonial administrators and merchants to indigenous peasants and formerly enslaved men and women.

This course is a survey-style introduction to the early modern Atlantic world, the global region brought together beginning in the fifteenth century by commercial interests, military conquest, and the African slave trade. It explores the diverse relations between Europeans and Africans before that trade commenced, and examines how the Iberian conquest of the Americas radically transformed them. It also examines the vast Atlantic diasporas: of Africans scattered around the American continents, of indigenous natives of the southern Americas to Europe and west-central Africa, and Europeans in Africa and the Americas. Students will learn about the life experiences of the men and women who crossed the Atlantic, the effects of these conquests and trade relations on the regions, the development of theories of race, ethnicity, and gender that emerged, and the larger structures of global trade and contact in the early modern world

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to major themes in the global history of slavery with a specific focus on the location of slavery in the making of the modern world bringing together histories from the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Ocean worlds. The course will focus upon these themes through literature, economics, and politics. In addition, the course will also introduce students to recent museum exhibitions, art exhibitions, digital history projects, films, and documentary compilations that all together have transformed how the global history of slavery is understood.

In this seminar we will examine the historical construction of gendered and sexual roles in the Spanish colonial world. This will entail thinking about gender and sexuality in the societies which "encountered" each other in the New World, and also thinking about how that encounter produced new forms of gendered and sexual relations. Among the questions we'll consider: how was the conquest gendered? How did colonial society produce masculinities as well as femininities? What gendered forms of power were available to women? How did ethnicity and casta (a status attributed to mixed race peoples), as well as gender and class, determine people's sense of themselves and their "others"? What were normative and non-normative sexual roles in the pre-modern Americas, and how did a European Catholic conquest affect these?

In 1964, when Martha Reeves sang, "Calling out around the world/Are you ready for a brand new beat?/Summer's here and the time is right/For dancing in the street," was she beckoning listeners to join a party or the civil rights struggle? Or both? From spirituals sung by enslaved workers to protest anthems shouted at union rallies, music has provided the soundtrack to social justice causes throughout American History. Whether performed by rank-and-file reformers or famous recording artists -- from Frank Sinatra to Nina Simone to Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, and beyond -- popular music has accompanied and sometimes fueled transformations in American politics, culture, and social life. In this course students will explore American popular music in its many forms -- blues, country, jazz, folk, rock, punk, disco, hip hop, tejano, and more -- to understand its power and limits as both a force for social change and a window into major themes of the American experience.

The course explores the history, culture, religion and society of Pre-Roman and Roman North Africa from the beginnings of the Phoenician rule and the foundation of the city of Carthage (9 th century BCE) to the Muslim conquest (7 th century CE), with a focus on the Roman occupation. This period, spanning about a millennium and a half (or 850 years of Roman rule), is best known for famous wars, generals and military conquests (the Punic Wars under the Phoenician general Hannibal, the destruction of Carthage), but its cultural, economic and religious history is equally interesting. Western North Africa was characterized by a complicated ethnic and linguistic makeup, by its relative independence from the center of the empire and by its economically strong position within the Empire, yet at its margins. It also became one of the centers of early Latin Christianity. Important authors such as Cyprian, Tertullian, Lactantius, Perpetua and above all Augustine of Hippo lived and wrote in the region dominated city of Carthage, and this is where some of the best-known writings of ancient Christianity were produced. In this course, we will situate the culturally and economically fertile environment of Western North Africa in its context in terms of geography (surrounded by the Mediterranean, the Sahara desert, the African provinces to the East, first and foremost Egypt, and lastly the Iberian Peninsula, from where the Vandal invaders would arrive), politics and history, economics, multiethnicity and religious diversity. We will discuss literary works, works of art, archaeological relics and historical sources to gain a multifaceted understanding of a complex and fascinating era whose legacy would contribute so much to shaping the Christian Middle Ages. Knowledge of Greek or Latin is not required. No prerequisites.

This course will examine the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in global contexts. From the 1920s to the 1990s, Black Americans' activism, organizing, and political efforts shaped their relationship with the Black Diaspora and U.S. Foreign Affairs. This class will cover an array of topics and historical moments such as Communism and the Red Scare, WWII, the Cold War, the formation of the United Nations, African Independents Movements, and Apartheid. We will study various activists, scholars, celebrities, and Black travelers whose movements around the world transformed how they viewed the United States' treatment of its Black citizens. By the end of this semester, students will know how Black Americans understood civil and human rights on U.S. soil and abroad.

This course traces the development of African American musicals as they cross different social,cultural, and aesthetic boundaries. The course invites students to contextualize a variety of musical performance traditions - ranging from 19th c. blackface minstrelsy to today's television hip hop era Empire - through the lens of black feminist and queer theories. In so doing, students will engage in critical discussions about how individual artists, spectators and African American musical productions more broadly have signified, reaffirmed, and challenged dominant US society's understandings of race, class, gender, and sexuality.The course is divided into four units of study: "Early Black Musical Performance" reconsiders the contributions of black women minstrel and vaudeville performers; "Hollywood's Black-Cast Musical" explores mainstream representation of black folk culture in iconic films such as Carmen Jones and Show Boat; "New" Black Musicals of the 1970's considers revolutionary off-Broadway musicals and queer reimaginings of the 1975 Broadway hit The Wiz; and "Contemporary Musical Performances" brings our discussion to the present with an exploration of gospel musicals on Broadway, hip hop era and Madea mania. Assessment includes: participation; leading a discussion of a film, play, or televised performance; and four short critical response papers.

Whether it is controversies about the removal of statues, bans on teaching the New York Times’s The 1619 Project, critiques of the musical Hamilton, or originalist interpretations of the United States Constitution, early America seems to have gained new prominence in debates about the present-day United States. But why does this period—which spans four centuries from approximately 1450 to 1850—hold such meaning today? And what does this history have to teach us about our present moment? In this class, we will learn about the vast, diverse, and complex world of early America and use this knowledge to better understand current issues and events. Like Americans today, early Americans dealt with pandemics, racial injustice, political corruption, and income inequality. They adapted to changing markets, globalization, and climate change. What do their experiences have to teach us about navigating these issues in our own time.

Have you ever put together a collection? Sea shells, Pokemon cards, or something of more value? What drives our desire to accumulate, order, and display objects in a systematic way? This course examines the social phenomenon of collecting objects in broad terms, but centers on the particularly complex European and American practice of collecting and exhibiting Africa—its objects, peoples, and animals—in a variety of exhibitionary complexes across time and space including: wonder cabinets, ethnology museums, art museums, World's Fairs, zoos, theme parks, and Hollywood films.

Creole is the quintessential language of migration. This elective explores the multidirectional interplay of Creole narrative expression and transnational migration. How do Creole texts imagine and influence the experiences of migration, long-distance belonging and immigrant settlement? How, in turn, does the changing experience of diaspora affect the evolution of the vernacular at home (lakay)? In what ways do Creole writers and performers express struggles with xenophobia and racism abroad and oppression and poverty in Haiti? We engage these questions through study of Creole fiction, poetry, theatre, story telling and music. Among the Creole works we explore are the novels and poetry of Maude Heurtelou, Felix Morriseau-Leroi, Baudelaire Pierre, Patrick Sylvain and Denizé Lauture, stories by Jean-Claude Martineau and Kiki Wainwright, musical lyrics of Emeline Michele, Beethova Obas, Ti Corn and Wyclef Jean and Rap Kreyòl groups like Barikad Crew. The class is intended for students who have completed Intermediate Creole II or have reached the equivalent level of competence in speaking, reading and writing the language.

This course introduces students to the dynamics of the social and historical construction of race and ethnicity in American political life. The course explores the following core questions: What are race and ethnicity? What are the best ways to think about the impact of race and ethnicity on American citizens? What is the history of racial and ethnic formation in American political life? How do race and ethnicity link up with other identities animating political actions like gender and class? What role do American political institutions (the Congress, presidency, judiciary, state and local governments, etc.) play in constructing and maintaining these identity categories? Can these institutions ever be used to overcome the points of division in American society?

How is social change possible? This is one of the central questions for the study of social movements, as well as the organizing theme of this course. In this course, we will consider the ways in which different sociological theories of social movements have asked and answered this question, paying particular attention to theories of identity, emotion, and networks.

This course introduces students to the vast, complex and exciting dimensions of black Chicago politics. First, institutional structures, geographic distribution and population characteristics will inform students about the sociodemographic background of the African-American population in the city. Second, the course explores varying types of political expression that have developed over more than a century, including electoral politics, mass movements, partisan politics; it will also examine the impact of the Chicago machine, and of the Washington era on the political and economic status of African Americans in the city. Third, public policy developments in housing, education and criminal justice will be discussed. Fourth, the course also compares black political standing with other racial and ethnic groups in the city. Finally, the course will introduce students to the long tradition of social science research centered on the city of Chicago.

This course will explore contemporary globalization trends across Africa and in the United States. It will focus on the ways that international forces and new technologies are affecting citizens and countries on the African continent as well as in the US. Over the course of the semester, we will share lectures, discussions, and group work with a "sister class" at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Through case studies and reviews of current events, the course will explore a diverse set of topics including technological change and development, the environment, migration, art and culture, trade, investment and aid, and contentious politics. The course will attempt to highlight the new opportunities for citizens as well as the challenges that remain for countries in the globalized world.

This course is an exploration of the various processes, accounts and theories of colonialism and decolonization in Africa and the Americas. The aim is to chart alternative paths to rethinking the meaning and impact of these terms/concepts. Focusing on the various colonial/imperial tools employed to subjugate, exploit, and dominate colonized subjects, we will examine how liberal discourses/structures that are assumed to embody the terms of freedom and sovereignty have now become extensions of the colonial they were initially employed to overcome. The main objective of this course is to explore various approaches to redefining decolonization, noting the changing meaning of colonialism.

This course will focus on the writings of Black political thinkers in the Americas, Africa, and Europe. Through critical examination of the conditions against, and contexts within, which the political theories of these thinkers are situated, this course hopes to arrive at some understanding of the principles, goals and strategies developed to contest and redefine notions/concepts of citizenship (vis-a-vis the imperatives of race/racism and the global colonial formations), humanity, justice, equality, development, democracy, and freedom.

This course employs normative, critical race, and decolonial approaches to study world politics. It helps students understand the underlying structures of oppression, imperialism, and racism that routinely frame engagements with current global political events. Specifically, we will discuss how particular understandings of race and racism shape contemporary scholarship in international politics and also inform national and international legal and governmental practices. Classes will be conducted via series of lectures and directed discussion of the readings. There will be many opportunities for small group work. We will discuss current events in world politics, and students should actively seek out news sources about subjects and countries/continents of particular interest to them. You should leave this course with an understanding of the diversity of critical perspective on race/racism in world politics, and of the wide range of political, historical, and economic experiences shaping global interaction. You will become aware of normative political themes and concepts, as well as how these themes and concepts are complicated and challenged by the specificities of local, regional, continental, and global contexts.

While there is a wealth of academic work on race, racism, and anti-racism in the domestic realm, there is less attention to them in the international context. This is unfortunate, because they cannot be domestically confined. United Nations resolutions against racism, debates about whether the International Criminal Court is racially biased, and the global wave of anti-racist protests in 2020 are a few examples. This course examines race in the international context, exploring how it affects, is affected by, and is intertwined with central topics in international relations, including human rights, war and peace, foreign policy, international law and international organizations.

In 2007, after decades of organizing on the part of indigenous activists, the United Nations issued a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The Declaration was the result of years of work by people from particular communities--each with its own history, culture, language, and home--who decided to call themselves, and work together as, Indigenous people. This creative step allowed indigenous peoples to work collectively for justice on a global scale, rather than individually and in confrontation with single states. This class explores the concept, and reality, of Indigeneity in both historical and contemporary perspective: we will consider the many shared struggles and opportunities of indigenous peoples around the globe today and the ways that similar (or distinct) histories have led to similar (or distinct) present realities.

This course examines the origins and development of contemporary opinions and policies concerning migrations and migrants. It does so by looking backward to the age when transoceanic mobility became more frequent and increasingly more accessible before moving forward to our own times. It is the central claim of this course that it is impossible to understand what drives policy today without first surveying the changing ideas of migration and the movement of people over time. It will therefore take students through the history of migration in the modern world, as well as studying the migrant journey, connections to home, the process and difficulties of assimilation and community creation, and the problems or opportunities that could arise for migrants from characteristics like race, religion, ethnicity, or language. Also considered will be the complex relationship between colonization and migration. In the process, Migrants and Mobility will also examine how different societies place value judgments upon migrants and analyze how and why migration/migrants have been categorized as “good” or “bad” over time. Students will also encounter and consider the effects of growing urbanization and industrialization, changing demography and global trade patterns, and, more recently, the impact of climate change. Migrants and Mobility will be primarily seminar based, placing a premium on participation and analytical discussion.

This course is about transnational networking, mobilizing, and campaigning for or against social change. Equal attention is paid to conceptual and substantive issues. Conceptual issues include framing, strategies, and actors. Among the substantive issues examined are human rights, women's rights, gay rights and gay marriage, climate change, and global gun control. We are particularly interested in the emergence over the last two decades of a ‘global right wing' and the globalization of the culture wars.

In 2006, Henry Louis Gates popularized the practice of DNA ancestry testing through his PBS series "African American Lives". In it, he uses DNA testing to uncover ancestral connections to ethnic groups in Africa, as well as Europe and elsewhere. And yet, scholarly consensus is that race and ethnicity are social constructed- fictional concepts that have real consequences, but are not biological in nature. What is it about race that makes us believe it is constitutive of some essential, biological self, and yet racial categories and meanings are constantly in flux? In this course, we will scrutinize the classification of groups and the naturalization of those categories. Focusing on the United States, throughout the course we will examine the invention, production and reproduction of race from a social constructionist perspective, concentrating on the ways in which the constitution of race is controversial and constantly being remade. We will also discuss how race structures inequality in everyday life. This course is organized so that it builds from racial classification theory, moves on to an examination of the construction of US racial categories and racial stratification, and closes with an applied focus on racial controversies that are directly tied to resource allocation and federal policy.

The aim of the introductory course is to introduce some basic questions about the nature and goals of education, its history, and theoretical explanations of influences on learning, teaching, and schooling. We will incorporate both classic and current texts. The core course will incorporate several disciplinary perspectives

Food access, equity and justice should be of great importance to everyone. Consistently there has been political, economic, geographic and flawed distribution supply chains within the domestic food system. This interdisciplinary course will utilize digital humanities tools and platforms for students to express their research interests. We will analyze the impact that human actions have on foodways, or the social, cultural, and economic practices of producing and consuming food in relation to race, equity and access, historically and currently. We will explore alternative courses of action toward viable, ethical, and antiracist solutions to questions about sustainable farming, global economic inequality, and hunger. Throughout the semester, participants will use the lens of race and ethnicity to study and discuss how these two concepts affect access to agricultural land, foodstuffs /foodways, environmental justice and nature.

What is ethnography, broadly defined? How is a scholar's ethnographic product shaped by their racialized experience? This course will reference texts over time and across academic disciplines to consider genre, style, audience, and purpose when engaging with this research method. We will read, listen to, and watch works to think through the various ways that Black intellectuals have used ethnography to make sense of our everyday social worlds.

This course is taught in an inquiry-based seminar format. Students can expect to engage the subject matter from a socio-historical perspective that will provide them with a critical context for understanding race, space and place in the USA. We will also discuss how race ideologies in the US have extended beyond its borders. To achieve this, we will examine how people of color’s movement, location, and relocation is shaped through laws, policies, and social patterns. We will also examine how racial imaginaries have shaped residential patterns, injustices, and social isolation and conflicts for Indigenous peoples, Aboriginals, Blacks and African Americans, Mexicans & Hispanic/Latino/a groups, and Asian Americans. To bring to the fore the politics of race and identity politics, we will discuss the racialization of the United States, American-ness as whiteness, white privilege, and the consequences for the social landscape. And finally, the course will consider how the racial construction of the US is manifested and buttressed through the built environment.

This course examines the development of Creole societies in the French, Spanish, Dutch, and British Caribbean in response to colonialism, slavery, migration, nationalism and, most recently, transnationalism. The recent exodus of as much as 20 percent of Caribbean populations to North America and Europe has afforded the rise of new transnational modes of existence. This course will explore the consciousness and experience of Caribbean diasporas through ethnography and history, religion, literature, music, and culinary arts.

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Prior to the 18th century, children were viewed as little adults. The invention of childhood grew during the Age of Enlightenment along with the rapid increase of printed titles (1620: 6,000 vs. end of 18th century: 56,000). As a result, religious texts began to lose dominance over the written word, and thus grew a new body of literature for children. The critical study of literature for children has made significant growth since its modest beginnings in the early twentieth century, which we will examine in this course. We will also explore the creation of childhood, children as imagined readers, and how social, political, and cultural factors have influenced topics such as childhood, family, and religion in "classic" and award-winning multicultural children's literature. By comparing literature with similar themes over time, we will explore how authors have positively reflected, challenged, or attempted to remain neutral in their writing about dominant social and cultural values and beliefs, especially those pertaining to race/racism, ethnic and cultural diversity, and equity and social justice. We will discuss literature within the context of historical and political events of when the work was published and consider how literature can be a reflection of a time-period and authors' political ideologies (Stephens, 1992; Sutherland, 1985). Finally, we will consider how literature can foster dialogue in K-8 classrooms to promote anti-racist counter-narratives and the seven themes of Catholic social teaching to develop children's understanding of their role in contributing to a more just, equitable, and humane world.

Is violent resistance and destructive populist uprising in response to injustice and structural violence ever justified? The apparent effectiveness of violent rebellion in the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020 suggests that the answer is "yes." How do these developments compare and contrast to the debates surrounding violent vs nonviolent rebellion during the U.S. Civil Rights and Black Power Movements? How should the oppressed respond to their oppressors - conceptualize, fight for, and deploy power? What is the difference between rebellion and social movement, and how do their differences affect prospects for transforming systemically unjust and structurally violent conditions? This course explores answers to these questions by examining the conflicts surrounding the Movement for Black Lives over the last decade, while examining examples from the Civil Rights movement as cases for comparison. We will examine the background theories and ethical frameworks by which activists and practitioners conceptualize, implement, and justify - and argue with one another about - the necessities and limits of violent vs. nonviolent action and re-examine the roles that rebellion can play (and has played) in transforming injustice and structural violence, as well as in conceptualizing and pursuing liberation. What does the peace studies concept of "conflict transformation" have to contribute to these understandings and debates? We will consider challenges posed by rioting, property destruction and "looting," and the risks and possibilities of avoiding so-called "backlash" responses of state repression and counter-protest. Readings include works by: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Omar Wasow, Angela Davis, Danielle Allen, Cornel West, James Baldwin, Eddie Glaude, Martin King, Stokely Carmicheal (Kwame Ture), Frantz Fanon, and Barbara Deming.

In June 2020, prompted by the horrific killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, our nation awakened to the brutality of institutional racism and the violence to human dignity it has wrought in communities of color throughout America's history. The movement for racial justice was renewed in vigor with nationwide protests and calls for action. Although the protests of 2020 have largely been a response to a crisis surrounding police violence, the calls to action have focused attention on the breadth of systemic racism in all facets of American life. In this course, students will engage weekly with a single event or concept, drawn from a variety of disciplines, necessary to understand and dismantle systemic racism. The course centers around a weekly guest-lecture series featuring authors, public intellectuals, faith leaders, and external and internal members of the academy. In each class period, the guest expert provides a sophisticated introduction to a discrete racial justice topic. Some lectures address historical events not widely known (e.g., the Tulsa massacre or the arrival of the first slave ship in the Americas in 1619); others address current racial inequities (e.g., the wealth gap, health outcomes, criminal justice, voter suppression); still others examine broad concepts (e.g., intersectionality, Catholic teaching on racism). Specific topics to be determined by expert availability. Students prepare for the sessions by researching the speaker or topic and preparing thoughtful questions to be posed during the guest's visit. Students also participate in at least two small group discussions and, at the conclusion of the semester, are required to produce a short reflective writing piece. The entire course will be offered via zoom for all participants.

In this course, we will challenge the single story/ies U.S. schools and curricula have told about books, characters, and cultural groups by focusing on literature by and about people from various populations that have been traditionally underrepresented in the United States. We will discuss young adult literature from parallel cultures (including possible works by and about African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino/as, Native Americans, Middle Eastern Americans, and other ethnic groups), as well as literature by and about populations traditionally defined by class, religion, ability, gender and sexuality. Course participants will investigate theoretical perspectives, issues, controversies, and educational implications for these texts, including race and racism, whiteness and privilege (in society and in the educational system), and critical literacy. As an extension of the course, we will also examine the young adult literature market and how contemporary media may reinforce or resist the stereotypes, labels, and single stories associated with these cultures. Possible texts include All American Boys, American Born Chinese (graphic novel), a Jacqueline Woodson novel, Openly Straight, a canonical text like To Kill a Mockingbird, Every Day, and several choice options, including a Classic/Newberry text, one text representing a non-abled bodied protagonist, and one contemporary text.

In practically every country in Latin America that had significant populations of enslaved Blacks, post-emancipation politics attempted to write Blacks out of the national narrative, thus limiting Blacks’ claims to equality and political participation. “Afro-Latin American Literature and Culture” begins with several fundamental questions: How do Black artists wield art to make claims to inclusion in their local and national communities? What is art’s relation to history and the racial national narrative? Can the arts ameliorate material conditions and racial politics? To pursue these questions, this course will explore the multiple forms of cultural expression created by Black creatives and their communities in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Latin America. Focusing on Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, this course will read literature by Black writers from each country as well as examine the religious practices, dance, music, food, graphic arts, and film that shape and reflect these Black communities. Artists will include Luz Argentina Chiriboga, Manuel Zapata Olivella, Rómulo Bustos Aguirre, Gloria Rolando, Esteban Montejo, Nancy Morejón, Alfredo Lam, and ChocQuibTown.

This seminar introduces topics in the history of slavery and Blackness in Latin America. Its focus is on the criminalization of mobility and the occupation of space by people described as Black and historically tied to enslavement. Blackness, a social condition associated with phenotype, emerged from the Atlantic slave trade, which brought enslaved laborers from Africa to European New World colonies. But slavery was not simply a labor or commodity relation, it became a way to explain the existence of social hierarchies that included free people of color and associated a variety of gendered physical characteristics with them. We will spend some time examining how law and social relations dealt with Atlantic slavery, and then move into the modern period to think about how these ideas and frameworks played out in a world of Latin American nations (and territories) without explicit African slavery.

This course examines the contemporary and historical politics of poverty in the United States. How policy and political actors frame both the causes of poverty and wealth, and the capabilities and rights of those experiencing poverty has led to varying policy responses throughout history. The assumptions underlying these debates and policies not only have long lineages, but also have intended and unintended consequences on those experiencing or near poverty. The readings and class discussion will bring together a theoretical understanding of the scholarly debates surrounding poverty and the empirical consequences of policies emanating from those debates. These policies include the spheres of cash assistance and the labor market, healthcare, food assistance, housing, family and childcare, tax, and broader economic configurations. We will focus as well on the actors and political processes (legislative, administrative, and judicial) at the heart of these efforts. By extension, this course will deepen the students' understandings of the role of ideologies, individuals, and institutions in shaping and responding to problems in our society. THIS COURSE WILL BE FULLY ONLINE.

This course engages African theoretical and philosophical traditions of politics and critically re-thinks the historically conditioned misperceptions about its peoples and cultures. It examines theoretical and philosophical questions concerning the nature of justice, democracy, identity, power, freedom, and equality as advanced by African thinkers. Because of the distinctiveness of African cultures’ metaphysical and moral conceptions of self and society, we will examine how this distinctiveness impacts conceptions of moral and political agency. We will compare and contrast Western individualism with communal African conceptions of freedom, justice, and communal responsibility. These questions must, then, beg another fundamental question of whether it is ethical for normative political theory and philosophy to seek to strive for a convergence into a universal political/philosophical norm, when these African thinkers conceive of their social and political contexts as different from Western ways of knowing, being, and doing. Finally, the course seeks to address the question, “What is African political thought and philosophy?” The prefix “African” will allow us to challenge the universalizing assumption of Western philosophical/theoretical tradition and simultaneously open an intellectual space to rethink the meaning, occupation, and futurity of philosophy and theory.

How do we define decolonization and/or decoloniality? What is the nature of the colonial condition these concepts seek to remedy? Decolonization and decoloniality have become a metaphor for decentering the hegemonic structure of Eurocentrism and re-positioning normative epistemologies and ontologies to include subaltern and marginalized ways of knowing, being, and doing. This course is a critical interrogation of the theories, philosophies, processes, and accounts of colonialism/coloniality and decolonization/decoloniality. The aim is to chart critical paths to rethinking the meaning and impact of these concepts. By interrogating how normative concepts, ideas, theories, and philosophies affirming the legitimacy of colonialism were employed and deployed to subjugate, exploit, and dominate colonized subjects, the course affirms a critical practice that opens new spaces for rethinking the meaning of decolonization. In this course, we will survey the core texts that have spurred decolonial theories and movements in Africa and the Americas. However, given that decolonial discourse now touches on nearly every aspect of society — past, present, and future — the topics covered in this course will by no means be exhaustive, but are designed to open intellectual space for renewed debates about the meaning and conceptual boundaries of decolonial theories.

This seminar explores the intersection of the physical realities of urban environments, race, and education and will be a question-based seminar. As a group we will work to answer a cluster of questions surrounding the course topic in a systematic, interdisciplinary format. Questions may include: How does the physical landscape/structure of schools matter to urban education? How does the high concentration of poverty and racial segregation impact curriculum, school culture, and neighborhood? How do early childhood programming, college preparatory programs, and after-school programs factor into the landscape of urban education? What are "best practices" involved with teaching in urban environments? The final question we will work on as a group will be: What are the implications of what we know about race and urban landscapes in propelling positive micro- and macro-level change for our educational system? This course demands a high level of class participation and student initiative.

American Education mirrors American society with myriad challenges, successes, and ideologies. This course will look at how political struggles over race, language, gender, and class have all played out in the battle over American schools, schools that ultimately hold the literal future of America. This course will explore the History of Education in American from the late 1865 to the present and will have special emphasis on segregated schools in the 19th century and today. The course will also look closely at the very best programs re-shaping American education such as The Alliance for Catholic Education and KIPP. The course will look at education from Kindergarten all the way through graduate programs as we study how our institutions have formed and how they form and transform our society.

As calls to defund police and abolish prisons have gone mainstream in the United States, many who encounter those demands struggle to imagine alternatives to our punitive criminal legal system, especially when it comes to violent crime. This one-credit course serves as a hands-on introduction to transformative justice -- a feminist political framework for responding to violence without relying on punishment, incarceration, or policing. We will learn about the history and philosophy of transformative justice (TJ) as it has developed in Black, immigrant, and Indigenous communities over many generations. We will read theoretical works, case studies, and personal narratives from scholars, practitioners, and community organizers seeking to solve the problem of violence without creating more violence. Most importantly, we will cultivate skills to build restorative and transformative responses to violence, abuse, and harm in our own relationships and communities. Our virtual class sessions will include a mix of discussion and activities, with an emphasis on collaboration and skill-building.

Visual anthropology involves the cross-cultural study of images in communication and the use of images as a method for doing anthropology. This course proceeds through a non-linear integration of visual themes including water, earth, light, fire, flesh and blood with analytical themes including aesthetics, poetics, violence, history, materiality and subjectivity. We explore still photography, film, and popular media in domains from ethnography, social documentary, war photojournalism, to high art. Students watch, read and write about, and generate visual products of their own in multiple media.

A major source of conflict - increasingly so - is environmental issues; both climate change-related conflicts about (more and more scarce) resources as well as secondary conflicts (conflicts that arise because of the resource conflict, i.e. climate migrants) pose a major challenge to the planet. Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si has offered ways to think about an "integral ecology" that takes the environment, life on the planet, the human condition and culture seriously. The cry of the earth and the cry of the poor cannot be separated. Laudato Si has to be read against the background of the concept of "Integral Human Development." This concept, inspired by the works of Joseph Lebret, OP, was introduced by Pope Paul VI in his encyclical Populorum Progressio (1967). It refers to "the development of the whole person and the development of all persons." The course explores the connection (intersectionality) between peace, (integral) ecology, and (integral human) development. It will do so with in-class room teaching sessions and working with select case studies on integral ecology.

Images of Hispañiola conjure up extreme contrasts. Romantic, sun-drenched beaches, heroic exploration and discovery, quaint relics, tourists, and happy-go-lucky natives merge in pleasing portraits of one side of the island. Rebellion and revolution, chaos and neglect coalesce menacingly at the other end. This course interrogates the taken-for-granted narrative of the antimony between the Dominican Republic versus Haiti and opens possibilities of recognizing the shared histories, politics, economies, and traditions of the two societies. In the first part of the semester, we examine how Spain’s neglected, undeveloped colony became a rising economic power, while the wealthiest “Pearl of the Antilles,” once freed of slavery and French colonial rule, confronted relentless depletion of its human and material resources. In the second part of the semester, we study the causes of the massive exodus from both countries over the past century. We focus on unanticipated consequences of diaspora, including the inspiration for those “outside” to transcend the borders dividing the “inside” of the island. We learn about innovative formations of transnational communities that span multiple sites linked by constant circulation of digital messages, videos and money, and the comings and goings of people, politicians, and spirits. We appreciate examples of the dynamic, expressive cultures of diasporan Haitians and Dominicans in prose, poetry, film, music, visual arts, and, last but never least, cuisine.

US literature and popular music between the mid-19th century and the end of World War II. We will read key works of American prose (as well as some poetry) from the period's principal literary movements, including realism, naturalism, modernism, and multimedia documentary. We will also listen to musical works--Broadway tunes and blues songs, spirituals and symphonies. We'll pay particular attention to how segregation and other racial politics, changing roles for women, and the mass production of commodities influenced the art of this period. Texts will include writing by Stephen Crane, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Harriet Jacobs, and Edith Wharton, as well as music by George M. Cohan, George Gershwin, Scott Joplin, Paul Robeson, and Bessie Smith. Course requirements will include two argumentative essays, several shorter writing assignments, regular online reading responses, and active class participation.

To imagine is to form a mental concept of something which is not present to the senses. Imagination therefore deals with "framing". Like everyone else, Africans ponder over their condition and their world on the basis of their experience, history, social location and other realities which provide the "frame" through which they construct and address reality. In this course, through the study of some significant African literary works and some literary works about Africa we will study the self-perception of the African and the way the African has ethically viewed his / her reality and tried to grapple with it over a period of time (colonialism, post colonialism, apartheid) with regard to various issues on the continent (political challenges, religion, war and peace) and over some of the social questions (class, urbanization/ city life, sex and sexuality, relationship of the sexes), etc. We will read such authors as Joseph Conrad, Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, Athol Fugard, Wole Soyinka, Cyprian Ekwensi, Chimamanda Adichie, Syl Cheney-Coker, Tsitsi Dangaremga, Nawal El Sadawi, Ferdinand Oyono , and some others. Using these and many authors we will ask questions about what constitutes the moral imagination, how such an imagination is manifested in or apparent in the social, personal and religious lives of the various African peoples or characters portrayed in these literary works; to what extent the moral sense has helped/ conditioned or failed to influence the lives of these peoples and characters. We will also inquire into the extent and in what ways the writers in our selection have helped to shape the moral imagination of their people.

In answering the question "What was American modernism?" most literary critical perspectives might commonly be expected to focus on a modernity represented by the authors of the "lost generation" in the U.S., such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. While a conventional understanding of U.S. American modernism might serve to underscore the importance of the stylistic, cultural and artistic contributions of these and other canonical moderns, such a view might also give little consideration to the significance of those modern U.S. American voices not ordinarily heard in such a context. This course poses the question "What was American modernism?" to answer it by exploring its roots in two less conspicuous early 20th-century U.S. American modernisms: the Chicago Renaissance of 1912-1925, and the Harlem Renaissance of 1920-1929. In "engendering renaissance," these two moments suggest a literary birth and rebirth of modern U.S. American identity that questions its seemingly stable boundaries and borders, reconfiguring the idea of "American" within and opening the door to the larger and more varied cultural fabric that is modern America(s). By locating the rise of U.S. American modernism in the relation between these two literary moments, this course will broaden our understanding of the idea of "American" at this time by considering how it is created within a frame determined by the interplay of race, gender, class and nation. In this way, it seeks to deepen our understanding of U.S. American culture and the idea of "American" in the early 20th century, while suggesting new ways to engage the global social and cultural challenges facing the idea of "American" in the 21st.

This course will examine the broader sweep of twentieth and twenty-first century African American poetics through the study of approximately eleven particularly influential poets. With the Harlem Renaissance, the Indignant Generation, Black Arts, and Post-Black Arts eras as historical backdrop, we will explore the evolving poetics these poets pursue, as well as their attending politics. We will also address essential questions at the core of our critical enterprise: What constitutes African American poetry? Why do blacks write poetry in the first place, and to what end? What are the critical issues animating critical discourse on black poetry? How and where might African American poetry develop into the twenty-first century? Poets for the course will include Langston Hughes, Anne Spencer, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Lucille Clifton, Michael S. Harper, Rita Dove, Natasha Trethewey, and Jericho Brown.

The 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro encourages a new generation to explore the life and work of James Baldwin (1924-1987). Directed by Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck, I Am Not Your Negro is a provocative documentary that envisions a book Baldwin never finished by providing insight into Baldwin's relationship with three men who were assassinated before their fortieth birthdays - Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In this course we will interrogate questions of race, sexuality, violence, and migration. Our current political moment encourages the examination of these issues while Baldwin's life and work provides the ideal vantage point for their investigation. Using I Am Not Your Negro as our starting point, Baldwin's life and work will allow us the opportunity to explore transatlantic discourses on nationality, sexuality, race, gender, and religion. We will also explore the work of other writers including Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

This course aims to evaluate how major cultural, social, and historical events are portrayed in cinematographic productions of Portugal, Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde. We will explore issues such as gender, racial and social disparities, the legacies of dictatorship and the colonial wars, the Luso-African struggles for independence, the role of the language in building a nation, and the influence of Portuguese culture in its former colonies. Our goal is to investigate how film productions from and about those countries contest hegemonic accounts, and to examine the interconnections between history, memory and cultural identity and praxis. Films such as All is Well, by Pocas Pascoal (Angola), Dribbling Fate, by Fernando Vendrell (Cape Verde), Sleepwalking Land, by Teresa Prata (Mozambique), Cats Don't Have Vertigo, by Antonio Pedro Vasconcelos, April Captains, by Maria de Medeiros (Portugal), as well as the documentaries Lusitanian Illusion, by Joao Canijo, and Hope the Pitanga Cherries Grow, by Kiluanje Liberdade and Ondjaki will serve as a vehicle for a deeper and broader understanding of how social, racial and cultural issues play a role in film and in the past and present time in Portugal, Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde. Conducted in English.

Since the eighteenth century, parallels have been drawn between the enslavement of African Americans and the marginalization of Irish Catholics in Ireland. In 1792, the Belfast newspaper the Northern Star published "The Negroe's Complaint" and "The Dying Negro" in an attempt to draw sympathy for enslaved African Americans and to also suggest that the Irish were metaphorically "slaves" in their own country. In 1845, during his lecture tour of Ireland, Frederick Douglass wrote, "I see much here to remind me of my former condition," suggesting that what he witnessed of the beginning of the Famine could be compared to slavery in the United States. Comparisons made between the Irish and African Americans continued through the twentieth century with writers from both cultures gesturing towards each other in literature. In this course we will explore African American and Irish literature. We will examine how black and Irish writers have gestured towards each other in literature, as well as the ways in which these two cultures have intersected - their shared experiences - while also focusing on important differences between the two cultures.

The transatlantic slave trade transformed the society, culture, economics, and politics of the early modern world; the disbursement of peoples of African descent during this period continues to impact the world that we live in today. In this course we will explore the formation of an "Atlantic World," by focusing on literature and theatre from the eighteenth-century to the present. Positioning the Atlantic Ocean as a conduit of exchange between the Old World and the colonized New World, the art of our focus will allow us to examine the results of these exchanges. While our initial focus will center on the creation of the Black Atlantic, our discussions and texts will include work written by indigenous peoples and diasporic Europeans, as well as diasporic Africans. Texts will include: Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Boucicault's The Octoroon, Shipp's Dahomey, Walcott's Sea at Dauphin, McCann's TransAtlantic, Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, Dillon's New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849, and Roach's Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance.

This course centers Blackness within latinidad. In it, students will learn about the history of Blackness inLatin America, and how that history continues to shape the experiences of AfroLatina/os in the US today. We will approach Blackness from a transhemispheric perspective, payingattention to how it is erased through the discourses of mestizaje and latinidad. We will analyze literary and cultural works by AfroLatina/os with roots in Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panamá, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Perú. This is a CBL course and students will volunteer at La Casa de Amistad once a week. Open to non-Spanish majors who are fluent in Spanish or are Spanish heritage speakers.

The core purpose of this course is enable students to formulate their own account of what it means to do theology and practice the Christian faith (personally and communally) in a context marked by anti-black racism. In a later preface to his seminal text *A Black Theology of Liberation*, James Cone says that his work cannot be understood without both "a general comprehension of nearly four hundred years of slavery and segregation in North American" and a keen knowledge of the black struggle for dignity and liberation. The initial task of the course, therefore, is to provide precisely this background as a historical, sociological, and theological foundation for doing theology today. Building upon this foundation, throughout the course students will engage historical and contemporary texts, particularly from black theological voices, in order to reflect upon their own formation (cultural, familial, theological), to understand the history of U.S. theology, and to articulate a vision for moving forward today in an antiracist way. Empowering each student to articulate such a vision (grounded upon a clear sense of history and developed through a respectful engagement with new theological voices) is the core goal of the course.

Few places on earth exhibit the dynamism of contemporary Christianity like Africa. Such dynamism creates new challenges and opportunities for the Catholic Church and other ecclesial bodies, and also shapes African life more generally. Through novels, historical studies, and present-day reflections from a variety of perspectives this course will explore Christianity in Africa, beginning with the early Church but with heightened attention to the more recent growth of Christianity on the continent. It will also examine Christianity's interactions with Islam and forms of African ways of being religious that predated Christianity and Islam, many of which have ongoing vitality. Attention will also be paid to African Christian theology, carried out formally and informally, as well as the implications of the spread of African Christianity for world Christianity.

This interdisciplinary course examines the historiography of the Black Power and Black Arts movements of the sixties and seventies. The poet and theorist Larry Neal defined the Black Arts Movement as “the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept,” encouraging artists to use their work to celebrate Black art and confront contradictions within Western society. The Black Arts Movement encompassed all areas of Black cultural expression—from poetry, art, dance, and music to theatre, film, and television. As historiographers, we will approach the Black Power and Black Arts movements as a sequence of debates, rather than a consistent or monolithic practice. We will investigate how artists, theorists, and activists of the sixties and seventies fostered competing definitions of Black power, yet shared an unwavering commitment to the struggle for Black liberation. Throughout the course, we will focus on the following questions: • What were major aims, organizations, and critical debates within the Black Power movement? • Who were the key figures and lesser-known (today) individuals who furthered Black cultural and political thought of the sixties and seventies? • How did Black women artists and activists amplify, complicate, and/or critique the prevailing notions of Black Power? • What relationship did the Black Power and Black Arts movements have with the rise of the women’s liberation movement and Black feminist drama? • What relevance, if any, does the Black Power struggle of the past have to today’s fight for Black Lives? In so doing, we will explore various articulations of “Black power,” “self-determination” and “nationhood”; engage with critical approaches to the “Black aesthetic”; and consider the role of intersectionality within Black Power discourse.

This course focuses on critical analyses of identities in media culture. Taking a cultural studies approach, we will interrogate theories and popular discourses of identity while exploring how particular identities are constructed, negotiated, resisted, and transformed within media culture. Our primary questions in this course are: What is identity? How do our identities inform our various relationships to media culture? And, how does media culture impact the construction of our identities? Our particular sites of analysis will be media representation (narrative, performance, aesthetics), media production (industries and political economy), and media consumption (reception practices and audiences). We will examine a broad array of media forms, including film, television, the Internet, games, and popular music. Traditional demographic identities, such as gender, age, race, sexuality, and class, will be central to the course, although other identities, including geographic and lifestyle identities, will be examined also. We will strive toward critical analyses that understand identities as constructed, not inherent, and intersectional, not autonomous.

This course aims to evaluate how major cultural, social and historical events are portrayed in cinematographic productions of Portugal, Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde. We will explore issues such as gender, racial and social disparities, the legacies of dictatorship and the colonial wars, the Luso-African struggles for independence, the role of the language in building a nation, and the influence of the Portuguese culture in its former colonies. Our goal is to investigate how film productions from and about those countries contest hegemonic accounts, and to examine the interconnections between history, memory and cultural identity and praxis. Films such as All is Well, by Pocas Pascoal (Angola), Dribbling Fate, by Fernando Vendrell (Cape Verde), Sleepwalking Land by Teresa Prata (Mozambique), Cats Donet Have Vertigo, by Antonio Pedro Vasconcelos, April Captains, by Maria de Medeiros (Portugal), as well as the documentaries Lusitanian Illusion, by Joeo Canijo, and Hope the Pitanga Cherries Grow, by Kiluanje Liberdade and Ondjaki will serve as a vehicle for a deeper and broader understanding of how social, racial and cultural issues play a role in the past and present time in Portugal, Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde. Conducted in English.

This course aims to understand some of the aspects that deeply affected the relations between Portugal and Lusophone Africa in the 20th and 21st century through fiction, cinema, essay and primary sources. We will explore issues such as the link between race and migration, the development of cultural identity, the struggle to belong, and the complex connection between Portugal and Africa. Despite the geographical distance, Portugal, Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde share a common legacy of colonialism, racism, gender gap, language and war. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to examine the ways in which these struggles are corroborated and/or contradicted by official narratives, and analyze the contemporary context of Portugal-African relations. Conducted in English.

Though sociologists are not fortune tellers, life course sociology has documented the human life course enough to reliably understand how and why people's lives are patterned in certain ways. This course seeks to understand how and why people change or remain the same throughout their lives. We will explore how lives are shaped by specific historical contexts, how individuals actively construct their life course within historical and social constraints, how our lives are intertwined (and how this shapes human action), and how the impact of life transitions on life trajectories is contingent on the timing of a particular change in a person's life. We will investigate patterns common in the different stages of our life course as well life course pathways related to family relationships, education, health and religion. Including all of these elements of life course sociology gives a fuller understanding of how individual lives are lived within our communities as well as global contexts, and also how lives are rooted in intersections of gender, class, race, sexual orientation and other statuses. (Sophomores, Juniors & Seniors Only)

Through readings and discussion in this senior seminar, you will develop a better understanding of causes and consequences of race and class inequalities by looking at how racism and capitalism have shaped American history and society. We will explore how both capitalism and racism have evolved and how sociologists have understood the relationship between capitalism (and resulting class inequalities) and racism (and resulting racial inequalities). Among the historical periods we will look at our Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement era, and the current Black Lives Matter and abolitionist movement. Important topics that we will discuss are slavery, exploitation, discrimination, reparations, the carceral state, white privilege, racial resentment, public goods, immigration, genocide and settler colonialism.

Through a close examination of twelve historical events, we will study African-American resistance in the United States from the 17th century through the 20th century. We will employ a case-study method and seek to categorize and characterize the wide variety of African-American resistance. Our study will include the politics of confrontation and civil disobedience, polarization of arts, transformation of race relations, the tragedies and triumphs of Reconstruction, interracial violence, black political and institutional responses to racism and violence, the Harlem Renaissance, jazz, blues, and the civil rights and black power movements. Students will be confronted with conflicting bodies of evidence and challenged to analyze these issues and arrive at conclusions. Music and film will supplement classroom discussions.

Scholars and activists use the concept of the "carceral state" to describe the official, government use of policing, surveillance, and mass imprisonment to exercise control over society. This course examines the histories, cultures, politics, and economics of prisons and policing in the United States, in order to determine how the U.S. carceral state has been a factor in the social construction of race, gender, and citizenship. We will study the genealogy of the U.S. carceral state -- beginning with the surveillance embedded in the earliest practices of slavery and settler colonialism, tracing its development through the 19th and early 20th centuries, and concluding with the rise of the modern prison industrial complex. We will then focus on contemporary U.S. prisons, policing, and surveillance, using case studies including the "war on drugs," immigrant detention, sex-crime regulation, and police violence. Finally, we will consider alternatives to prisons and policing, as we learn about academic research and activist movements working to end state and police violence, abolish prisons, and create opportunities for restorative justice. Over the course of the semester, students will learn about the historical development and ongoing maintenance of the carceral state, using an intersectional framework that highlights the ways in which prisons and policing have both shaped, and been shaped by, race, gender, citizenship, and economics. Along the way, students will ask and address such questions as: How does the U.S. carceral state function as a tool for social control? What histories, policies, and ideologies underlie the carceral state? How have individuals and organizations worked to transform or abolish the carceral state? How have art and cultural production been used to normalize and/or critique the carceral state? And can we imagine a world without prisons or police?

Antiracist and decolonial feminist scholars and activists have long understood that sites of confinement--such as the prison, the asylum, and the detention center--produce and police genders and sexualities. This seminar introduces students to feminist, queer, and trans work in the field of critical prison studies, exploring gender and sexuality at shifting intersections with racism, ableism, militarism, capitalism, and the state. Our readings will integrate the work of free-world academics with theory, research, art, and personal narrative produced by prisoners and survivors. While we will read and discuss a variety of texts, our study will center Black, im/migrant, and Indigenous feminist scholarship and organizing in movements for abolition and transformative justice. Class activities will emphasize collaboration and skill-building. Required Texts include: Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?;Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity; Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice; Andrea Ritchie: Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color; Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

Race is a social construct. So why have scientists spent centuries trying to quantify, measure, and categorize people by race? From early anthropometry to the Human Genome Project, this course examines the production and embedding of race into scientific knowledge since the 18th century. Designed for students interested in the history of science and the production of scientific knowledge or those curious about the origins of scientific racism and racial inequality, this course is also well-suited for students pursuing careers in the health professions. By focusing on historical discourses on the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge of race, students will be able to:1. Understand how race, racism, and racial inequality are embedded in scientific knowledge2. Outline the various methodologies different fields of science have used to group people into races3. Carefully evaluate scientific technologies for racial biasesThis is an upper level undergraduate and graduate seminar.

This course focuses on critical analyses of identities in media culture. Taking a cultural studies approach, we will interrogate theories and popular discourses of identity while exploring how particular identities are constructed, negotiated, resisted, and transformed within media culture. Our primary questions in this course are: What is identity? How do our identities inform our various relationships to media culture? And, how does media culture impact the construction of our identities? Our particular sites of analysis will be media representation (narrative, performance, aesthetics), media production (industries and political economy), and media consumption (reception practices and audiences). We will examine a broad array of media forms, including film, television, the Internet, games, and popular music. Traditional demographic identities, such as gender, age, race, sexuality, and class, will be central to the course, although other identities, including geographic and lifestyle identities, will be examined also. We will strive toward critical analyses that understand identities as constructed, not inherent, and intersectional, not autonomous.

This five-week course will examine forced migration from the perspective of the beliefs, teachings, and programmatic commitments of faith communities. The first week will be devoted to identifying the causes of and global trends in forced migration, as well as the categories of forced migrants. It will also explore the “law of migration”; that is, the diverse legal systems that migrants must negotiate on their journeys and that religious actors use to assess migration policies. The second week will explore the teachings of diverse faith communities on forced migration, their understanding of this immense and growing phenomenon, and their programmatic and policy responses. The third week will segue to state-centered approaches to the governance and management of migration, with a focus on the concepts of sovereignty and the rule of law. It will also consider ideologies such as nativism and exclusionary nationalism that are in tension with the beliefs, policy positions, and programs of religious actors. The fourth week will be devoted to guest speakers and student presentations on situations of protracted displacement throughout the world. Persons in protracted displacement have lived in exile for at least five years and have no viable course out of their “long lasting and intractable status of limbo.” The fifth week will be devoted to US refugee protection trends and policies.

Moving beyond a simplistic "pro-choice versus pro-life" framework, this course invites students to study the complex ways in which reproduction is both political and racialized—how fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, abortion, adoption, parenting, and caregiving are defined by power relations, shaped by material conditions, and linked with the unequal distribution of resources and life chances on a global scale. What factors influence a person's ability to have children, to not have children, and to raise children they do have in safe and sustainable communities? How do the structural violences of racism, capitalism, ableism, and imperialism shape meanings and experiences of reproduction in the U.S., in local contexts around the world, and across national borders? How have diverse social movements organized to fight reproductive oppression and to build more just futures? Our exploration of these questions will lead us to a wide variety of historical and contemporary sites where reproduction intersects with systems of power and practices of resistance. At the heart of our inquiry will be the understanding, established by Black and Indigenous feminist scholars and activists, that reproduction is a key aspect of social justice, and we will focus in particular on the intersections of gender and sexuality with racial, economic, environmental, and decolonial justice. Students will contribute to the course syllabus by sharing their own research on contemporary issues, policy, and activism. Our learning will be discussion-based, collaborative, and exploratory.

A winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Award and the Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison is one of the most important American novelists, essayist and literary critics of the 20th Century. She is known for her complex and nuanced portrayals of the African-American experience within the African-American community from the days of slavery to the present. Less well known is Morrison's nonfiction and her contributions to an African-American Literary theory which can be used to engage authors as diverse as Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and James Baldwin. In this course students will read Morrison's first six novels (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Jazz) as well as her major work of literary criticism (Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination) and a collection of her nonfiction (What Moves at the Margins). Students will have the opportunity to develop sustained research projects on the works of Morrison and to draw upon Morrison's literary theory to analyze a broader set of texts in classic and contemporary American literature.

Is it possible to think of the 21st century as a post-racial, post-feminist world? In her provocative 2012 study, Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender, Janell Hobson suggests that rather than having been eradicated, millennial hopes that the historical difficulties represented by race and gender have lost their significance in the present day are as far, if not even further away from the mark as they have ever been. For Hobson, policing the body, whether that be in terms of its race, its gender, or its sexuality, has remained paramount. "[W]hile the early-twenty-first century discourse of 'postracial' and 'postfeminist' often declares the loss of meaning attached to race and gender," she argues, "..the global scope of our media-reliant information culture insists on perpetuating raced and gendered meanings that support ideologies of dominance, privilege, and power." In Hobson's view, the body and how it is imagined rests at the center of such ideologies, pointing also to a number of crucial questions that become particularly important when considering the significance of race and gender through the lens of modernity. How might a reconsideration of race point also to a rethinking of gender and vice-versa? What does race actually mean? How does/can it alter the way we understand gender? Is it possible to think race beyond the idea of race? What might a new conception of race actually look like, and how might this influence our thinking on gender? How are the problems of race and gender intertwined, and how is/has the body been imagined in and through them? What can such questions tell us about today's racial and gendered realities, both inside and outside the university, both in the past and the present? This course takes a step backward to investigate these and other like questions in the context of the utopic impulse and its emphasis on the imagination in several 19th-century American authors whose work may be viewed as participating in a broad yet under-acknowledged vision of race, gender and Atlantic modernity that seeks to interrogate hierarchies of race and gender as these have been constructed and maintained within dominant ideologies. Grounding our analysis in a number of 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century political philosophical texts on law and utopia and drawing on insights from critical race theory, gender studies, feminist theory, theories of law and literature, and utopian studies, our goal will be to gain a more nuanced understanding of our racialized past and its troubled link to questions of gender both then and now, so that we may better hope to imagine - and reimagine - the shape of our collective democratic future in the 21st century's global community

From the earliest moments of European contact, race and Afro-Cubans have played central roles in the history and cultural development of Cuba. Slavery, the struggle for Cuban independence, and the ensuing (perhaps still ongoing) struggle for Afro-Cuban political and social equality have driven Cuban history, while Afro-Cuban cultural expression has become deeply woven into the national social fabric. This course will examine Afro-Cuban history and culture from the last decade of the eighteenth century to the contemporary moment. Divided into three periods,colonial (1791-1895), early republic (1895-1959), and revolutionary (1959-now) the course will address the history, political movements and cultural forms of expression (religion, music,literature, film, etc.) that have helped to create an identifiable Afro-Cuban culture. So too, the course will examine the tensions between Afro-Cuban culture and "mainstream" Cuban culture, the ongoing push and pull between the two, and thus the impact of an African presence in the ongoing evolution of cubanidad. Titles for the course will include Biography of a Runaway Slave, A Black Soldier's Story, Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century, Afro-Cuban Tales, Man-Making Words, Afro- Cuban Myths, Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba and Looking Within/Mirar Adentro.

This course undertakes a broad examination of black politics in multiracial America. Racial issues have provoked crises in American politics; changes in racial status have prompted American political institutions to operate in distinctive ways. The course examines the interface of black politics with and within the American political system. How successful have blacks been as they attempted to penetrate the electoral system in the post civil rights era. What conflicts and controversies have arisen as African Americans have sought to integrate the American system of power. Now that the laws have been changed to permit limited integration, should African Americans integrate politically, that is should they attempt to 'deracialize' their political appeals and strategy, with an effort to "crossover politically;" are some approaches such as those of President Barack Obama "not black enough?" What internal political challenges do African Americans face; some such as the increasing importance of class and socioeconomic factors, as well as gender and sexuality may reshape the definition of the black community. What intellectual challenges and strategic choices are they facing as the American population has grown increasingly multiracial. Finally, in light of these demographic changes in American life and American politics, how stable will past patterns of political participation, and political organizations and institutions of African American politics remain.

This graduate level seminar will explore the philosophical, theoretical, and ethical underpinnings for inclusive and collaborative practices in anthropology, particularly research that combines approaches from more than one anthropological subfield. Taking a global approach, students will examine a wide range of case studies in community-based and collaborative anthropology, aiming to identify best practices and develop skills which students can then apply to their own projects. Attention will be paid to the importance of context, including geography, colonial histories and decolonization, war and conflict, economy, and environment, that shape engaged approaches to working for and serving communities instead of working on or studying communities with an extractive approach.

Together with the United States, Mexico and the Caribbean have been among the most influential exporters of music globally since the early 20th century. This course traces these processes of musical production and consumption. Students will be introduced to important historical and stylistic musical developments as we survey various styles and genres with attention to their cultural significance - including the corrido (Mexican ballad), Caribbean-derived salsa, and cumbia, among others. Our approach, such that we are dealing with music-cultures, is at once anthropological and ethnomusicological. In order we achieve our aims, the course is organized along two axes: one chronological (so to speak), the other conceptual, neither complete. The chronological portion will allow us to survey various genres and ensembles of musical production. We dovetail this effort with a focus on important themes and concepts that aid in understanding the present and historical conditions of the terrain where performance, identity, race-ethnicity, gender, transnationalism, and commoditized publics intersect.

A capstone of the AFST major is the 6-credit senior project, which may be either a senior internship or senior thesis. Either option provides seniors with an opportunity to reflect upon the larger implications of their course work and, should they desire, to incorporate a service-learning component. A written proposal describing the intended internship must be submitted to the AFST chair for formal approval. If accepted, the student will be assigned a supervisor/advisor and required to write a 30 - 40 page project summation. The final version of the senior project is due at the end of the term. An oral presentation on the senior project must also be made to the director and advisory committee during the week of final examinations in order to complete degree requirements. Minors may undertake a 3-credit internship with the permission of the chair.

A capstone of the AFST major is the 6-credit senior project, which may be either a senior internship or senior thesis. Either option provides seniors with an opportunity to reflect upon the larger implications of their course work and, should they desire, to incorporate a service-learning component. A written proposal describing the intended internship must be submitted to the AFST chair for formal approval. If accepted, the student will be assigned a supervisor/advisor and required to write a 30 - 40 page project summation. The final version of the senior project is due at the end of the term. An oral presentation on the senior project must also be made to the director and advisory committee during the week of final examinations in order to complete degree requirements. Minors may undertake a 3-credit internship with the permission of the chair.

This is a specialized opportunity for a student to design a readings course with a professor on a specific topic of academic interest. A research paper is required at the end of the semester. The professor directing the readings will establish lectures and other meeting arrangements.

A capstone of the AFST major is the 6-credit senior project, which may be either a senior internship or senior thesis. Either option provides seniors with an opportunity to reflect upon the larger implications of their Africana course work and, should they desire, to incorporate a service-learning component. A written proposal describing the intended thesis must be submitted to the director of undergraduate studies for formal approval no later than the last working day of September. Each student will solicit a thesis supervisor/advisor and required to write a 30-50 page thesis/project synthesis based on their chosen topic. During the first semester students will work on their research proposals, including, related literature reviews, methodological exploration, service and/or data collection. The second semester students will spend time analyzing their data and writing their formal project synthesis/thesis. The final version of the senior project is due each spring by the common due date assigned by the College of Arts and Letters each year (usually the first week in April). Finally, an oral presentation on the senior project/thesis will be made to the Africana faculty. Minors may undertake a 3-credit internship/capstone project with the permission of the DUS.