Latino Studies (ILS)

This course is designed to develop beginner dance skills for regional dance styles of Mexico. Students interested in becoming dancers will learn steps, techniques, culture, and choreography post colonial pieces from the regions of Hidalgo, Sinaloa, and Jalisco. Principles of body alignment, strength, and coordination will be introduced as they relate to dance and performance. No previous dance experience required. Shoes, skirts, hats provided.

The class will bring together Mexican and Irish folk music and dance traditions to retell a unique and largely forgotten history of camaraderie between the Irish and the Mexicans circa 1848 in the making of our nation. This one-credit, 8-week, course will be taught by Shannon Dunne, adjunct professor of Irish studies. It will meet TR 12:30-1:45PM in Washington Hall. Ethnomusicologist Victor Pichardo and Paloma Garcia-Lopez of the Institute for Latino Studies will guest lecture to tie in students from the Ballet Folklorico and Mariachi courses as well. This is a truly collaborative and exciting cultural experience for the ND community. Students will meet for 8 weeks, twice a week, and perform at 1 or more shows.

This class instructs students on vocalization, instrumentation, and ensemble techniques that are part of the art form of Mexican Mariachi music. Beginners welcome. Advanced students with prior experience will assist in the instruction of the course. Guest instructors and speakers will also contribute to the course. Students gain the following skills: development of a broad knowledge of Mariachi music and Mexican culture, recognition of forms in Mariachi music (i.e. ranchera, polka, son, etc.) and growth of performance skills to create an ensemble sound.

This class instructs students on vocalization, instrumentation, and ensemble techniques that are part of the art form of Mexican Mariachi music. Advanced students with prior experience will assist in the instruction of the course. Guest instructors and speakers will also contribute to the course. Students gain the following skills: development of a broad knowledge of Mariachi music and Mexican culture, recognition of forms in Mariachi music (i.e. ranchera, polka, son, etc.) and growth of performance skills to create an ensemble sound. The class is a continuation of Mariachi Ensemble I.

This class instructs students on vocalization, instrumentation, and ensemble techniques that are part of the art form of Mexican Mariachi music. The course will be focused on performance. Guest instructors and speakers will contribute to the course. Students gain the following skills: development of a broad knowledge of Mariachi music and Mexican culture, recognition of forms in Mariachi music (i.e. ranchera, polka, son, etc.) and growth of performance skills to create an ensemble sound. The class is a continuation of Mariachi Ensemble II. PRIOR EXPERIENCE REQUIRED.

This class instructs students on vocalization, instrumentation, and ensemble techniques that are part of the art form of Mexican Mariachi music. The course will be focused on students who want to improve their presence and sound on stage. Guest instructors from Chicago and Mexico will contribute to the course. Students will develop individual talent and grow their performance skills to for diverse audiences. To enroll, students must have taken Mariachi I, II, III, or demonstrate prior musical experience through an audition during the first week of classes.

This advanced level course will help students deepen technical mastery on instruments like violin, trumpet, guitar, vihuela, and guitarron. The class will focus on preparing for high-level performances, including professional-level concerts and events. Students will refine skills for creating a cohesive ensemble sound, emphasizing sustained group effort and advanced performance techniques. Students will improve advanced aural skills, rhythm and intonation, and the ability to recognize and interpret complex musical forms (ranchera, son, bolero, polka). Students will develop skills in improvisation for a variety of audiences. Students of all backgrounds are encouraged to take this course.

Contemporary U.S. theater ought to value equity, diversity, and inclusion by more consistently producing works that reflect its culturally complex society. This course is designed to introduce students to theatrical texts by contemporary Latinx, African-American, Asian-American, and Native American playwrights. Many of these playwrights' works engage with a variety of cultural experiences that complicate definitions of U.S. society. This course will examine the trajectory of culturally inclusive U.S. theater from the late 20th century to the present. The course will also consider how U.S. regional theaters work toward greater equity by including diverse voices. Students will be expected to read plays and analyze them using methods provided. The course aims to provide students with tools for reflection to develop their own analytical and creative responses to contemporary U.S. theater.

This course explores topics related to language and identity in teaching, literacy research, theory, and practice. This course specifically foregrounds issues related to the Latinx experience in American schooling contexts with a focus on gender, and other identity markers that intersect with gender such as race, class, ethnicity, and (dis)ability. From an educational perspective, Latinx student populations in schools are increasing across the nation and yet far too often school curricula, quality bilingual and dual language educational offerings, and teacher preparation programs are slow to catch up to the demographic shifts. This course will further explore how Latinx identities factor into conceptualizations and practices of children's play, literacy activities, language use, and classroom behaviors of both teachers and students. By exploring culturally sustaining pedagogies and a "funds of knowledge" approach, we will seek to answer the following questions: How might we learn approaches to language and literacy education that narrow the achievement gap as they extend to the language and literacy development of Latinx learners? Moreover, what is the impact upon students when we view identity differences not as deficit, but as resource, thus creating schooling experiences that engage students, foster growth and inform equity? This course will engage students with children's literature, ethnographic exercises, linguistic autobiographies, as well as media and film depictions of contemporary issues facing Latinx students in schools.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This literature course offers an opportunity to read, discuss, and write about a generous sampling of contemporary American poetry by living Latinx poets, utilizing as its principal text the anthology, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. There will also be a special module on Latinx poetry inspired by Latinx art, with particular attention to the Smithsonian American Art Museum's exhibit: "Our America: the Latino Presence in American Art." We will also be relying significantly on a series of online resources, including video interviews with Latinx poets conducted here at Notre Dame. We will focus mainly on mid-career writers, discovering and examining some of the themes that characterize Latinx poetry. A number of the poets who we'll be reading will be special guests, via ZOOM, at various points during the semester: we'll get to ask them questions, and watch and hear them read some poems. We'll also encounter poems that challenge what one might expect when one hears the term, "Latinx poetry."

Gazes are gravitational forces. They can erect and deconstruct identities, ideologies, and geography. This course investigates the ideological tensions that inform the gaze and how this gravitational force is experienced, produced, enforced, and reimagined by marginalized beings. It also reevaluates the gaze itself; we will examine the gaze within cinema, as a form of self-expression, institutional power, and a critical lens through which to question our looking practices. We will investigate how nationalism, race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class produce gazes while examining alternative gazes that envision an elsewhere. Context will guide our discussion as we consider how gazes are enforced within family, work, and political structures. Throughout the semester, students will research various interdisciplinary approaches to the gaze, consider their personal looking practices, and create a gaze of their own. This course takes an intersectional approach to the gaze; possible texts include La Llorona, Lilo & Stitch, and poetry by Alan Pelaez Lopez and Larry Mitchell.

In this fine arts course we will read full-length books by young Latinx poets. We will discuss and learn from the them as we aspire to create our own literary art, in tandem with fun assignments, including but not limited to: writing to music, using a text from another language to write our own in English or Spanglish, visiting the Snite Museum on campus to use the visual or plastic arts as a springboard for our own literary art. We will also read and discuss essays on the craft of writing. The Latinx writers we will be reading will also be guests at special sessions on ZOOM, during which we?ll be able to question them about their art. Students will experience at least one literary event to experience literature as performance. Finally, students will practice and hone a certain vocabulary in order to offer constructive feedback to one another. No prior experience with creative writing necessary. All levels and majors and colleges welcome.

Lifelong Chicagoan Gwendolyn Brooks once said of her Bronzeville home, "If you wanted a poem, you had only to look out of a window." This "life in the raw" that inspired the Pulitzer-winning poet also spoke to generations of writers and poets. What can the writing of Chicago, a place proud of its diversity but dogged by inequities, tell us about race and citizenship? And what does it mean to talk about the literature(s) of a city? We'll tackle these big questions as we learn about the 1893 World Fair; the Chicago Renaissance; the Black Arts Movement; the Latino Arts Movement; and Chicago's contemporary literary scene. Through discussion, several short writing assignments, and a longer, research essay, we'll sharpen our analytical and writing skills and seek to become lucid readers of Chicago's literary landscape.

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?

This course will examine the Latina/o experience in the United States, including the historical, cultural, and political foundations of Latina/o life. By focusing on various Latina/o groups and the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and citizenship, this course will highlight the diversity within the category "Latina/o. This course has an optional community-engaged learning component with La Casa de Amistad.

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.

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.

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.

Despite the growing presence of Central Americans in the United States in the last four decades, Central America and its people have occupied a paradoxical presence in the popular U.S. imaginary. As noted by literary scholar Yajaira Padilla, they are hypervisible as “threatening guerillas,” undocumented migrants, domestic workers, and “gang-bangers,” yet their lived experiences remain illegible in the dominant culture. This course traces the literary and cultural narratives of Central American experience within and in relation to the United States. We read fiction, poetry, film, literary nonfiction, theater, performance art, and music alongside literary and cultural studies scholarship. We begin by anchoring ourselves in key scholarship of U.S. Central American literary and cultural studies and the travel narratives of those who “witnessed” Central America in the mid 19th century. We fast-forward to writers from the U.S. and Central America who witnessed and experienced the effects of U.S. imperialism in the region, from the making of the Panama Canal to Cold War-era military interventions. We then focus on the creative narratives of Central American diasporas from the 1990s to the present. We cover works by and about Central Americans from El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Panama, as well as Garífuna and Maya territories.

This course contributes to Notre Dame's core curriculum through its examination of theology as reflection on faith within the context of a living Christian Tradition. The course explores how theology - classically understood as "faith seeking understanding" - addresses questions Latinx Christians probe as they seek to live Christian faith in engagement with the world. More specifically, the course investigates three core topics: (a) the history of Latinx Christians as the context for their theological reflection; (b) an assessment of the theological significance of Jesus's Galilean origins; and (c) Latinx devotion and religious traditions as expressions of their lived faith and as resources for theology.

Global Catholicism will explore the past, present, and future of the Catholic Church from a variety of perspectives. The largest and oldest transnational organization in the world, the Catholic Church also embodies the people of God and the Body of Christ. It therefore lends itself to analysis from many academic disciplines, and, in this course, priority will be given to insights from theology and history, though with reference to other fields such as art history, literature, and the social sciences. Besides exploring the university’s art and archival collections, readings thus will include a novel, a memoir, primary sources both historical and theological, as well as analyses of pertinent issues and episodes that feature historical, theological, sociological, and anthropological approaches. There will also be a visit to Chicago’s Catholic parishes that reflect the Church’s global reach. Besides participation and engagement in class meetings, course requirements include regular brief responses to assigned readings, several group oral reports, and a mid-term and final exam. In addition, students will also prepare a final project that will seek to draw upon historical and theological reasoning to address a contemporary issue of importance for the Catholic Church, proposing a response to the issue from the perspective of a church leader (for example, a bishop, head of religious congregation, Catholic university president, etc.)

More than a century before African slaves were trafficked to the Virginia colony in 1619, Christopher Columbus transported captured indigenous peoples of the New World to Spain. The dispossession and enslavement of non-Europeans in the colonization of the Americas was justified by Christians but also condemned by Christians with different political and economic interests. This development course in theology introduces students to the challenging intersection of faith, slavery, and freedom by exploring key figures and events 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 faith in God provided a catalyst for the empowerment and resistance of the oppressed and their advocates in shared struggles to attain greater justice, equality, and independence. From the "Protector of the Indians" Bartolome de las Casas to St. Oscar Romero, and the "the Black Moses" Harriet Tubman to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the course explores these and other extraordinary figures of hope who risked their lives in the Americas to both protest grave social injustices and promote authentic expressions of faith. To confront this turbulent past theologically, students will examine idolatry, migration, land, liberty, poverty, and the common good as normative categories with ongoing significance in the face of contemporary social crises affecting the most vulnerable peoples and the environment.

The goal of this course is to facilitate student exploration of the genre of the telenovela. Students will sharpen oral and written language skills through exposure to authentic telenovelas from Latin America, reading of authentic texts, and through the creation and production of their own telenovela. They will hone their oral and written proficiency and learn the idiosyncrasies of Hispanic culture as they write, direct, act in, tape, and edit a telenovela. During this process students will also learn and apply basic videography and non-linear video and audio editing techniques.

This course is designed for learners who have a personal connection to the Spanish language, having been exposed to it at home or in their community from a young age, and as such already understand and/or speak the language. The main focus is on language awareness, with the goal of enhancing language skills and deepening cultural understanding. Emphasis will be placed on practical language use, cultural exploration, and critical analysis of cultural artifacts. This course is founded on the principle of respecting, validating and legitimizing all modes and registers of speech that students bring with them to the classroom. Students will be introduced to linguistic variants of Spanish in the pursuit to foster awareness of linguistic and sociolinguistic aspects related to Spanish in the United States. The specific objectives are to further develop proficiency/competence in reading and writing skills, while expanding the whole linguistic repertoire needed in academic settings. Students will become aware of certain norms of written Spanish, such as the use of spelling, punctuation, accent marks and certain grammatical points particular to heritage speakers. It will expose students to a variety of text formats: short stories, poetry, songs, visual arts and film from the Spanish-speaking world.

Horror movies have historically been much more than a genre of fear: they can be a powerful medium of social critique and cultural analysis. In this course, students will explore and analyze the genre of horror films beyond surface-level scares – they will learn approaches and theoretical frameworks to unravel the complexity of social, political, and cultural meaning hidden behind monsters, zombies, vampires, and other icons of the genre. We will also investigate the literary tropes and influences for many of these films. Through a multidisciplinary learning environment, students will analyze horror films from Latin America and the United States, studying how these films address issues such as social inequality, racism, sexism, institutional violence, power dynamics, and cultural tensions. The course will combine cinematographic analysis, critical theory, cultural studies, and hands-on audiovisual production. A central component of the course is a collaborative project in which students will collectively write, produce, direct, act in, film, and edit their own horror vignettes. These short films will serve as practical applications of the course's theoretical insights, challenging students to create compelling horror narratives that provide meaningful social commentary.

This fifth-semester language and culture course is designed for students who want to improve their communication skills in Spanish and broaden their understanding of the Hispanic world through connecting with the local Spanish speaking community. Each section may focus on different topics, such as health care, education, social services, history of immigration, and intercultural competence. The course has a required Community-Based-Learning component in which students engage with the Latino community through placements in such areas as health care, youth mentoring or tutoring programs, English as a New Language (ENL) classes, and facilitating educational workshops with parents. In this course, students integrate their service experiences with the academic components of the class through readings, research, reflective writing, and discussion.

Students will be introduced to Literatura Infantil y Juvenil (LIJ) in the Spanish-speaking world through a combination of considerable reading of LIJ across genres and levels and a critical perspective of LIJ via academic text and articles. Books read will include many award winners by prolific writers and illustrators of LIJ, as well as widely known writers for adults who have also written children's books. Among genres read will be folklore, narrative, fiction (representing afro-latino, indigenous and other multi-cultural groups; contemporary, realistic, historical), short story, and poetry. In addition, students will develop criteria for evaluating quality LIJ through a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. Finally, there is a Community-Based Learning (CBL) component where students will share LIJ with the local Latino community through CBL projects and a reading program with Latino youth. Pre-requiste: ROSP 20202 or above or placement by exam. This course can count as an advanced elective towards the major. Taught in Spanish. Students must have a Language Exam Score between 440 and 600 to enroll in this class.

Students wishing to enroll in this section MUST be enrolled concurrently in ROSP 30201/ILS 20710: Introduction to Latino Studies. Students who have completed the Notre Dame language requirement in Spanish are eligible to sign up for an additional single credit discussion section as part of the Languages Across the Curriculum (LxC) initiative of the College of Arts and Letters. Choosing this option means that students will do some additional reading in Spanish language materials (approximately 20-25 pages a week), and meet once a week with a graduate student or faculty tutor from the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures who will guide a discussion in Spanish and grade some brief writing assignments. The LxC discussion section in Spanish associated with this course will be graded on a pass/fail basis and will be credited on the student's transcript. Up to three LxC discussion sections can be applied toward a major, secondary major or minor in Spanish. Please talk to the instructor if you are interested in adding this supplemental credit.

Students will work with a South Bend neighborhood to explore a structural challenge and, with the guidance of a local artist, respond to this challenge alongside community members in creating an artistic piece that serves the good of the neighborhood. This seminar will also provide a “hands-on” experience as students are exposed to practices of participatory research methods and the art-making process.

This class investigates the murals in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, the city's neighborhood most closely identified with Latinos and Latinidad. Students will explore the cultural, historical, and social contexts that give rise to muralism and will examine the murals themselves over the course of several trips to the city. Our research will contribute to an exciting new digital humanities project that is building a mobile app and website devoted to the murals, so students' work will directly impact what the public knows about muralism in the city. Students will also gain training in digital humanities, including such skills as app development, geolocation, 3-D modeling, and data mining.

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.

This course explores the history, meanings, myths, and realities associated with narcotics in the United States. We will consider, for example, the fascinating history of cocaine as it went from miracle drug and panacea (as well as the active ingredient in Coca-Cola) in the early twentieth century to elite party drug in the 1970s to public health threat in the 1980s and 1990s. Through this example and many others, including marijuana’s dramatic shift from illegal to legal substance, we will pay special attention to drugs and social difference, exploring the ways that American ideas about narcotics relate to such matters as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, citizenship, and nation.

This course explores how, since the 1970s, Americans have disagreed on fundamental ideas regarding sex, race, history, foreign policy, class, the economy, and religion It comes to terms with why contemporary Americans can see reality in such radically divergent ways. Students will examine the way Americans of the last half century have fought over the "soul of the nation." Readings will address the liberal-conservative divide, fracture, and polarization.

This course will survey representations of Latinos in American cinema from the silent era to the present. We will examine how stereotypes associated with Latinos have been produced, reinforced, and challenged in American films - from "greasers" and "Latin lovers" to gangsters, kingpins, and border crossers. We will explore the fascinating contradiction that, despite a long history of misrepresentation and underrepresentation, Latinos have made significant contributions to Hollywood and independent cinema. We will also examine the rise of Latino directors in recent years and their drive to reframe the Latino image for American audiences. Screenings will range from the silent epic Martyrs of the Alamo (1915) to more recent films such as Maria Full of Grace (2004). Our interdisciplinary approach to the subject will draw upon readings from history, film theory and criticism, and ethnic/American studies. Students will take a midterm exam and make class presentations.

While race is a notoriously difficult concept to define, it is undoubtedly a powerful force in American life. But how do we know what we know about race? Where do these ideas come from? How will matters of race and representation change in the era of Barack Obama? Focusing on the late nineteenth century to the present, this course explores the ways in which ideas about race are formed, negotiated, and resisted in the arena of American popular culture. From blackface minstrelsy on the vaudeville stage to contemporary comedy, television, and music, this course will ask how popular culture actively shapes - rather than merely reflects - American ideas about race and ethnicity. Rather than emphasizing on a particular racial or ethnic group, we will more broadly examine the politics and practices of representing difference in the United States. By engaging with a diverse set of theoretical, historical, and primary texts, students will learn to approach and analyze popular culture with a critical eye.

This CAD course looks back to 1850, when urban industrial America began, and looks forward to 2050, when Notre Dame promises to be carbon neutral, to critically engage competing visions of individual, communal, and ecological flourishing. It focuses on economic, racial, and environmental justice as students explore how US political culture, the discipline of American Studies, and Catholic social teaching have clashed and converged and Americans proposed varying solutions to poverty, racism, and environmental degradation. After an introduction to American Studies, we turn to visions of the good life in foundational US political documents (the Declaration, the Constitution, and Inaugural Addresses) and in Catholic tradition (scriptural passages, theological essays, and papal encyclicals, from Rerum Novarum to Laudato Si'). Then the course's three main sections consider, in turn, economic equity, racial justice, and environmental restoration. Each section includes a "faith in action" case study and concludes with an "integrative essay" that puts Catholic social teaching into conversation with American Studies scholarship. In the final class session, Learning Groups present their synthesis of the course material, and, during the exam period, each student submits a final integrative essay that focuses on one of the issues—poverty, racism, or environmental degradation—and identifies what American Studies might learn from the Catholic Tradition and what the Catholic Tradition might learn from American Studies.

What does American Studies have to do with the rest of the world? A lot. The movement of people, ideas, and products across our national borders have influenced both the United States and the world around us. (Think immigration, commerce, study abroad programs, cultural fads like belly dance and gangnam style, but also, imperialism, terrorism, and drones.) In this course, we will explore both the presence of the world in the United States and the presence of the United States in the world, with a focus on the politics of culture. How have Americans imagined the world and how have non-Americans imagined the United States? Is there such a thing as "cultural imperialism" or "Americanization" and how does it work? How has culture influenced U.S. foreign policy and how have U.S. foreign policy makers and non-governmental groups sought to influence culture, both within the United States and elsewhere? The course has a chronological emphasis, beginning with the Spanish-Cuban-American war (1898) and U.S. imperialism in the Pacific, going on to the post-WWI "Wilsonian Moment", WWII, "the American Century" and the Cold War, and the War on Terror. Even more important, however, is its thematic emphasis on the connections between culture and policy. Requirements include discussion, reading responses, and a final research-based paper.

This course traces the developments of contemporary art practice in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and subsequently expands beyond this physical location to include global borders and artworks that reflect on living in between cultures, races, and languages. Students will develop a toolkit for analyzing the way borders shape culture and identity (race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, and ethnicity) in transnational points of contact. With an emphasis on printmaking, performance, photography, and film, the course will dwell on borders that respond to paradigms of fear and desire, contagion and containment, utopia and dystopia. Students will enhance their skills in visual analysis and writing, and refine their ability to conduct original research. No pre-requisites or prior knowledge of Art History and Latinx Studies is required for the course. 3 credits

What do the paintings and sculptures in museums and the manuscripts and antique books in archives tell us about our collective past? What do they tell us about how value, importance, and worth have been ascribed across time? As users of these cultural collections, how might we address inequities and silences within them? The first half of the course provides an introduction to the history of cultural collecting and its many issues. Students will apply a critical gaze to the collections held in our campus repositories - the Snite Museum of Art, Rare Books and Special Collections and University Archives - and in museums and archives beyond the Notre Dame campus. In the second half of the course, students will create a single online exhibition around the theme of diversity using our campus collections. This exhibition will be published on the Hesburgh Library's Digital Exhibitions and Collections page and students will be given curatorial credit for their work. The course schedule will begin with seminar-style meetings and move to individual work, one-on-one sessions with instructors, peer review and project evaluation

Latin American Photography

Cinema and hospitality in a broad sense: how do films embody the art of welcoming, of hosting, of including and caring? Three months after his election in 2013, Pope Francis visited the Island of Lampedusa (Italy), one of the world’s deadliest forefronts of the humanitarian catastrophe often referred to as the global “refugee crisis.” He denounced the “globalization of indifference” in which no one wants to take responsibility for “our brothers and sisters” migrants who suffer and die. Ten years later, while the Pope is again addressing the “crisis” in Marseilles, in the month of August 2023 alone, 2,095 “migrants” have lost their lives in their attempts to cross the Mediterranean Ocean. Through a general concept of “hospitality,” our class will offer a holistic, cinematic approach to a world scene in which an unprecedented number of individuals are forced to flee their homes. We will focus on the (extremely) old notion of hospitality (a decisively matrixial one) and analyze films that put this concept at their core both formally and narratively. One critical goal will be to explore the various cultural understandings and practices that forge the highly cultural, both idiosyncratic and universal art of inviting, including, unconditionally hosting, and caring for the guest, the stranger, the child, the unknown. An ideal of protection, empathy, and compassion without which there is no responsibility, no ethics, all concepts that are the cornerstone of a feminist ethics that will nourish our research.

This course surveys art made in Chicago from the nineteenth century to the present. We will examine the rise of Chicago as an art capital through the founding of art academies and museums, the hosting of World Fairs, and the era of modern architecture after the Great Fire of 1871. We will analyze iconic artworks from Chicago’s diverse art scene which became home to the Black Arts Movement, Chicano Art Movement, Feminist Art Movement, and one of the country’s most ambitious public art programs. Students will develop skills in research, writing, and visual literacy. At least one trip to Chicago will be a required part of the course.

The United Nations estimates that an unprecedented 71 million people around the world have been forced to flee from their respective homes. Among them are nearly 26 million refugees, half of whom are under the age of 18. Media and social science scholarship represent refugees as passive recipients of western aid and avoid critical examination of the global and historical conditions that create "refugees."This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of critical refugee studies (CRS) to re-conceptualize the refugee not as a problem to be solved but as a site of social and political critiques. CRS illuminates the processes of colonization, war, and displacement. This course examines militarism and migration as well as refugee voices written in their own words. We will assess a variety of sources, including oral history, ethnography, art, graphic novels, and interdisciplinary scholarship from humanities and social science.

American ruins are increasingly visible today, from images of urban decay and piles of debris in Detroit and Gary to movies and novels (The Book of Eli, The Road) depicting post-apocalyptic "ruinscapes" of abandoned towns, derelict factories, crumbling monuments, and deserted shopping malls, variously populated by zombies, vampires, and survivalists. Ruins typical signify "disaster," "failure," "defeat," and "the past." Why, then, in a nation that has repeatedly defined itself in terms of promise, progress, and success-the American Dream-are visions of ruin, real and imagined, so prevalent today? This class explores the history and meaning of American ruins, relating contemporary fascination with ruins ("ruin porn") to currently held attitudes about modernity, technology, citizenship, consumerism, the rule of law, and the environment. Course materials include novels, films, and photographs; coursework includes fieldtrips (to Detroit and Gary), essays, and discussion.

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.

Baseball is one of the most enduringly popular and significant cultural activities in the United States. Since the late 19th century, baseball has occupied an important place for those wishing to define and understand "America." Who has been allowed to play on what terms? How have events from baseball's past been remembered and re-imagined? What is considered scandalous and why (and who decides)? How has success in baseball been defined and redefined? Centering baseball as an industry and a cultural practice, this course will cover topics that include the political, economic, and social development of professional baseball in the United States; the rise of organized baseball industry and Major League Baseball; and globalization in professional baseball. Readings for this course will include chapters from texts that include Rob Rucks's How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game (2011), Adrian Burgos's Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line (2007), Daniel Gilbert's Expanding the Strike Zone: Baseball in the Age of Free Agency (2013), Robert Elias's How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad (2010), and Michael Butterworth's Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity: The National Pastime and American Identity During the War on Terror (2010). Coursework may include response papers, primary source analysis, and a final project.

In 1975, the African-American writer Ishmael Reed put culture at the center of politics: “If I have you revering 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 for 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, Paul Beatty, Maxine Hong Kingston, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Wendy Trevino.

This seminar course 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.

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.

Drawing on Lave and Wenger's (1991) theory of legitimate peripheral participation, this Community Based Learning course is structured to allow students to participate in two communities: (1) an elementary classroom during English Language Arts instruction time to both observe the teacher's pedagogy and work directly with children and (2) as a developing literacy researcher with students in the course. Students will learn about research based best practices in literacy instruction during seminars and apply these strategies and approaches in the classroom while working with small groups and individual children. Students will also learn about and apply qualitative approaches to data collection and analysis to study 2-3 children's growth over the semester and to make meaningful and insightful connections between theory and practice. Since the majority of students' time will be dedicated to read-alouds and teaching multicultural children's literature, students will develop an extensive annotated bibliography of children's literature to deepen understanding and appreciation for literature for children. On-Site: Students should plan to spend 3 hours per week at Muessel Elementary School (based on when ELA is taught, typically in the morning, and ND students' schedule). Beginning Week 3, we will only meet on Tuesdays for seminar on campus. Students are responsible for their own transportation.

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 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.

Migration is a prevailing global phenomenon that affects millions of peoples around the world. According to the UNHCR report, at the end of 2019, there had been 79.5 million forcibly displaced people around the world. At the same time, refugees and migrants experience migration- and displacement-related physical and psychosocial stress and trauma, which may increase their vulnerability and affects their health and well-being. This course will explore, engage, and analyze contemporary migration flows - movements of people across national and international borders - and the ways human mobility shape refugees' and migrants' lived experiences, cultural meanings, social values, and health. How and why particular modes of mobility are permitted, encouraged, and enabled while others are conversely, banned, regulated, policed, and prevented? How do contemporary forms of displacement may challenge conventional understandings of who gets to be defined and accepted as a refugee? Why do we have so many different categories of people who simply seek refuge? Do these different categories indicate different treatments? How is migration associated with higher levels of mental health disorders among refugee/migrant populations? The course will engage with such questions by focusing on events that occurred in the second half of the twenty-first century in Europe, including both the EU and non-EU states. We will rely on the selected readings and documentaries as they reflect an integrative anthropological approach to migration, displacement, and refugeeness. Taking into account lived experiences, identity, social values, cultural meanings, health, and well-being, we will explore migration, borders, and displacement as a subjective experience and sites of ethical, socioeconomic, political, and cultural examinations and critiques. Topics will include transnational migration, terminology, citizenship, borders, asylum policy, health, and well-being. This course will also enrich your understanding of the fluidity of different categories, processes underlying refugees and migrants' cultural and social tuning, as well as their biosocial responses, resilience, and adaptability under conditions of migration and displacement. The course will be run in a seminar-style, and students will be expected to analyze and debate core readings in class.

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 seeks to explore connections between environment and culture change by introducing students to the diversity of cultures living in the Southwest. We begin by learning about indigenous people living in the Southwest today including the Pueblo peoples (e.g., Hopi, Zuni, Santa Clara, Cochiti, Acoma), Navajo, Ute, and Tohono O’odham using ethnography and contemporary native histories. We will then travel back in time to learn about the complex histories of these people, particularly the ancestral Pueblo, to places like Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, the Rio Grande, the Mimbres Valley, and the Phoenix Basin. Our explorations will cover from the earliest Paleoindians (11,500 years ago) to the 13th century Migrations to European contact, the establishment of Spanish Missions, and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680-1692. We will then bring this discussion full circle to today. Along the way, we will explore the impact of large-scale, long-term processes such as the adoption of agriculture, village formation, religious change, migration, and warfare on the rich historical landscape of the Southwest.

This course introduces students to the diversity of cultures living in the American Southwest from the earliest Paleoindians (11,500 years ago) to European contact, the establishment of Spanish Missions, and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680-1692. Most of the course is devoted to learning about the complex cultural developments in the Mimbres Valley, Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, the Rio Grande, and the Phoenix Basin. Class work and discussions will focus on important issues such as the adoption of agriculture, the development of villages, the transformation of ideological beliefs and political organization, the importance of migration, and the impact of warfare using information on environmental relationships, technology, and other aspects of material culture. Students will also learn about descendant populations living in the Southwest today including the Pueblo peoples (e.g., Hopi, Santa Clara, Acoma) and Tohono O'odham.

This applied research methods course will allow students to examine research as a driver of change in poverty studies. Throughout this course students will learn a variety of research methods that will equip them with the skills to engage research that in some way seeks to disrupt, reduce, or abolish poverty. Students will learn the foundations of applied research through qualitative and quantitative methods including sampling basics, grounded ethnographic approaches, survey design and the utilization of secondary sources. Students will also engage with experiential learning that is focused on problem-based goals and relevant applications in the area of poverty. This course will create an opportunity for students to learn practical approaches to data identification, collection, analysis and dissemination. It will include a lecture and seminar-based format where students are introduced to key concepts in research methods as well as hands-on opportunities to practice what they've learned in collaboration with community partnerships. At the end of this course, students will have the strategies, tools and confidence to handle complex data, to develop practical solutions to current challenges, and develop a clearer understanding of the varying ways knowledge can be created and accessed. The course will culminate in a group research project.

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

This class is dedicated to the contemplation and analysis of American (in the hemispheric sense) narratives that trace the trajectory of outbreaks of widespread illness to their subsequent mitigation. A major source of reflection and analysis will be the instructor's experience nursing in an ICU during the first and second COVID-19 surges in New York City. Drawing upon literature, film, philosophy, history, and medical science, the focus will be on medicine and healing as a hinge point between politics and life. The class will analyze medicine as power; specifically, in what Michel Foucault described as biopower or "making live and letting die." In short, we will study theories, practices and stories of healing. However, instead of focusing on European texts such as Bocaccio's The Decameron (1353), Shelley's The Last Man (1826), or Albert Camus's The Plague (1947), this class draws on the tensions between the Eurocentric canon and its deconstruction in the Americas (Machado de Assis, Bellatin, Cuarón, Poe, Cazals, Porter). These tensions manifest at the points where bare life and political life converge, where class, race, geography, and the economics of healing complicate an intervention so simple as quarantine. Nevertheless, and as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us, some—whose daily circulation provide essential goods and services to society—cannot afford to quarantine, and it is their stories that fall outside the scope of Europe's literary grasp.

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 reflect on Hip Hop and its presence in everyday life, from questions about narrative medicine to its use in public health campaigns.

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.

This course offers a critical examination of what it means to be an immigrant or child of immigrants through scholarly works, memoirs, blogs, and popular journalism. Since the liberalization of immigration policy in 1965, immigrants from Latin America and Asia are becoming an increasing and emergent demographic of American society. In major American cities such as Los Angeles and New York, they comprise over 50% of the population. This course focuses on how immigrants and the children of immigrants experience the United States. How are immigrants changing the US racial and ethnic structure? How do their experiences differ given varying legal statuses? How is the second generation becoming American? We will explore these questions through readings that focus on family, religion, education, dating and sexuality. This course will include a community based learning component where students will work with immigrant serving organizations. Students will have the option to teach citizenship classes or to work with immigrant children. Service will be 2-3 hours per week outside of class.

Despite the growing presence of Central Americans in the United States in the last four decades, Central America and its people have occupied a paradoxical presence in the popular U.S. imaginary. As noted by literary scholar Yajaira Padilla, they are hypervisible as “threatening guerillas,” undocumented migrants, domestic workers, and “gang-bangers,” yet their lived experiences remain illegible in the dominant culture. This course traces the literary and cultural narratives of Central American experience within and in relation to the United States. We consider fiction, poetry, film, literary nonfiction, theater, music/sound, visual and digital culture, and documentary alongside literary, historical and cultural studies scholarship. We begin by anchoring ourselves in key scholarship of U.S. Central American literary and cultural studies and the travel narratives of those who “witnessed” Central America in the mid 19th century. Next, we consider writers from the U.S. and Central America who witnessed and experienced the effects of U.S. imperialism in the region, from the making of the Panama Canal to Cold War-era military interventions. We then focus on the creative narratives of Central American diasporas across media and forms, from the 1990s to the present. Across these units, we also attend to how Afrodiasporic, Indigenous, gendered and queer experiences challenge dominant understandings of Centroamericanidad. We cover works by and about Central Americans across the region, including El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Costa Rica, and Belize, as well as Garífuna and Maya territories.

This course explores the history, meanings, myths, and realities associated with narcotics in the United States. We will consider, for example, the fascinating history of cocaine as it went from miracle drug and panacea (as well as the active ingredient in Coca-Cola) in the early twentieth century to elite party drug in the 1970s to public health threat in the 1980s and 1990s. Through this example and many others, including marijuana’s dramatic shift from illegal to legal substance, we will pay special attention to drugs and social difference, exploring the ways that American ideas about narcotics relate to such matters as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, citizenship, and nation.

This course examines why some individuals decide to become immigrants through a cost benefit analysis, viewing migration as an investment in human capital. It addresses the selection among immigrants and how they integrate and assimilate in the destination country. Primary focus is given to the labor market, wages in particular, both of immigrants and of natives in the host country. A distinction is made between economic migrants and refugees and discrimination in its varied forms is also studied. The fiscal impact of immigration is discussed along with immigration policy in a global context.

This course focuses on studying the causes and consequences of migration from and through Central America. It addresses issues of climate change and sustainability, such as food insecurity, flooding and hurricanes, disease outbreaks, ethnic-based inequalities, as well as violence in the region with a particular focus on policy solutions and mitigation and adaptation responses to climate change. It explores the role of economic development and public policy, the role of businesses and social corporate responsibility, and the implications of undocumented migration to neighboring countries and to the United States.

In her book, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, Edwidge Danticat states that "we are all living dyingly." The concept of death and/or dying is part of our collective and shared experience. It presents us with the larger possibilities on how to live, how to experience, how to persevere, and how to change. In this course we will examine the politics of trauma, disaster, and memory. We will read across genres in fiction, essays, and poetry in order to write work that contemplates memory as a locus for resilience. We will look at how writers are grappling with some of the more pressing issues of our time i.e., climate change, natural disaster, femicide, colonialism, war, among others. Students will write prose that looks to redress what it means to "live dyingly."

This course is designed to introduce students to Mexico's modern history and its people. We will pay particular attention to political and artistic movements during the Porfiriato (1876-1910), the Revolution (1910-1938), and the post-revolutionary period (1938-1970s). We will include a detailed discussion of the recent disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa, in the State of Guerrero. Students will examine what it meant to be a "militant" in the political world of artistic production and social movements and the different ways in which the Mexican state responded to this militancy. We will explore how and why a broad range of representative leaders of Mexico's most important political and cultural revolutions used paintings, murals, graphic art, cartoons, literature, music, film, and graffiti to (A) lead a social, cultural, and political restructuring of their respective communities; (B) export their unique notions of "Revolution" to the nation and the world; and (C) question the contradictions that some artists (at times) faced within their own revolutionary movements.

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 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.

Few American regions have generated as many cultural narratives, myths, and icons as the American West. Exploring conflicts and conquests alongside Western culture and the creation of the mythic West, we will examine the West through the multiple perspectives of the many peoples who have lived there. Using novels, histories, first-hand accounts, art, and film, we will trace the history and culture of the West. While discussing the evolution of the West's regional identity, we'll explore topics like episodes of violence and conquest, the creation of the US-Mexico border, the rise of national parks and tourism, and the West Coast's counterculture. In this course, we will investigate how violent frontier battles and brutal discrimination became tamed and commodified to sell the West to Americans through fashion, film, and tourism. This course is open to all students; no previous knowledge of the topic is required.

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 is an interdisciplinary history course examining the Latino experience in the United States after 1848. We will examine the major demographic, social, economic and political trends of the past 150 years with an eye to understanding Latino/a America. Necessarily a large portion of the subject matter will focus on the history of Mexican-Americans, and Mexican immigrants in the Southwest and Midwestern United States, but we will also explore the histories of Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Latin-Americans within the larger Latino/a community. Latinos are US citizens and as such the course will spend significant time on the status of these groups before the law, and their relations with the state, at the federal, local, and community level. To explore these issues within the various Latino communities of the US we will explore the following key topics covered: historical roots of "Latinos/as" in the US; the evolution of a Latino/a ethnicity and identity within the US; immigration, transmigration, and the shaping of Latino/a communities; Latino/a labor history; segregation; civil rights; nationalism and transnationalism; the Chicano Civil Rights Movement; Latinos in film; and post-1965 changes in Latino/a life.

TThis major-level course is designed to provide students with a substantive overview of Latina/o immigration and community formation in Chicago during the twentieth century, and how it became one of the largest Latino cities in the United States. The Windy City's rise in the nineteenth century as an industrial metropolis transformed it as a magnet for capital, culture, and labor. A series of key events around the turn of the century and into the early decades of the twentieth century - the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, the rise of economic production during World War I (1914-1918), and the Immigration Act of 1924 that greatly reduced Eastern and Southern European immigration - would come to shape the patterns, processes, and terms of Latina/o migration into Chicago, particularly those of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. Mexicans and other Latin Americans joined the Great Migrations of African Americans and ethnic whites to look for better opportunities in the north, and since then, Latino Chicagoans have forged communities as they have also negotiated the broader social, cultural, and political currents of American history throughout the twentieth century. This course will introduce students to these broader patterns as explored through recent scholarship on Latinos/as in Chicago. Students will also read key primary sources in the field and consider the historiographical debates about retelling this aspect of Chicago's history.

This course explores how ideas about race and racism have been intertwined with scientific, medical, and technological developments, shaping society since the 18th century. While recognizing that race is fundamentally a social construct, the course delves into scientific efforts to quantify, measure, and categorize individuals by race from early anthropometry to contemporary developments like the Human Genome Project and artificial intelligence. By critically analyzing scientific theories that produced and built upon ideas of racial hierarchy, students will develop a deep understanding of how race, racism, and racial inequality have been embedded into scientific knowledge, and thus, societal understanding. Students will also examine the historical context of racial disparities in healthcare, including the development of racialized medical theories, and will explore the role of technology in reinforcing or challenging racial biases, from the early days of photography to modern AI and surveillance technologies. This course is tailored for students with interests in the history of science and the production of scientific knowledge, as well as those curious about the origins of scientific racism and racial inequality.

The aim of this class is to try to understand what conquest, as we have traditionally called it, meant to the people who experienced it in some parts of the Americas that joined the Spanish monarchy in the sixteenth century. We'll concentrate on indigenous sources - documentary, pictorial, and material - and try to adopt the indigenous point of view, without neglecting sources mediated by Europeans. Although the class will concentrate on selected cases from Mesoamerica, the lecturer will try to set the materials in the context of other encounters, both within the Americas and further afield; and students will be free, if they wish, to explore case-studies from anywhere they choose in the Americas (in consultation with the lecturer and subject to his approval) in their individual projects.

This course offers an introduction to the history of Latin America through the study of film (in combination with more traditional print sources).

This course is designed to introduce students to the Mexican (1910-1940s), Cuban (1959-1970s), Nicaraguan (1979-1990), and Anti-Neoliberal (1990s-present) Revolutions and their impact in Latin America, as represented in the arts. Following a brief introduction to the various definitions of the word "Revolution," students will examine what it meant to be a Latin American revolutionary in the political world of artistic production and reception. In particular, students will explore how and why a broad range of representative leaders of Latin America's most important political and cultural revolutions used paintings, murals, graphic art, poetry, music, and film to (A) lead a social, cultural, and political restructuring of their respective countries; (B) export their unique notions of "Revolution" to the world; and (C) question the contradictions that some artists at times faced within their own revolutionary movements.

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 on 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 on 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.

This course will examine the long history of struggle for civil rights by the Latina and Latino communities. Representing an estimated 65.3 million residents of the United States, the demographic is the largest minority group. However, their experiences represent a clear paradox. Despite their “American” identity, they remain “Others” to many in the United States. Beginning with the forceful incorporation of ethnic Mexicans in the mid-nineteenth century, this course covers the triumphs and failures of collective action by this community for a variety of rights and access on their path to inclusion. These include workplace strikes for equal pay, unionization drives, walkouts against educational discrimination, interfaith alliances for immigration rights, and more. Through covering various topics, this course documents the strategies Latinas and Latinos utilized in their social movements and negotiates the consequences of those tactics and their lasting influence in their communities. In these struggles for equality, Latinas and Latinos advocated for educational reform, reshaped public space, and influenced the negotiations of their place in society.

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.

Scholars and activists use the concept of the "carceral state" to describe the official, government use of criminalization, surveillance, and mass imprisonment to exercise control over society. This course examines the histories, cultures, politics, and economics of the US carceral state. Reading feminist scholarship from across the disciplines, we will study its genealogy — 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 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 violence, abolish prisons, defund police, and build opportunities for restorative justice. We will ask and address such questions as: How does the US 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 reform, transform, or abolish the carceral state? How have media and the arts been used to normalize and/or critique the carceral state? And can we imagine a world without prisons or police?

The legacy of comics is ever present in society today. Many graphic novels are present in culture today, from various streaming services to box office sensations and flops to superheroes. For decades, graphic novels have provided critiques of environmental pollution, racism, the urban crisis, xenophobia, and authoritarianism. From rewriting the history of Texas to advocating for labor rights for Latina domestic workers, Latina/o creators have turned to graphic novels as a medium for documenting and disseminating their history. This course offers a broad overview of and introduction to the production of Latina/o History through Graphic Novels. The course will balance a thematic approach of central themes throughout Latina/o History, such as migration, labor, and social movements, and the methodology and terminology of reading comics. Once the center point of culture wars, graphic narratives are increasingly accepted today as forms that cultivate sophisticated types of verbal-visual literacy that actively critique forms of knowledge and contemporary policies and offer alternative forms of history. This class will explore how Latina/o graphic narratives have long been an essential source of cultural expression and central to the Latina/o communities documenting their history on their terms. From revisionist accounts to biographies of leaders to instilling superpowers to child migrants and domestic workers, graphic novels offer a compelling perspective into complementary historical narratives.

The most influential voices in the United States today—including those working in media outlets (i.e., CNN, FOX, MSNBC), the entertainment industry (i.e., Hollywood and Netflix), and the government (i.e., senators and governors)—overwhelmingly describe the countries of Central America and the Caribbean as “unruly”, “violent”, and unilaterally “impoverished.” Not too different from those given by their counterparts during the 19th century, these descriptions have been primarily framed in relation to the “tropics,” an “imagined region” of the world composed of “banana republics”, as we will discuss in this class, that always seemed to be far from the benefits of “modernity” and the advances of “Western civilization.” But in complicating these vague, misleading, and treacherous descriptions of the broader Latin American region, students will also be presented with the opportunity to explore a variety of challenges that ordinary Latin Americans face today, from a historical perspective. For example, in discussing the roots and long-term effects of modernization theory and military interventions, students will explore why Haitians and Hondurans, but not necessarily Costa Ricans, have left their respective countries in massive numbers. In comparative cases, they will also learn why ordinary people in El Salvador have welcomed a ruthless government of “law and order”; why their neighbors in Guatemala have instead looked for a populist leftist leader to demand justice and greater democracy; why Nicaragua has betrayed a once egalitarian revolution with a totalitarian regime; and why Puerto Rico has failed to protect its “citizens” from environmental and health disasters, and in comparison, why socialist Cuba has fared better in these regards, but has otherwise silenced those who criticize the ruling elite and has often been accused in international courts of violating human rights. Finally, as further points of contrast, students will learn why liberal and conservative politicians at times welcomed the presence of US foreign agents in their respective countries and why American politicians at times joined cautionary forces with their counterparts in Israel, France, and Argentina in combatting the long Cold War in Central America and the Caribbean. In providing historical context to these and other questions, this course will introduce students to the ambivalent and often complicated relationship(s) between the United States and its neighbors in Central America and the Caribbean, from the early 19th century to the present.

This is a course on twentieth century Latin American history. It examines the region through the life, writings, global impact, mythical significance, and legacy of revolutionary icon Ernesto Che Guevara (1928-1967). While the discussions will mostly concentrate on the events that shaped Guevara's life, the class will also delve into Guevara's involvement in Africa, his death in Bolivia, and his legacy in the Americas. We will also pay particular attention to the social and political environment that surrounded his birth in Argentina in the late 1920s, his political awakening as a bohemian medical student traveling in his motorcycle throughout South America during the 1950s, and his rise as a key leader of the Cuban Revolution following the 1954 CIA-sponsored coup in Guatemala. We will conclude the class with a discussion on the emergence of Che Guevara as a pop icon commodity in more recent decades. Following a close look at the life and writings of Guevara and his legacy, students will be asked to write a research paper that examines Che as a symbol of rebelliousness, as differently re-appropriated by a variety of movements, ranging from student activists, religious figures, film directors and conservative critics, to leaders of labor, gay, environmental, feminist, and indigenous movements. Please note: the class does not exclusively put the emphasis on Che Guevara-the man-but rather on the global events and influential figures that shaped and responded to his radicalization, on the one hand, and the different ways in which a variety of people made sense of Guevara's legacy and his iconography, on the other.

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 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.

In the past four decades, the United States has experienced an unprecedented rise in income and wealth inequality. Inequalities across multiple other dimensions (race, ethnicity, geography, and gender) are also pervasive. This course examines a multitude of questions related to politics, policy, and varieties of inequality: How has the American political system and the policies it produces affected levels of inequality in the U.S.? How has inequality shaped American politics and policy? What is the relationship between income and power? What are the political consequences of increasing income inequality? What are the implications of racial and ethnic inequities for the quality of democratic representation? Which policies increase political inequality? What are effective remedies for unequal influence? Finally, which institutions move democratic practice furthest towards full democratic equality and which ones serve to reinforce historical hierarchies? This course is designed to help students understand the political causes and consequences of inequality in America and consider potential interventions to support human flourishing for all. The course will be organized as a reading-focused seminar, with a combination of discussion and lecture rooted in cutting-edge scholarly research and evidence-based public commentary. Students will develop a substantial final research project that will be presented to an audience beyond the classroom.

Why have some countries in Latin American developed into democracies, while others have seen the rise of dictatorships? Why have some countries remained at peace while others are often at war? This course examines historical, economic, regional, and international factors that have influenced political development in Latin America.

The course will examine U.S. policies and practices to combat human trafficking including how U.S. policies advance the prevention of trafficking in persons, the protection of victims and survivors and the punishment of perpetrators as a foreign policy objective of the U.S. Students will develop a basic understanding of the various aspects of and perspectives in human trafficking including domestic and international law; foreign nationals and United States Citizens; victim services, survivor aftercare and law enforcement and sex and labor trafficking. Students will also analyze international trafficking prohibitions under the various international conventions and identify current trafficking issues in the United States, with a particular focus on commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor and involuntary servitude and the range of remedies available when rights have been violated. Finally, students will identify gaps in existing remedies and formulate policies to address them.

Despite, or perhaps because of the history of enslavement, exclusion, and continued discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, many Americans have organized and mobilized in search of a more perfect union. These struggles can be seen within the Civil Rights Movement, Black Panther Party, Chicano Student Movement, American Indian Movement, Immigrant Rights Movement, and the recent Black Lives Matter protests. Through analysis of political movements and moments in American history, this course will examine the concept of political power, the avenues often excluded groups take to participate in politics, and what it means for those groups to successfully transform American democracy. Along the way we will read works from authors such as the American Founders, W.E.B. Du Bois, Huey P. Newton, G. William Domhoff, Frances Fox Piven, James Baldwin, and others.

What do terms like “structural,” “systemic,” or “institutional” racism mean? What are the structures, systems, and institutions that historically have contributed, and continue to contribute, to racial injustice in the United States? Most importantly, how can understanding these concepts help us dismantle the barriers to racial justice in America? This course will focus on the ways that the law and the legal system in the United States has been a tool to create and sustain racial inequity, as well as the reforms, both historic and ongoing, to redress them. Course materials will include cases and commentary. Together, we will examine legal structures in the areas of housing, education, banking and finance, voting, employment discrimination, criminal law, and environmental justice, among others. The course will draw from the Klau Institute’s archives in its five-year long Building and Anti-Racist Vocabulary lecture series featuring authors, public intellectuals, faith leaders, and external and internal members of the academy. 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.

Incidents of hate-driven political violence and domestic terrorism have increased in the United States in recent years and are the highest they have been in decades. Non-partisan studies show this upsurge in violence has been driven primarily by white-supremacist, anti-Muslim, and antigovernment extremism. What are the causes of this upsurge in extremism and political violence? What is its impact upon contemporary society, religion, and politics? What do the categories and practices of peacebuilding have to offer for purposes of constructive and transformational responses to such violence and its causes? This course explores answers to these questions. It examines how the causes and conditions of the upsurge in extremist politics and political violence relate to racism, nationalism, xenophobia, and the political weaponizing of American religion. We will explore such factors as the role of ethno-nationalism in the wide-spread Evangelical Christian embrace of QAnon conspiracy theories and political organizing, the merging of Catholic and Orthodox Christian "traditionalism" with political authoritarianism (e.g. especially as modeled by contemporary Hungary, Poland, and Russia), the so-called "Alt-Right" organizing and activism (e.g. the "Unite the Right" marches and rallies in Charlottesville), the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capital, the relation of the so-called "Gun Lobby" to increased militance of political rhetoric and organizing, militia organizing and participation in political violence and terrorism, and invocations of a looming "civil war" as the inevitable result of deep and persistent political polarization in the U.S. Readings will include Janelle Wong's Immigrants, Evangelicals, and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change; Kristen Kobes Du Mez's From Jesus to John Wayne; Cynthia Miller-Idriss' Hate in the Homeland; Barbara Walters' How Civil Wars Start; Sarah Riccardi-Swartz's Between Heaven and Russia; and Ryan Busse's Gun Fight, among others.

This course introduces students to major actors, institutions, processes, and policies of sub-state governments in the United States. Through an intensive comparative examination of historical and contemporary politics in city governments, we will gain an understanding of municipal government and its role within the larger contexts of state and national government.

Immigration is an issue of increasing importance in the United States. Few issues have generated as much debate and emotion as the immigration policy. The goal of this course is to provide students with an overview of the critical normative and academic questions in political science regarding immigration in the U.S. What factors have affected contemporary and historical immigration policy in the United States? In particular how have economics, demographics, politics, religion, culture, environmental concerns, and ethnic and nationalist interests impacted the nature of immigration politics and policy? How have groups leveraged political influence for desired immigration policy outcomes? We will study the impact of worldwide immigration and population trends on the formulation of American policy. The emphasis will be on an academic understanding of how immigration policy has been affected by domestic and international demographic and political factors

The U.S. Census estimates there are over 55 million Latinos living in the U.S. today; and by 2060, that number is expected to double. In this course, we will explore the implications of these demographic trends for U.S. politics - past and present. Divided into three main sections, the course is designed to provide students with a broad overview of Latinos in American politics. Beginning with the question of who counts as "Latino," the first section addresses the history of Latino sub-groups in the United States, Latino identity, and shifts in the demographics of the U.S. Latino population over time. In the second section, we will focus on Latino political behavior - from public opinion to protest, voting to campaigning for elected office. In the third section, we will explore the consequences of political institutions. Here, we will explore the development of U.S. immigration policy and the militarization of immigration law enforcement, with particular focus on how the general public, activists, and policymakers are responding to these institutional processes.

Politics of Latin America is intended to be a multi-disciplinary introduction to critical issues within contemporary Latin American culture, society, politics, and economy. An assumption behind the organization of this course is that many of the traditional boundaries between different disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities are drawn somewhat arbitrarily, and that a more comprehensive understanding of Latin America can, and even should, be approached from a number of different analytic and disciplinary lenses. Thus, we will trespass traditional disciplinary boundaries from time to time over the course of the semester. The course is divided into two major parts. The first part is organized around a number of key analytic lenses, which we will employ sequentially with an aim to gaining a deeper appreciation of important aspects of contemporary Latin America. We will begin with a discussion of the utility of "culture" as a tool for understanding Latin America. Is there such a thing as "Latin America" understood as a discrete category of countries, and if so, what do they share in common? We will follow this discussion with an exploration of what is certainly a chief cultural expression among any people, an exploration of levels of religiosity and their relationship to social and political behavior. Other key features of culture will be woven into the analyses of the case studies we will undertake for the remainder of the course. We will explore the wide variation in the quality of democratic governance in different Latin American countries. And we will we look to some of the sources of that variation, including democratic institution building, economic and social policy making, and the persistence of populist politics, and forces in the international arena, such as U.S Foreign Policy, among other factors. In the remainder of the course, we will look specifically at country-cases in comparative perspective, in particular Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina

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?

We are living through a watershed moment in United States history. Structural racism is at the forefront of the national discourse. Yet, the threat that racism holds on our nation's most cherished ideals of democracy and justice is hardly new. Generations of activists, scholars, and everyday people have fought and persevered to bring about social, cultural, and policy change. This course engages deeply with topics relevant to the national discourse on racial and ethnic relations in the U.S. The first part of the course examines key concepts, focusing on the social construction of race and ethnicity, prejudice, and discrimination. The second part reviews the historical experiences of Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans. The third and final part of the course centers on four critical issues that are especially relevant in 2020: (1) immigration; (2) political disenfranchisement; (3) racial and ethnic disparities in health; and (4) racism in the criminal justice system.

The crime narrative, a large category that includes the mystery novel, detective fiction, testimonial, and other subgenres, is often thought of as a minor genre limited by its formulas. It may be entertaining, but it isn't "serious" fiction. This course pays serious attention to the genre and its development in Latin America from its origins in the late 19th century to today, focusing on the issues of memory and identity. The goal is to see what these narratives can tell us about the societies they represent, the traumas and conflicts they dramatize, and the losses and mysteries that attend them.

This is an upper-division course for students with advanced preparation. It serves as the introduction to the analysis and explication of Spanish-language literary texts. Short texts in prose, poetry, and theatre from a variety of periods and countries within the Hispanic world are read, presented, and discussed. The course is a prerequisite for the survey courses, and must be completed by the end of the junior year.

The focus of the course will be on representations of indigenous peoples and the issue of Spanish American identity. This course may count for either the Early or Modern Latin-American area requirement, depending on the subject of the student's final paper. Taught in Spanish.

This is an advanced-intermediate fifth-semester culture-based Spanish course designed for students who want to improve their communication skills in Spanish and broaden their understanding of the Hispanic world. Students will work with selected Latino families to preserve and document their histories, creating a lasting record that they can proudly pass down to future generations. By being involved in this important project, students will not only enhance their language skills, but also their cultural awareness, of and sensitivity to, this growing demographic group, as well as further develop their civic engagement. Through literature, film, current events, and guest speakers, students will develop knowledge about migration issues, family immigration histories, and problems facing our Latino communities in general, and particularly in South Bend. Students through ethical engagements will work on a collaborative creation and preservation of memory (memory of an experience that shapes everyday life and the future). Using storytelling techniques, students will work with families to create a collaborative book detailing their life and path to our community. The dispositions that the students will further develop through this class are a better understanding of the Latino culture and appreciation for our customs, an awareness of the diversity of Latino culture, an intercultural competence as well as a reflective sensibility.

Students will hone their oral and written skills through the study of a myriad of the most popular cultural activities in Brazil. MPB, Música Sertaneja, Pop, Funk, Soap Operas, Popular Movies, Soccer and Volleyball will provide students with a rich panorama of Contemporary Pop Culture in Brazil while revealing deeper conflicts and tensions within Brazilian society. Offered in Portuguese. Students will hone their oral and written skills through the study of a myriad of the most popular cultural activities in Brazil. MPB, Música Sertaneja, Pop, Funk, Soap Operas, Popular Movies, Soccer and Volleyball will provide students with a rich panorama of Contemporary Pop Culture in Brazil while revealing deeper conflicts and tensions within Brazilian society. Offered in Portuguese.

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.

Students will explore translation theory, ethics, preparations, procedures and techniques by means of Monica Baker's In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation. Together with an advanced language text to improve language skills, and selected readings to provide a strong preparation for meaningful interaction with their community partners, the course will provide real-world opportunities for application and feedback for the skills the students develop. Students will be expected to work with the community partner for 10-12 hours per semester, which typically entails a visit once per week to the partner site.

A survey of literary trends and major figures in modern Spanish-American literature from 1880 to the present. Readings of selected texts in prose, poetry, and theatre. Recommended prerequisite: ROSP 30310.

This course is not for the faint of heart, but will explore the feint, adept, and deft use of Civics and History courses to try and create one ideal American narrative in K-12 classrooms. History in American K-12 classrooms and beyond is always political! Historical thinking is also supposed to be an active way of learning and establishing new ideas when there are new pieces of information or additional epistemologies not a passive regurgitation of facts. Join this class to struggle with how a more representative curriculum might help foster better-rounded citizens and broader critical thinking skills. Historical narratives created and true are installed in American curricula to create ‘good citizens,' but who determines what ‘good' is and who and what ‘citizens' are is an ever-changing pantheon of characters seeking god-like power over the nation's past, with aspirations of helping shape and control the nation's future. This course examines how historical events are molded and taught in curricula in different eras and shows the evolution of textbooks and curriculum firsthand. Students explore how early textbooks think of Native peoples as "Noble Savages" and how that ‘nobility' disappears in later texts. We'll have the opportunity to study the re-shaping of ethnic identities in the United States History curriculum and how the Cold War not only re-configures the size and orientation of the maps in our history books but also how the stories of other nations and their forms of government become commonplace slurs as a way to whip up righteousness for US policies in the Cold War and to quash rising ideologies connected to labor movements and those other nations simultaneously. We'll examine the rise and righteousness of both sides of the current debate over Critical Race Theory in the K-12 classroom and so much more. You will have the opportunity to explore additional historical narratives of Native peoples and many different groups who immigrants by choice, force, and forced annexations and their representations in curricula. This course recognizes the privileges that race, class, and gender has played in creating the historical narrative for K-12 classrooms through the study of the groups who make decisions about what civics and historical lessons are taught to students in American schools in different eras. This course will have writing and research elements go through multiple drafts and the final version of student works is not just academic in nature but is to demonstrate that you can utilize your knowledge and understanding for the good, to in essence show ‘what you are fighting for' in the parlance of all at Notre Dame working to bring academic thinking to the forefront for the common good. This course will require critical thinking, creative solutions and ideas on curricular philosophy, great classroom participation, a willingness to do original historical research, and a tremendous desire to share.

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 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.

This course begins with a study of the U.S. criminal legal system - its history, its goals, its effects, and how it is embedded in larger systems of power linked with race, gender, and economics. Our greater purpose, however, is to get at deeper concerns about violence, harm, and justice: what we want a justice system to accomplish, why punishment is at the center of our current system, and our own responsibility for that system that operates in our names. As part of the national Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, the course involves inside students (who are incarcerated at the Westville Correctional Facility in Westville, IN) and outside students (who are enrolled at Notre Dame, St. Mary's, and Holy Cross) learning with and from each other and breaking new ground together. Each week, campus students travel to Westville for class with the incarcerated students; all are responsible for the same reading and writing assignments, and all participate together in class activities and discussions. Together, we will examine myths and realities related to crime and punishment, explore the effects of the criminal legal system and its policies, and develop ideas for responding more effectively to violence and harm in our communities. Apply online via the CSC website: socialconcerns.nd.edu.

This is the first part of a Catholicism and the Disciplines (CAD) seminar about immigration issues—especially those related to the México-U.S. border. For this part (two credits), we will meet in class to read and to discuss social scientific research about such topics as why migrants leave their home countries, what they encounter and experience when attempting to cross the border, the responses of U.S.-based citizen groups to unauthorized border crossings, and the effectiveness of current U.S. enforcement policies. We also normatively evaluate these responses and policies, particularly from a Catholic perspective (but also from other faith, non-religious perspectives). Lastly, we will process and reflect on our immersion trip to the Southern Arizona borderlands. (the co-requisite class, Mexico-U.S. Border Immersion Experience, requires separate registration and takes place over the semester's mid-term break), including discussing what a uniquely Catholic border policy would look like, strategies to raise awareness about what is going in these borderlands, and migration issues and responses to them in other parts of the world. Immersion Description: This is the second (experiential-learning) part of a Catholicism and the Disciplines (CAD) seminar about immigration issues—especially those related to the México-U.S. border. Like the first corequisite part (Mexico-US Border Seminar), students will receive two credits for successfully completing it. Over the semester's mid-term break, we will travel to the Southern Arizona borderlands for a weeklong immersion trip. Among the activities in which we will engage on the trip are: (1) observing Operation Streamline legal proceedings; (2) attending a humanitarian aid training; (3) touring a Border Patrol facility; (4) going to the border wall and learning about its environmental impact; (5) hearing from Catholic and leaders of other faith traditions about their social justice work along the border; (6) visiting Arivaca and Nogales to experience everyday life in a border community; and (7) participating in a Samaritans' humanitarian desert trip. Students will be notified about their acceptance status via email after submitting the application. There are fees associated with this seminar. This is a graded course.

This course examines the socio-histories, movement, and settlement patterns of racial minorities in the U.S. The course will focus on how race and racial imaginaries shape the movement and settlement of racial minorities. It will include deep examinations of these mobility patterns and how they are constructed and articulated through laws, policies, and social arrangements. Special attention will be paid to the racialization of the United States, American-ness as whiteness, and the consequences for the social and physical landscape. And finally, the course will consider how the racial construction of the U.S. is manifested and buttressed through the built environment and the consequences.

This course introduces some of the issues behind recent calls to reform the US criminal legal system, including mass incarceration and supervision, racial disproportionality, and the challenges of "reentry." But the heart of the course is our exploration of deeper concerns, including why our criminal legal system relies on punishment, how we might cultivate other forms of justice, and what responsibility we have for the systems that operate in our names. As part of the national Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, the course involves inside students (people incarcerated at the Westville Correctional Facility in Westville, IN) and outside students (people enrolled at Notre Dame, St. Marys, or Holy Cross) learning with and from one another and breaking new ground together. Most weeks of the semester, outside students will travel to Westville for class sessions with the inside students. All students are responsible for the same reading and writing assignments, and participate together in class activities and discussions. Together, we will examine myths and realities related to crime and to punishment, explore the effects of current criminal legal policies, and develop ideas for responding more effectively to harm and violence in our communities.

This is a leadership internship for Cross-cultural/Urban studies working 8 weeks in a multicultural area with organizations dedicated to empowering local communities. Students will work with ILS to build partnerships with the agencies and people involved. Students will complete academic requirements including readings, reflection sessions, and a presentaton of a synthesis paper at the end of the internship. Application and interview necessary for participation.

This research lab will employ an interdisciplinary approach to research on a range of issues related to mass incarceration. Collaborating with faculty, scholars, activists, practitioners, those impacted by systems of incarceration, and other classmates, students will develop, refine and implement a research project which contributes to the overall body of scholarship on incarceration. Students will be able to design projects (exploring moral, normative, and/or empirical etc. dimensions of incarceration) which connect their own academic and intellectual interests to emerging research questions at the Center for Social Concerns. This research lab is open to students in all disciplines.

This course is the summer portion of the fall, community-based, service-learning course, the Cross Cultural Leadership Program (CCLP). It involves working for 8 weeks with organizations dedicated to empowering local communities. Students will complete academic requirements including readings, reflection sessions, and a presentation of a synthesis paper at the end of the program. Application and interview necessary for participation.

This is an unpaid cross cultural leadership internship for 8 weeks in a multicultural area with organizations dedicated to empowering local communities. Students will work with ILS to build partnerships with the agencies and people involved. Students will complete academic requirements including readings, reflection sessions, and a presentation of a synthesis paper at the end of the internship. Application and interview necessary for participation.

The Center for Social Concerns and Campus Ministry have partnered together to explore ways that justice is understood as an essential part of a Christian spiritual practice. Students will consider how Catholic Social Tradition and theology lead one to engage the work of justice. They will critically reflect on their faith and will be challenged to consider its implications. This seminar will use issues related to immigration and refugee justice as a lens through which to process these questions. An immersion to Texas to engage at/around the border will take place over Fall break.

Racial Justice in America is focused on the historic and current impact of racial injustice and the urgency of the work of racial justice today. Racial Justice in America will invite course participants to consider how the stories of the struggle for racial justice in the United States shapes our imaginations for the work of racial justice today. The centerpiece of this course is a required spring break immersion to major civil rights locations in the South. Additionally, students will read/reflect on how we tell the stories of racism in the United States and will create their own narrative/reflective account of their experience with racism and the civil rights movement sites.

Solidarity and the City explores the principle and practice of solidarity in the context of U.S. cities. Students will examine the root causes of poverty and injustice in urban areas, will work on individual and group assignments that apply that learning to specific issues of justice, and will participate in a Spring Break immersion to a city to learn/work alongside partners engaging issues of particular importance in context.

This course will take place in a local neighborhood and students will learn fundamental concepts and skills of community organizing alongside residents of South Bend. Together, neighbors and students will learn the art of organizing through relational meetings, house meetings, power-mapping, and research actions. The culmination of the course will include participation in a public action with local officials addressing a pressing issue in our community. Through a series of trainings and hands-on application, students will build public relationships, amplify their voices, cultivate power and leverage it for justice.

This course examines the complex contemporary and historical factors that obstruct justice and equity in the American education system. Students will consider the ways the persistent inequity in education interrupts human flourishing and inhibits civic engagement. Through conversation, reflection, and encounter students will begin to cultivate a vision of just education informed by an awareness of power, privilege, and positionality. This seminar will help students understand how assertions of dignity and concern for the common good must factor into innovations in both the private and public sectors of education to advance equity and achieve justice for all. This seminar includes a Spring Break immersion to Washington DC to meet with lawmakers, policy experts, and educational advocates.

This seminar will provide an overview of and framework to understand the global refugee crisis. We will trace the evolution of international refugee law and policy dealing with this ever-growing population. Central are the ethical challenges that refugees pose for the international community. What is the nature of our collective obligation to refugees? What determines the extent of this obligation? Through a series of legal and sociological case studies, students will also grapple with the social, legal , political and ethical challenges posed by humanitarian intervention on behalf of refugees and the often unintended consequences of such policies. How do the different models for dealing with refugee resettlement affect the life chances of refugees? This project-based course will pair students with a refugee community to address a pressing social concern.

This interdisciplinary course enlists students in the ongoing efforts of the Just Wage Research Lab, a collaborative research and advocacy project of the Higgins Labor Program at the Institute for Social Concerns. Students will help develop, refine, and update the Just Wage Framework, a multi-stakeholder online tool designed to advance a more inclusive and equitable economy. Students will also undertake collaborative research projects in partnership with academic researchers and/or community organizations, connecting their own intellectual interests and disciplinary expertise to the common-good project of promoting a just wage economy. Extended weekly sessions will facilitate visits by scholars, practitioners, and activists; interactive group discussions; and collaborative experiments.

This internship course empowers students to transform their internship experiences into catalysts for professional growth. Through a strategic and reflective approach to leadership development, students will build the skills necessary to navigate workplace challenges, establish meaningful professional relationships, and cultivate self-awareness to make informed career decisions. By integrating theoretical frameworks with real-world application, students will learn to maximize their internship opportunities, articulate their professional value proposition, and develop strategies for long-term career success.

This one credit S/U course examines why migrants leave their home countries, what they encounter at the border, responses from U.S.-based citizen and faith groups, and the effectiveness of U.S. enforcement policies. Students will engage with these questions in the Tucson, Arizona borderlands area during Spring Break (March 8 - March 14). While there, students will have the opportunity to observe legal proceedings, attend a humanitarian aid training, tour a Border Patrol facility, listen to stories from migrant families, visit the border wall, hear from Catholic and other faith leaders about their justice work along the border, visit a border community, and participate in a humanitarian desert trip. Before and after the trip, students will meet to learn about and reflect upon the experience of migration and possible responses inspired by Catholic Social Teaching. This course is open to all students. Transportation, food, and lodging are provided. So that we may book flights and make other arrangements, students who add this class will be required to sign a participation agreement.

This seminar will introduce students to the cultural, social, political and economic issues surrounding the migrant experience and migrant farm labor in the US through experiential learning. The Seminar centers on a weeklong trip to Immokalee, Florida during the semester break in which students will meet with numerous organizations that employ, work with, advocate for, and support Migrant farmworkers.

This course focuses on studying the causes and consequences of migration from and through Central America. It addresses issues of climate change and sustainability, such as food insecurity, flooding and hurricanes, disease outbreaks, ethnic-based inequalities, as well as violence in the region with a particular focus on policy solutions and mitigation and adaptation responses to climate change. It explores the role of economic development and public policy, the role of businesses and social corporate responsibility, and the implications of undocumented migration to neighboring countries and to the United States. Prerequisite: Econ 10010 Principles of Microeconomics, or AP credit, or Principles of Economics.

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.

Contemporary U.S. theater ought to value equity, diversity, and inclusion by more consistently producing works that reflect its culturally complex society. This course is designed to introduce students to theatrical texts by contemporary Latinx, African-American, Asian-American, and Native American playwrights. Many of these playwrights' works engage with a variety of cultural experiences that complicate definitions of U.S. society. This course will examine the trajectory of culturally inclusive U.S. theater from the late 20th century to the present. The course will also consider how U.S. regional theaters work toward greater equity by including diverse voices. Students will be expected to read plays and analyze them using methods provided. The course aims to provide students with tools for reflection to develop their own analytical and creative responses to contemporary U.S. theater.

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.

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.

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.

In this course we will read novels and books of poetry written by Latinx writers and published within the last five years. We'll engage with historical, contemporary, and speculative definitions of latinidad, taking up the ideas and provocations offered by the books we'll read in the course of the semester.

In this class, we will explore various American migrant communities and discuss the many facets and difficulties of American identity. What are the benefits and drawbacks of migratory movement? What should one's relationship be to assimilation? What does migration do to the idea of one's homeland? Although we will be working chronologically, our progress will be atypical. This circuitous route through the literature in this class will be a literary journey that echoes the various movements of people in the United States. Potential authors we read may include: Sui sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton), Anzia Yezierska, Nella Larsen, Sanora Babb, William Saroyan, Carlos Bulosan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tomás Rivera, Arturo Islas, Julia Alvarez, Fae Myenne Ng, Chang-rae Lee, Janet Campbell Hale, and Tommy Orange.

In this seminar we will examine the historical construction of gendered and sexual roles in the Spanish and Portuguese colonial worlds. 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, as well as Atlantic slavery, 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 caste, as well as gender and class, determine people's sense of themselves and their "others?" What were normative and alternative sexual roles in the pre-modern Americas, and how did a European Catholic conquest affect these? Readings will include monographs and primary sources. Students will write an extended research essay in this class, and History majors may use it for their departmental seminar in consultation with the instructor.

Was the American Constitution originally a pro-slavery constitution that changed over time to a constitution that outlawed slavery and state-supported racial discrimination? Did the Civil War and subsequent developments through the civil rights acts of the 1960's represent a commitment implicit in constitutional principles from the nation's beginning? Do these constitutional principles embrace active governmental efforts to achieve an equal-opportunity society, including equal educational opportunity and an end to racism, a "private" attitude? Do constitutional principles promise a color-blind society? Or do they promise no more than color-blind governments? This course addresses these questions. Readings will include state documents like the Declaration of Independence and The Federalist Papers, the speeches of American politicians and other public figures, and decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court regarding slavery, public accommodations, education, voting, housing, and employment.

Why is talking about climate change without reference to colonial pasts an incomplete conversation? Why is a forward-looking climate justice conversation incomplete unless it is also looking back? How does coloniality present today? How does the global south figure in writing on climate change? Can there be a role for the global south in the climate justice conversation that recognizes its vulnerability to climate change but goes beyond portraying it as always and only vulnerable, devastated and/or menacing? In this class we will begin with the premise that the answer is yes: not only is such a role possible, but it must actively be created if the climate justice conversation is to an inclusive one. Examining representations of climate refugees, extreme weather events, and imagined geographies of conflicts, and informed by scholarship on racialized constructions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrants, in this class we will collectively work through the intersections between the political and ecological that today determine the movement of humans, capital, and knowledge. Our collective endeavor will be to: (i) understand writing on climate change with a focus on its implicit (yet predominant) threat and risk imaginaries; (ii) question the role of the global south in such writing; and (iii) craft a lexicon that is cognizant of colonial pasts and their continuity, and relates geographies, histories and politics in more equal ways.

This course explores the theory and practice of community peacemaking. It covers the benefits, challenges and methods of local peacemaking, as well as the relationship between peacemaking and peace building. Content will draw on practitioner experience in South Africa, South Bend and elsewhere. Guest lecturers will include community activists from South Bend.

This seminar provides an overview of scholarship on theories, methods, and research conducted on immigrant youth and their families from developmental perspectives. Topics will include a review of a number of developmental issues including youth's adjustment to immigration, adolescents' identity development, school experiences, cultural issues, family dynamics and well-being. The readings will largely focus on immigrants residing in the U.S.

A three-week course that refers to a review of basic questions on international migration, with emphasis on immigration to the United States and the methods through which these questions have been adequately or inadequately answered. The numbers, impact, nature, structure, process, and human experience will be discussed in terms of the research methods commonly used to approach them. Spring.

What does it mean to be Latino and who should be in/excluded from that category? Are Latin@s a “race’ or an “ethnicity” or an “ethnorace” or something else? Should we even be using “Latino”? Or should we use labels like Hispanic, Latino/a or Latin@? What about “Latinx” or “Latine”? And what do these different questions tell us about the lives of the more than 62 million people in the US who personally or whose parents and ancestors once lived in places as far-reaching as Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, and perhaps even Brazil and the Philippines? This course aims to answer these questions by examining research, journalism, and media that elaborate on how race and ethnicity are constructed within US histories and systems of discrimination, prejudice, nativism, etc. Students will study empirical patterns and theoretical discussions on Latin@ immigration, panethnicity, political behavior and mobilizations, and interactions with US institutions. In exploring theory and patterns, this course will emphasize how racial-ethnic inequality shapes Latin@ life, both between Latinx@s and other groups (like Asian, Black, and white Americans) and amongst Latin@s. We will also explore how racial/ethnic inequality intersects with other social categories and systems, including gender and social class. Students will further explore the potential futures of Latin@ populations in the US.

This course introduces students to the histories of colonization and imperialism, looking at the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of foreign rule. We will look simultaneously at an analysis of these structures as well as at social movements' attempts to move beyond them. We will ask the question: is the world really postcolonial or do we live in a new, reconfigured form of empire? How do structures of empire and colony intersect with issues of gender, race, sexuality, and religion?

Millions of people around the world have been forced from their homes by interlinked factors including persecution, armed conflict, natural disasters, development projects, socio-economic deprivation and increasing climate change. Resolving large-scale displacement represents a critical challenge for contemporary peacebuilding, development and climate justice. This course is designed to introduce students to various theoretical and methodological frameworks that inform and shape forced migration laws, policies and practice. Specifically students will: (i) examine international, regional, national and local responses to the problem of forced migration; (ii) investigate the obstacles to effective protection and assistance for refugees and displaced persons; (iii) explore the challenge of resolving displacement crises, and (iv) discuss some of the moral dilemmas raised by forced migration.

Throughout much of American history, individuals have organized and acted collectively to advance interests based on a common racial or ethnic identity. In some instances, groups have organized in an attempt to overcome discrimination and to stake a claim to rights and privileges enjoyed by majority group members. In other cases, members of the majority group have organized to restrict opportunities for the minority and to protect an advantaged position. We will consider the causes and consequences of both progressive and conservative social movements - such as the civil rights movement, the Ku Klux Klan, and the contemporary alt-right - giving particular attention to how theories of social movements help us to understand episodes of race-based collective action.

Latina and Latino Catholics have lived their faith in what is now the continental United States for almost twice as long as the nation has existed. This course explores the origins and development of Latino Catholicism in the United States, particularly the theological contributions of contemporary Latinas and Latinos.

Latin American Feminism and the Feminist Novel in the Twentieth Century (Taught in Spanish) The twentieth century was the century of women, feminism, and the feminist novel in Latin America. The history of Latin American feminism presents three milestones: first, the women's movements that demanded political and civil equality at the beginning of the century and culminated in the 1950s with what Julieta Kirkwood called "the years of silence"; second, the violent decades of the 1970s and 1980s, when women challenged their historic exclusion from political life, showed how authoritarian regimes replicated patriarchal oppression, and developed feminist theories and practices; and third, the 1990s when women focused on the damaging effects of neoliberalism, which impacted the activism of women and the development of feminist ideas. This course, designed as a seminar for advanced students in Spanish, will focus on the feminist novel since the 1950s when women ventured into a genre they had barely published in the past and will trace its course through the multiple positions that Latin American feminism took during the twentieth century. This course will be taught in Spanish and requires the active participation of all students.

If the saying "We are what we eat" is true, then food reflects and determines our identity, our subjectivity, and our very being. Through the study of Latin American canonical and less-known literary texts from Colonial to contemporary times, this course focuses on food as a cultural artifact shaped by the dynamics of colonialism, modernization, immigration, and globalization. From a multidisciplinary perspective that includes Literary, Cultural, and Gender Studies, as well as History and Anthropology, we will explore topics such as food exchange value, regional and indigenous traditions, social behavior and consumption, cooking imaginaries and social structure, culinary technologies, and gender correlations, among others. Primary sources include texts by Cristebal Colen, Alvar Neez Cabeza de Vaca, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Ricardo Palma, Esteban Echeverrea, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Soledad Acosta de Samper, Ruben Dareo, Rosario Castellanos, Gabriel Garcea Merquez, and Isabel Allende. We will read these works together with theoretical approaches by Claude Levi-Strauss, Walter Mignolo, Pierre Bordieu, and Walter Benjamin.

We have recently witnessed a wave of debates about monuments (statues of military figures, explorers, conquerors, rulers, etc.). Moreover, many of those monuments have been intervened, "vandalized" moved, covered, and even topped down, fueling a series of controversies that invite us to reflect about the constantly shifting politics of memory and about the political effectiveness of pursuing symbolic justice in the public space. This is a Cultural Studies undergraduate research seminar devoted to a selection of important public monuments in Latin America; this is, statues, monoliths, and architectural visual signs that attempt to memorialize historical events and people as well as cultural and political values. We will examine their history as well as their paradoxical semiotic fate: no monument is able to install the memory it pretends to make eternal. Monuments are floating signifiers destine to be appropriated, re-signified, toppled down, and, eventually, forgotten.

This course invites the students to explore the issue of identity as it is lived and thought by a number of Hispanic Caribbean thinkers and artists (essayists, playwrights, film makers, poets, and performance artists). We will pose the following questions: Is "identity" a useful concept for thinking about the culture of a nation, territory, region or community? How are the following factors used in identity politics or in the project of thinking identity: landscape and place, history (heroic history, the histories of suffering), the body, sacrifice? We will consider essays by Fernando Ortiz, Antonio Benítez Rojo and José Esteban Muñoz; poetry by Virgilio Piñera, Nicolás Guillén and Reinaldo Arenas; performances by Ana Mendieta, Carmelita Tropicana, Tania Bruguera and Carlos Martiel. All class discussions in Spanish. This course satisfies the modern Spanish-American area requirement.

The goal of this undergraduate seminar is to analyze Latin American literature in the cultural-historical period of the so-called "modernizing impact," which covers the last two decades of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century and is commonly known as Modernismo. The journey will focus on the birth of the genre of the modern chronicle, a hybrid zone between literature and journalism, between information and imagination, between politics and the market. In Latin America, this complex object has brought together numerous critical perspectives that read local modernization against the backdrop of global modernity, whether as a dyschronic modernity (Ángel Rama), a disconnected modernity (Julio Ramos), a peripheral modernity (Beatriz Sarlo), a dissonant modernity (Gwen Kirkpatrick), a translinguistic modernity (Julio Ortega), or a modernity in translation (Mariano Siskind). From the discussion of these fundamental perspectives for the study of the field, specific prose texts by Rubén Darío, José Martí, Julián del Casal, and Julio Herrera y Reissig will be addressed. The chronicles of modernity will serve as a platform to reflect on current and relevant problems in literary studies, such as the representation of American cities, the crisis of modern subjectivity, the tension between the Eurocentrism of global modernity and American nationalisms, migratory processes, the phenomenon of secularization, the emergence of mass culture, the transition from the model of the "nineteenth-century literary man" to that of the "professional writer," the role of translation, and the assimilation of cultural traditions foreign to the Latin American sphere.

Images of Brazil often evoke stereotypical images of soccer and carnaval. In this course, we will study these staples of Brazilian culture beyond the shallow confines of stereotypes. History, Sociology, and Cultural Studies will all contribute to an interdisciplinary approach to understand the complexities of Contemporary Brazilian society. (offered in English)

What can literature teach us about the local Latino community? How does immersion in the community enhance your understanding of concepts such as migration and biculturalism? How can literature combined with experience in the "real world" allow you to connect the dots between politics, economics, history, culture, and the arts? Migrant Voices is a course designed to bridge together the study of U.S. Latino/a literature and the pedagogy of community-based learning. Students will read foundational and contemporary works by U.S. Latinos/a authors from various backgrounds and nationalities (Mexican/Chicano, Salvadoran, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Colombian, Peruvian, etc.) that are representative of the local Michiana U.S. Latino population. Issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and transnationalism will be central to our discussions and will be examined through both a literary lens and an experiential perspective. For the CBL aspect of the course, students are required to engage in a minimum of 2 consecutive hours of tutoring/mentoring, once a week, at La Casa de Amistad. Programs are available M-T-W-R from 3-5 pm and Mon. and Thurs. from 4-6 pm. The final grade will be calculated based on: class participation, class journal, essays, quizzes, exam, and a final paper. This class will be conducted in Spanish. Only offered to Juniors and Seniors. Cross-listed with: ILS, LAST, AFST.

This course centers Blackness within latinidad. In it, students will learn about the history of Blackness in Latin 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, paying attention 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. Taught in Spanish and can count as Modern Latin-American Area requirement.

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-Based Learning (CBL) 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 .

If something has become clear following the recent termination of Mexican-American studies courses by the Tucson Unified School District (AZ) is that race and ethnicity matter when considering the condition of Latinos/as in the US. In this course students will begin by examining the events related to the AZ law and will explore how these issues are played out in Latino literature and our local Latino community. Literature by Afro-Latina/o, Andean-Latina/o (and other Latinos of indigenous descent), and Asian-Latina/o authors will provide a lens through which to explore the racial and ethnic complexities that are erased by the umbrella term "Latino." Tutoring/mentoring at La Casa de Amistad will provide an opportunity for students to see the issues studied at work in the "real world," while also fostering stronger ties between Notre Dame and the South Bend community. For the Community-Based Learning segment of the course, students will spend two hours per week volunteering and will participate in a local immersion weekend. This course will be conducted in Spanish. Spanish heritage speakers are welcome.

The first waves of feminism in South America during the late 19th and early 20th century were led by many women in the medical profession. Julieta Lanteri and Sara Justo in Argentina, Ernestina Lopez in Chile, or Paulina Luisi in Uruguay, to name a few, claimed for women's rights in terms of health and hygienism. At the same time, medicine emerged as a dominant and masculinized discourse within the nation-states that sought to control women's and non-binary bodies and behaviors. In the 20th and 21st century, medical discourse was also in the center of feminist debates about motherhood, reproductive rights, obstetric violence, among others. This course will explore the connections between medicine and feminism through the life and works of women writers and activists from South America, from the late 19th to the 21st century. We will read fictions, essays, journal articles, and medical treatises from the 19th and 20th century and debate on the role of medical knowledge in the context of recent feminist movements. Theoretical readings include Donna Haraway, Michel Foucault, Teresa de Lauretis, and numerous scholarly works on feminism, the history of medicine, and gender and sexualities in South America (Salessi, Lavrin, Marino, Guy, Ben, among others).

This course takes up the relations between aesthetics and politics as they pertain to traffic, migrancy and the international movement of people. Politico-philosophical categories such as freedom, containment, refugee, civilian, (in)equality, nation, hate and hospitality will be at the center of our conversations. Our approach will be interdisciplinary and our objects of study will include recent literature, film, television and historical research that deal with these themes in a sustained way. Language of instruction: English. Spanish majors taking this course for major credit will complete written assignments in Spanish.

This one credit course immerses students in service in the Latino community of South Bend as tutors, assistants, mentors, translators, etc.

For decades, Notre Dame has been an incubator for state-of-the-art research in the interdisciplinary field of Latino Studies. This seminar delves deeply into newer research produced by scholars affiliated with the Institute for Latino Studies, the unit on campus that has fostered much of this work. Each week we will read recent research from an ILS-affiliated scholar and, most weeks, meet with the scholars themselves to discuss their research trajectories and current areas of research. Students will read and respond to research in a wide array of fields, prepare questions for visiting scholars, interview them in class, and respond to selected works in writing.

This seminar examines the relationship between art and social movements in Latinx communities from the civil rights era to the present. The course will focus on graphic art media that negotiates relations of power, constructs multiple publics, and fuels many of the debates around the politics of identity. We will consider notions of authorship (collective/individual), activism, display, dissemination, consumption, collecting, and technology. Students will learn to think critically and empathetically about how these collective modes of art-making foreground the politics of representation: what we see, how we see, who gets to control our image, and how can printed multiples challenge those narratives. Students will enhance their skills in visual analysis and writing, gain experience in collaborative printmaking, and refine their ability to conduct original research.

This course examines how historical, political and cultural violence shape language, narrative, and collective and individual identities, and considers art as a form of transformational testimony. In this class, we will ask: How do writers and artists navigate the invisible restrictions placed on speech in order to translate the pain of war, forced migration, and state sanctioned violence into language? How have writers and artists productively challenged grammars of denial and the politics of erasure? How do literary and artistic practices confront the challenge of displacement, subjugation and cultural erasure by creating new sites of memory, knowledge production, and visions of reconstruction? We will read literature from Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, China and beyond and study visual art, films and performance pieces that engage with and respond to state-sanctioned violence, document the psychic, spiritual and material consequences of displacement, and generate new visions of identity, community and nationhood in an increasingly global world.

The Elective Course introduces students to Cuba's cultural heritage and the magic and poetry of its Architecture and Urbanism and its cross-cultural —European influence— and immediate regional background. The course explores the formation of a multiracial nation, and particularly the history and urban evolution of Havana, the country's capital city, and considers the key role of architecture in its ever-changing construction. Through a holistic approach, the students will learn and understand the distinct features—similarities, differences, and synchronicities— in the fields of art, architecture, and urbanism in Cuba, and examine how cultural identity has been a central organizing paradigm. A series of presentations will allow students to identify, recognize and discern the main features of Cuban architecture and urbanism and relate them to the universal culture. The Course will introduce students to the concept of cultural landscapes. Critical thinking will allow the students to relate research and theoretical content with historic preservation themes as well as practical design knowledge. The Course will focus on the study of Havana, Cuba's capital city and it will encompass the study of its past, its present and will even provide a vision for the future of Havana. The chronological study of Havana and its history and urban evolution will provide a comprehensive understanding of its rich heritage and cultural identity.

This course will examine the health of Latinos in South Bend from an interdisciplinary perspective drawing on biology, medicine and cultural anthropology. We will consider both the scientific bases of specific diseases affecting Latinos and the social, cultural, economic and environmental factors that increase risk and limit access to therapy. We will discuss topics such as antimicrobial resistance, chronic illnesses, labor-related afflictions, mental health and the effects of climate change on Latino well-being. We take seriously subjects' holistic, embodied understandings of suffering and their pragmatic quest for treatment across a pluralistic continuum from curanderismo to biomedicine. A critical analysis of health injustice and ways to cure this systemic dis-ease guide our class research, seminar discussions and scholarly goals.

This course examines the "Global Sixties" (c.1956-c.1976) with particular attention to politics, culture and religion in the United States, Western Europe, and Latin America. The emphasis will be placed primarily on the topics of youth activism and state repression from the perspective (and influence) of the "Global South." The main goal of the course is to provide an opportunity for extensive reading in the Global Sixties historiography. For this, it pays particular attention to influential primary texts, ideas, interpretations, ideological currents, and repercussions of the period with emphasis on the broader context of the Cold War. Additional and more specific goals include: (1) exploring the different approaches and methods that historians have used to interpret the history of the Global Sixties; and (2) providing methodological background and advice that will aid students to write original research papers.

This course will examine the opportunities and challenges facing Latino communities today as they simultaneously transform and are transformed by their continuing growth in U.S. society. Through a careful examination of the biographies of leaders in Latino communities, we will examine what role they have each played in empowering Latino communities to advance in business, arts, education, community organizing, entertainment, medicine, religion, law, academia, politics, and other areas. The course will coincide with the Transformative Latino Leadership Speaker Series sponsored by the Arthur Foundation through the Institute for Latino Studies. Students in the class will have the opportunity to interact with invited leaders in several setting including the classroom, meals, receptions, and university-wide events. The primary course requirement is a research essay about the life and career of a chosen leader.

This course examines the public policy-making process at the federal, state, and local levels. Students will explore a specific policy problem affecting the South Bend metropolitan area. The goal will be to write and present a policy brief to local decision-makers in public policy.

Who belongs in the United States, and how do we decide? Motivated by these central questions, this course explores what it has meant, and what it means today, to be an American by tracing the mutually-constitutive relationship between formal membership in the polity and specific notions about race, class, and gender. Beginning with an introduction to the theoretical conception of citizenship, the course proceeds as a sociopolitical analysis of the "roots" and "routes" to American citizenship - from the Naturalization Act of 1790 to the proposed Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. Interdisciplinary by design, this course draws on empirical studies, popular culture, and current events to engage students in an informed discussion of a sensitive, but ever-salient subject in American political life. Topics covered include: the precondition of "Whiteness"; the historical role of "the stranger"; immigrant incorporation, exclusion, and expulsion; and the mutability of Jus Meritum (service-citizenship).

In the United States, public policy has the potential to be a consequential mechanism to address the most vexing and important social and economic problems: inequality, poverty, mass incarceration, climate change and much more. But policies do not appear out of thin air. They are the product of complex political processes. Even after policies are made, political decisions determine how they are implemented and to what end. In order to evaluate or change policy, we must understand politics. That is the focus of this course. We begin with a review of theoretical approaches to conceptualizing and studying public policy. We then explore key policy actors (the President, interest groups, denizens etc.), as well as core aspects of policy design and implementation. Finally, we closely study contemporary policy arenas. Along the way, students will be challenged to grapple with the paradoxes of policy making and to envision pathways to substantive change. Father Hesburgh famously credited President Lyndon Johnson's commitment to civil rights with "changing the face of America." This class recognizes that dramatic policy change must consider the politics behind that change and politics seeking to maintain the status quo. This course fulfills the capstone requirement for the Hesburgh Program in Public Service and Latino Studies.

The newest wave of immigration has not only transformed the demographic composition of the United States, but has also reshaped the nature of politics and policy. The transformation of the population as a result of immigration has also significantly altered the relevance of ethnicity. We will therefore also consider the consequences of immigration for American ethnic minorities. Drawing on a variety of perspectives and readings in American and Comparative Politics, this course will focus on the critical normative and academic questions in political science regarding immigration and ethnicity. In particular, we will focus on immigration policy, attitudes towards immigrants, immigrants' experiences with the immigration and naturalization process, and immigrant and ethnic minority (social and political) incorporation.

This course examines the educational experiences and struggles of racial/ethnic minority students in US public schools. Students will study educational stratification by race/ethnicity, as well as how racial/ethnic minorities experience this stratification. We will explore legal, political, historical and social perspectives regarding educational policies and practices. Additionally, this course focuses on the potential of education as an agent for social justice and change for linguistically and culturally diverse groups.

America is the richest country in the world and yet about three million American children now grow up in families surviving on just $2 a day. As America's richest 0.1% have seen their incomes more than quadruple over the last forty years, the incomes for 90% of Americans have barely changed. These financial disparities reflect deeper inequities: inequalities in health, educational opportunity, social status and more. In this course, we will examine the nature and consequences of American inequality. After a broad overview of historical and comparative trends, the course will address such questions as: What kinds of inequalities, if any, should trouble us, and why? How do aspects of individuals' identities - such as race, gender, and social class - shape their life chances? How is inequality (re)produced by institutions like schools, neighborhoods, and the criminal justice system? And, finally, what might be done to make America less unequal in the years to come?

Independent faculty supervised readings.* credits 1-6

Senior Thesis research and writing.

This course is a senior thesis course for the second semester.