Courses Related to Diversity and Racial Justice - Fall 2021
(Undergraduate and Graduate, Listed Alphabetically by Departments and Programs)
Responding to calls from our students and the larger campus community to strengthen and expand anti-racist and social justice curriculum and pedagogy, the College of Humanities and Fine Arts seeks to highlight the following courses. These courses are one part of our ongoing efforts and heightened commitment to teaching and scholarship that recognizes the crucial and often neglected contributions, experiences and struggles of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and the historical and contemporary legacies of systemic racism and its intersections with other forms of inequality and injustice. Courses and programs being offered in the coming spring aim to integrate diverse content, critical thinking skills and classroom spaces that foster deep and transformative engagement with these concerns.
Fall 2021
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 117 – Survey of Afro-American Literature I
Meeting Days/Time:
Lecture: MW 11:15 – 12:05 p.m. Discussions: F 10:10 or F 11:15
Course Description:
This course covers the major figures and themes in African American literature before the Harlem Renaissance, analyzing specific works in detail and surveying this rich body of writing. It examines what slave narratives, poetry, short stories, novels, drama, and folklore of the eighteenth and nineteenth century reveal about the social, economic, psychological, and artistic lives of the writers and their characters. While we will discuss many different topics and themes across the semester, we will be particularly interested in tracking the relationships among black writers, artists, and activists in the period; examining the relationship between black writing and other artistic forms and media; and placing early African American writing within a long history of freedom struggles.)
4 credits (AL,DU)
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 132 – African-American History: 1619-1860
Meeting Days/Time:
Lecture: MW 2:30 - 3:20 p.m. Discussions: F 1:25 or F 2:30
Course Description:
This course will examine important developments and issues in African American history from the initial arrival of African slaves to Virginia until the Civil War. We will focus on the Black experience under slavery and the struggle for emancipation. Key topics to be discussed include the Atlantic slave trade, the evolution of African American communities and culture, free Black communities, the distinct experience of Black women, and Black protest traditions.)
4 credits (HS,DU)
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 151 – Literature & Culture
Meeting Days/Time:
Lecture: MW 12:20 – 1:10 p.m. Discussions: F 12:20 or 1:25
Course Description:
This course explores relevant forms of Black cultural expression that have contributed to the shape and character of contemporary Blackness. Topics to be discussed will include West African cultural patterns and the Black past; the transition-slavery; the culture of survival; cultural patterns evident in literature; and Black perceptions versus white perceptions. The focus of this course will be on the music and literature of the Chicago Renaissance (1930-1959), featuring jazz, blues, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and other important elements of the Chicago scene.)
4 credits (AL,DU)
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 151 – Literature & Culture
Course Description:
*On-line only. Contact: UMassulearn.edu to register.)
4 credits (AL,DU)
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 156 – Revolutionary Concepts in Afro-American Music II
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Course Description:
This course will examine the development of African American music during the twentieth century into the twenty-first century. Literature and history will be examined alongside documentaries and footage of famous performers in conjunction to their historical period and the cultural and political events of the time. The Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Arts Movement, post-Civil Rights era, and the Black Lives Matter Movement will encompass the scope of this course. Therefore, we will be reading works from Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, among others, while surveying the varied styles, productions, and receptions of artists such as Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Odetta, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Curtis Mayfield, Betty Davis, Donna Summer, Prince, Bad Brains, Beyonce, and many more. In addition, the course will consider the diasporic reaches of "AfroLatinidad" (bachata, salsa, etc.) and Caribbean influences such as reggae and dub.)
4 credits (AT,DU)
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 161 – Introduction to Afro-American Political Science
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Course Description:
Survey of the politics of the Black community in the U.S. The history of Black political development, major theories which explain Black political life, social, economic, psychological and institutional environment from which Black politics flows. Attention paid to 1988 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson and its relevance to the 2008 election of Barack Obama.)
4 credits (SB,DU)
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 170 – The Grassroots Experience in American Life and Culture I
Meeting Days/Time:
Lecture 1: TuTh 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Lecture 2: TuTh 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Course Description:
This course combines instruction in research techniques in a variety of Humanistic and Social Science disciplines, and hands-on experience with those techniques, with substantive materials focusing on the long struggle of minority populations for full participation in American cultural and public life.)
4 credits (HS,DU)
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 192F – Freshman Survival Techniques
Meeting Days/Time:
Thursdays 5:30 - 6:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This course helps first-year students transition from high school to college. Students will be matched with peer mentors and academic advisors; learn effective study and time management skills; explore various topics that deal with academics and social issues; and receive assistance with securing internships, co-ops, and summer employment.)
1 credit
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 197A – Taste of Honey: Black Film-Part I
Meeting Days/Time:
Thursdays 6:00 – 8:30 p.m. Malcolm X Cultural Center
Course Description:
This course will take you on a historical journey exploring the roles of African American men and women highlighting their contributions and struggles in the American movie industry. Students will learn about the ground-breaking movies, roles and actors who helped pave the way for a future generation while breaking down racial barriers to tell the story of the African American experience. In this course you will enjoy a great selection of movies that explore a variety of topics in multiple genres such as race, gender and stereotypes while reflecting on how these characteristics are portrayed in drama, comedy, musicals, crime, biographies and action movies.)
1 credit
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 236 – History of the Civil Rights Movement
Meeting Days/Time:
Lecture: MW 11:15 – 12:05 p.m. Discussions: F 11:15 or F 12:20
Course Description:
This course examines the Civil Rights Movement from the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954 and through the rise and decline of Black Power. We will investigate the lives and influence of major movement leaders, as well as major organizations of the period including SCLC, SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP; and the collective efforts of ordinary citizens who did extraordinary things. We also will pay attention to the Civil Rights Movement in the South, as well as the North and West; the work of gender and sexuality; and different philosophical and tactical strands of the movement, including nonviolent demonstrations and black nationalism.)
4 credits (HS,DU)
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 236 – History of the Civil Rights Movement
Course Description:
*On-line only. Contact: UMassulearn.edu to register.)
4 credits (HS,DU)
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 290G – Introduction to Black Global Studies
Meeting Days/Time:
Thursdays 1:00-3:30 p.m.
Course Description:
This course uses the critical methodologies of the humanities and social sciences to consider some of the questions provoked by African and African diasporan experiences. Course materials will allow students to survey the lasting contributions of Africans and their descendants to the development of various world civilizations and examine historical relationships between the individual actors and larger social forces. The five major themes that we will use to comprehend the experiences of African-descended peoples are Beauty, Identity, Power, Visions of the Past, and Visions of the Future.)
3 credits
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 365 – Composition: Style & Organization
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 11:30-12:45 p.m., NAH 302
Course Description:
Expository writing focusing primarily on argumentative and narrative essays. Discussion and practice of logic—inductive and deductive reasoning—as it relates to the argumentative essay form. Topics as thesis on main idea, organization, style, unity, supporting evidence, avoiding logical fallacies, and basic writing mechanics, including constructing sentences, paragraphing, transitions, and correct grammar. Junior year writing is required for all majors in AfroAm; secondary majors have the option to complete this requirement in their primary major.)
3 credits
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 392C – Civil War, Reconstruction, Black Resistance
Meeting Days/Time:
Tuesdays 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Course Description:
The eras of the Civil War and Reconstruction studied from the perspective of Black Americans, highlighting Black protest and resistance. Key topics include: the Civil War as slave rebellion; the process and meaning of emancipation; family, community, and labor in the aftermath of slavery; interracial politics in the Reconstruction era; legal and extralegal violence and resistance.)
3 credits
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 395G – Peer Leadership and Facilitation
Meeting Days/Time:
Tuesdays 5:30 - 6:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This second part of a two-semester course is designed to help upper-class students (juniors and seniors) develop leadership and outreach skills. Students will serve as peer leaders, working directly with newly entering firstsemester students and help them transition from high school to college. Students will assist first-year students form effective study habits and effectively manage their time.)
3 credits
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 494DI – Du Bois Senior Seminar
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 1:00-2:15 p.m., NAH 302
Course Description:
This course is the senior capstone course required for all majors in Afro-American Studies. It also fulfills the University's Integrative Learning Experience (IE) requirement. This course has two aims: (1) to reflect on your educational journey at UMass as well as to further explore your intellectual and professional goals; and (2) to prepare you to complete your senior project in Afro-American Studies. The course will provide ample space and time to brainstorm and plan your senior project in consultation with the instructor and your peers.
3 credits (IE Course for AfroAm Seniors& Juniors)
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 597M – Third World Marxism
Meeting Days/Time:
Wednesdays 6:00-8:30 p.m., NAH 309
Course Description:
This seminar has two goals first, to introduce students to the views of Karl Marx on non-European societies, and second to explore how Marx's general theories have been adopted and modified to address the circumstances of nonwhite peoples. The primary focus will be on writings produced in the western hemisphere by African Americans such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis and Harold Cruse; West Indians such as C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, and Walter Rodney. We also will include writings by influential Latin American marxists such as Jose Carlos Mariategui. For the sake of comparison, some attention will be given to the development of marxist traditions in China and in Africa. This will be a reading seminar with heavy emphasis on class participation, including the leading of at least one class discussion.
3 credits (undergraduate/graduate)
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 597P – Black Presence at UMass Amherst
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 4:00-5:15 p.m., NAH 302
Course Description:
This course will provide an opportunity for students to assist in researching and selecting materials for a Black Presence at UMass website and for a short history, with photos, of the presence of Black folk at UMass since its founding in 1867. The goal for the website is to be as comprehensive as possible in identifying students, staff, administrators, faculty that made up the UMass Afro-descended community. We also will be preparing lists of key individuals and events to be included in the short history. Where feasible we will be doing short (5-10 minute) videos for the website throughout the semester and during Homecoming weekend. The large portion of the work will take place using the resources of the Du Bois Library. There will be visits to community sites in Amherst, Springfield, and other relevant towns and cities. The efforts of all students involved will receive appropriate acknowledgement on the website and in the book. The class also will serve as informal advisors on academic and artistic programming for the Malcolm X Center for the 2020-21 school year. These are projects of great and lasting significance. Student input is vital.
3 credits (undergraduate/graduate)
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 667 – African American Presence in American Literature
Meeting Days/Time:
Tuesdays 1:00-3:30 p.m., NAH 309
Course Description:
An intensive survey of the portrayals of Afro-Americans in American literature, examining how characters, themes, and ideas are portrayed when filtered through the race, gender, class, politics, historical time frame, and individual artistic aesthetic of a variety of writers.
4 credits
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 691F – Black Politics and the American Political System
Meeting Days/Time:
Tuesdays 4:00-6:30 p.m., NAH 309
Course Description:
An historical examination of the black political struggle for equality and citizenship in America—the obstacles placed in the path of that struggle by the American political system in general and by the American state in particular—and the countless ways in which racial politics have shaped the system that is called American Democracy.
4 credits
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 692J – African American Literary Movements
Meeting Days/Time:
Thursdays 2:30-5:00 p.m., NAH 309
Course Description:
The New Negro Harlem Renaissance writers (1920s), the Chicago Writers (1930s and 1940s), the Black Arts and Aesthetics Movement writers (1960s and 1970s), and Black Womanist/Gender issues writers (1980s) mark four distinct periods of heightened literary production among African American writers. Participants in this course will investigate formative themes and concepts (protest/social literature, Pan-Africanism, uplift, Black aesthetic, among others) that have shaped these movements and will examine the cross-talk—shared concepts, ideas, and ideals—that gives these movements as well as twentieth-century African American literature certain recognizable features that have been shaped and reshaped over time.
4 credits
Course Number and Name:
ART 495 SS – Junior/Senior Art Seminar
Course Description:
Theory and Practice Based Seminar exploring contemporary theory that intersects social, economic, philosphical issues with an emphasis on studying non-Western writers. Artists of color across the globe will also be explored.
Course Number and Name:
ART 795 – Graduate Art Seminar
Course Description:
Theory and Practice Based Seminar exploring contemporary theory that intersects social, economic, philosphical issues with an emphasis on studying non-Western writers. Artists of color across the globe will also be explored.
Course Number and Name:
ARCH 300 – Design I Studio
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10:00am-12:45pm
Course Description:
Studio course for BS Architecture majors. This course focuses on development of a conceptual basis for design and planning. Basic spatial concepts, design skill development and communications skills are applied to presentation of design solutions. Students gain experience in both digital and analog 3-D model-making and 2-D presentations of abstract and simple spaces. The design process is structured around a series of abstract and analytical studies of artworks and culminates in the design of a studio and gallery for a BIPOC contemporary artist. Students research the artist’s practice to understand their ideologies and physical needs and design spaces for their practice. Readings about diversity and spatial justice accompany the design process.
Course Number and Name:
ENGLISH 115H – American Experience Honors
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10:00-11:15am
Course Description:
Using the thematic of immigration to and migration within the United States, this course will explore "American experiences" from the early 20th century to the present. Course materials will include literature, films, visual art, and other media forms, with an eye to how each text gives representational shape to the experiences they depict. We will concentrate especially on how they negotiate issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. This course satisfies the DU and AL General Education Requirements.
Course Number and Name:
ENGLISH 204 – Intro to Asian American literature
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 11:15am-12:45pm
Course Description:
This course will introduce students to literature and film by, for, and about Asian Americans. Students will learn a reading practice that consists of contextualizing the texts in their historical production as well as close-reading and critical thinking. Through reading, writing, discussions, and a final group video project, students will explore how Asian American literature shapes the construction of heterogeneous, diasporic, and transnational subjectivities that challenges the very notion of “Asian American” as a uniform identity and object of knowledge.
Course Number and Name:
ENGLISH 269 – American Literature and Culture after 1865
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10:00-11:15am
Course Description:
Figures of Contestation in American Literature and Film. In this class, we will address literary and theoretical works that tackle America’s changing cultural landscape from 1865 to 1930. In mainstream entertainment culture, fiction constituted the one of the nation’s most popular forms of artistic and political expression, creating spaces for dissent and hagiography alike. From images of workers in industrial squalor, poverty and prostitution in urban city streets to utopian depictions of feminist communities and rallying orations at national conventions, this course will introduce turn-of-the-century figures of contestation taken from the Civil War, Gilded Age, Women’s Rights and the Harlem Renaissance eras. Canonical and lesser-known readings include Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and the 1915 propaganda film Birth of a Nation. Alongside core readings and film viewings, students will have an opportunity to experience the textual formats and iconography that undergirded past reading cultures using digitized historical newspapers and image archives. Assignments include discussion, a class presentation and short critical responses.
Course Number and Name:
ENGLISH 300 – Junior Year Writing, Section 2
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 1:00-2:15pm
Course Description:
Topic: Race and Rhetoric. How do texts shape our understandings of race? Critical race scholars have argued that writing conventions may obscure race, hinder our ability to write against racism, and even foster racial injury. Such scholars, as a result, challenge us to play with writing in order to make race and racism visible and to imagine racial accountability. In this course, we begin with an introduction to critical race theory, and the semester unfolds in three parts, where we apply basic tenets to several forms of writing about race:
comparative literary analyses of two novels
analyses and writing of personal essays and creative nonfiction
rhetorical analyses of and responses to news and social media.
Readings will include Chang Rae Lee's Native Speaker, R. Zamora Linmark's Rolling the R's, Eula Biss' No Man's Land, and select essays on critical race theory and rhetorical analyses of racial representations. We have two goals here. One, we’re working to understand how literary and rhetorical forms impact our understandings of race and racism. Two, as a junior-year writing seminar meant to support your writing within the English major, this course asks you to analyze and write about text types that are foundational to English studies: literary, personal, and rhetorical. My hope is that this course will help you advance your understanding of why analytical and imaginative writing in English studies matters in this world.
Course Number and Name:
ENGLISH 300 – Junior Year Writing, Section 3
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45pm
Course Description:
Topic: Writing Human Rights. Although the Declaration of Human Rights was ratified post-World War II, the US public has seen a recent resurgence in the circulation of human rights stories ranging from Malala Yousafzi’s plight for girls’ education in parts of Pakistan, to images of migrants along the US-Mexico Border and in southern Europe, and even consumer program that gives money to human rights organization for purchasing products. This circulation has sparked conversation about and activism against human rights abuses in the general US public. This course seeks to read stories of human rights abuses (found in social media, documentary films, novels, short-stories, non-fiction) through the lens of writing criticism and rhetoric (i.e. considering the arguments that each story makes and why they make them) and against the legal documents that define and guide our understanding of human rights. Some questions that will steer us include:
What and who defines a human rights abuses or crises?
Why do some crises/abuses capture the imagination of the public and others fall flat?
Course Number and Name:
ENGLISH 300 – Junior Year Writing, section 5
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 11:30am-12:45pm
Course Description:
Topic: Literatures of Conflict. In times of “conflict” we all have a vested interest in exploring this complex term: How do we define conflict and, more importantly, how do we perceive the outcome of conflict? Where do we locate ourselves in moments of conflict? Do we have control over our individual and collective identities? What role can language play in the formation of identity as expressed in literature and art? These are a few of the many questions that we will be asking throughout the semester. Our selection of texts is global in scope, and includes novels from Iraq, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the United States (in relation to Algerian migration).
Course Number and Name:
ENGLISH 315 – Speculative Fiction
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 2:30-3:45pm
Course Description:
Science Fiction. This class will introduce students to the concept of literary genre via readings in the area of science fiction and speculative fiction. Although our focus is on speculative genres, students with an interest in literary theory more broadly will also find the course useful as a focused introduction to critical methodologies. Students will learn how to use genre to conduct analyses of literary texts, as well as to think about the way historical context influences literary work. Some questions we will ask will concern when and how the speculative fiction genre began to take shape, and what some of its signature early works are. We will ask how we identify genres, and we use genre to think about history and historical change. We will devote a particular focus to how political commitment and forms of resistance take literary form, and we will read texts that seek to represent and reconfigure uprisings of all kinds, from slave rebellions to labor stoppages, to feminist and LGBTQIA struggles. Texts and authors will include: Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Victor LaValle, Mary Shelley, Amitav Ghosh, Larissa Lai, N.K. Jemisin, Patrick Chamoiseau, Jeff VanderMeer, Mohsin Hamid, and others.
Course Number and Name:
ENGLISH 317 – (Dis)ability and Literature
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 1:00-2:15pm
Course Description:
This course will delve into the thriving field of disability studies as it engages with literary texts and the arts. Reading and viewing from a range of genres, we will explore how texts portray disabilities across the human spectrum. A primary goal will be to investigate how disabled and non-disabled writers alike communicate physical experiences that depart from the idealized human form of Western culture. Paradoxically, an equally important goal will be to become less sure of what disability is, questioning our received notions. We will hope to develop insight into human physical variation, suffering, and our accountability to one another, while fostering the empathy and self-reflection that make for a humane society—as potential caregivers and responsive, informed human beings. This is a service-learning course, where students will partner with adults with cognitive differences to create a project. The service-learning will be integrated into regular class hours.
Course Number and Name:
ENGLISH 362 – Modern Novel: 1945-Present
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 2:30-3:45pm
Course Description:
Topic: Contemporary Arab American Fiction This course examines the significance of contemporary Arab American fiction within a transnational American setting. We will begin by positioning Arab American fiction in relation to sociopolitical and cultural preoccupations in the US. We will investigate Arab American literature as a burgeoning literary tradition in its own right, and as a critical lens through which we can better gauge US cultures and politics. The selected novels will allow us to see the ways in which Arab Americans both contribute to and are influenced by the sociocultural and political landscapes of the US. Our selected novels employ a range of literary techniques, including playing with form, interpolating non-English words into the texts, disrupting time, and complicating narrative point of view. We will engage the relationship between aesthetics and politics in these textual interventions, and consider the effect of this relationship on the representations and receptions of Arab Americans. The course will probably include works by Zaina Arafat, Omar El Akkad, Laila Halaby, Mohja Kahf, and Laila Lalami. We will also watch and discuss two films. Critical essays and cultural theory will guide our readings and film viewings.
Course Number and Name:
ENGLISH 371 – African American literature
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 2:30-3:45pm
Course Description:
This course will offer students an overview of the important literary works produced by African American authors throughout the twentieth-century. We will examine the ideas, concerns, and preoccupations of African American authors as expressed in various literary pronouncements. ENG 371 will also allow students to assess the values and aesthetics that are not only representative of African American literature of the twentieth-century, but that define the particular genre and historical context from which the literature emerges. Using this critical orientation and throughout this course, students will discuss and write about texts with respect to how these works address challenges to gender, racial, economic, and national identity in the United States and throughout the African Diaspora. Furthermore, by focusing on African American literature since 1900, ENG 371 offers students the ability to chart the development of African American authors’ literary sensibilities across the twentieth-century and within multiple genres. Such endeavors will enable students to figure the literature produced by African Americans as indictive of a collective artistic imagination and representative of a process by which African Americans employed the written word in their demand for recognition and personhood. In essays and discussions, students are to consider the development of twentieth- century African American letters within the four specific literary areas we will encounter: Early Twentieth-Century and the Harlem Renaissance, The Realist/Modernist Movement, The Black Arts Era, and Literature Since 1975. In your writing, and discussion, make sure to engage these questions: What claims does African American literature make for itself given its political and aesthetic contexts? How ultimately does literary art function for the disenfranchised?
Course Number and Name:
ENGLISH 386 – Studies in Writing and Culture
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10:00-11:15am
Course Description:
What is writing? How does writing inform our understandings of race? How might such understandings affect how we engage in discussions about race? This course is, first, an introduction to foundational questions about "writing" and "culture." Scholarship from writing studies and critical race theory will prompt students to define writing as a social act and explore how writing impacts identity formation and social movements. With this conceptual framework, we will then analyze how texts enact race, including but not limited to discourses about race circulating in universities; course readings will be, for the most part, nonfiction texts that are written for academic as well as more public audiences. In short, our purpose is to examine how everyday written texts reinscribe and/or interrupt understandings of racial identity and racial injustice and to write back to contemporary conversations about race. Course requirements will include writing short academic responses to readings, one discourse analysis of race-focused discussions in universities, and one interview-based case study.
Course Number and Name:
ENGLISH 481 – Individual American Authors
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 11:30am-12:45pm
Course Description:
Race, Struggle, and Democracy in 19th-Century US Literature. Americans today are living in an important and exciting time, when the Black Lives Matter movement has brought powerful new pressures to bear on white racism, exposing its systemic and pervasive permeation of American culture. In the spirit of this movement, in this course we turn to the nineteenth century – arguably the period when white racism became firmly established in the US – and we read the literature of the period in relation to that development. How and why did anti-Black racism take hold at that time? What position did white writers like Emerson, Whitman, Stowe, Phelps, Thoreau and Melville take on slavery, abolition, and race? The central figure in this course and our guide in this exploration will be the great Black abolitionist and anti-racist writer Frederick Douglass. We will try to see this period and its literature through his eyes. We will delve into his penetrating analyses of race and American culture. And we will discover that those analyses speak to our time as cogently as they did to his own.
Course Number and Name:
ENGLISH 791L – Contemporary American Indian Fiction
Meeting Days/Time:
Th, 1:00-3:30pm
Course Description:
This course will trace the contours of American Indian fiction, beginning in the Native American Renaissance with N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968) and ending with Brandon Hobson’s The Removed (2021). In his recent Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, Daniel Heath Justice thinks about the ways Indigenous texts articulate how to become human, how to be a good relative, how to be a good ancestor, and how to become a community. These same concerns will guide our readings of this work. We will also focus our discussions on issues of sovereignty, constructions of place, depictions of history, and the promise of Indigenous futurism in these novels, as we explore the current critical terrain of the field. Additional authors will include N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Stephen Graham Jones, LeAnne Howe, Cherie Dimaline, and Tommy Orange, among others.
Course Number and Name:
ENGLISH 791SA – South African Literature and Politics
Meeting Days/Time:
Wed, 1:00-3:30pm
Course Number and Name:
ENGLISH 891B – Poetry of the Political Imagination
Meeting Days/Time:
M 1:00-3:30pm
Course Description:
Poetry of the political imagination is a matter of both vision and language. Any progressive social change must be imagined first; any oppressive social condition, before it can change, must be named in words that persuade. Poets of the political imagination go beyond protest to define an artistry of resistance. This course explores how best to combine poetry and politics, craft and commitment. Students will read classic works ranging from the epigrams of Ernesto Cardenal, written against the dictator of Nicaragua, to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the book that sparked an obscenity trial. They will also read the farmworker poems of Diana García, born in a migrant labor camp; the emergency room sonnets of Dr. Rafael Campo; the prison poetry of political dissident Nazim Hikmet; and the feminist satire of Marge Piercy, among others.
Course Number and Name:
ENGLISH 891VC – Voices of Dislocation: Contemporary Immigrant Fiction
Meeting Days/Time:
M 6:15-8:45pm
Course Number and Name:
HISTORY 112 – Introduction to World Religions
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 10:10-11am + discussion
Course Description:
What is religion, and why do people care so much about it? This course will examine the origins and development of some of the world's major religions including Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We will read sacred texts and travel to sites of worship. We will also consider how religion continues to shape current affairs. Students will prepare analytic essays, participate in group discussions, and attend off-campus field trips. The course will demonstrate that understanding religion is critical to participating in a global community and will neither advocate or denigrate religious participation. (Gen. Ed. I, DG)
Course Number and Name:
HISTORY 117 – Science and Society in Modern China
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 12:20-1:10pm + discussion
Course Description:
Science has meant many things in modern Chinese history. It has been pursued as a force for sovereignty, enlightenment, civilization, modernity, economic development, social transformation, political liberation, state authority, democracy, populism, individual opportunity, international solidarity, global power, and more. This course will explore how science has shaped modern Chinese history and the roles played by scientists in supporting and challenging the state. It will also examine how specific social, cultural, and political contexts have shaped the practice and policy of science in China, and how the specific visions for science that have emerged there have influenced and inspired people within the country and around the world. Throughout the course, we will be attuned to the effects of power relations on the history of science in China, including the Chinese state’s geopolitical maneuverings in the contexts of colonialism and the Cold War, revolutionary challenges to ivory-tower elitism, and scientists’ struggles to find their voices within and against the state. (Gen. Ed. HS, DG)
Course Number and Name:
HISTORY 120 – Colonial Latin America
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 12:20-1:10pm + discussion
Course Description:
General view of the cultural, economic, and political development of Latin America, 1492 to 1824. Topics include the Iberian and Indian backgrounds; Spanish and Portuguese imperial organization; role of Indians, Blacks, and Europeans in the New World; the coming of independence. (Gen.Ed. HS, DG)
Course Number and Name:
HISTORY 130 – Middle East History I
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 2:30-3:45pm
Course Description:
This course will provide an introduction to the history of the Islamic world from the birth of the Prophet Muhammad in 570 CE to the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258. It will focus on the origins and the tenets of Islam, then turn to an investigation of the cultures and societies that emerged from the interactions of Islam and the Muslim community with existing cultures and political systems. The course will address such issues as the military and political realities of the Islamic empires, economics and trade, the interaction between nomadism and sedentary life, and Middle Eastern models of just rule. It will also examine questions of religious sectarianism, race, philosophy and spirituality. (Gen. Ed. HS, DG)
Course Number and Name:
HISTORY 220 – Capitalism and its Alternatives in Latin America
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 10:10-11:00am + discussions
Course Description:
Why have poverty and inequality proven so persistent in modern Latin American history? What strategies have people proposed to deal with these problems, and with what consequences? This course surveys the major periods in Latin American and Caribbean economic development, focusing on the last 150 years: the liberal export era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the state-led industrialization efforts of the mid-twentieth century, experimentation with radical alternatives to capitalism in Cuba and elsewhere, the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and after, and recent attempts to forge alternatives to neoliberalism. We'll look at the views of politicians, intellectuals, and businesspeople, but also at those of workers, women, indigenous people, migrants, and others typically marginalized in public debate. No prior experience with Latin American history or economics is necessary. (Gen. Ed. HS, DG)
Course Number and Name:
HISTORY 247 – Empire, Race, and the Philippines
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 1:00-2:15pm
Course Description:
This course compares the colonial legacies of Spain, Japan, and the United States in the Philippines while examining local reception, resistance, and negotiation of colonialism. (Gen.Ed. HS, DG)
Course Number and Name:
HISTORY 264 – History of Health Care and Medicine in the US
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 1:25-2:15pm + discussions
Course Description:
This course explores the history and social meaning of medicine, medical practice, health care, and disease in the United States from 1600 to the present. Using a variety of sources aimed at diverse audiences students will investigate topics such as: the evolution of beliefs about the body; medical and social responses to infectious and chronic disease; the rise of medical science and medical organizations; the development of medical technologies; mental health diagnosis and treatment; changing conceptions of the body; the training, role, and image of medical practitioners and the role of public and government institutions in promoting health practices and disease treatments. We will pay particular attention to the human experience of medicine, with readings on the experience of being ill, the delivery of compassionate care, and the nature of the relationship between practitioners and patients. Course themes will include race, gender, cultural diversity, women and gender, social movements, science, technology, politics, industry, and ethics. (Gen. Ed. HS, DU)
Course Number and Name:
HISTORY 297WL – Women & the Law: History of Sex and Gender Discrimination
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 1:00-2:15pm
Course Description:
This course examines the legal status of women in the United States, focusing specifically on the 20th and 21st centuries. How has the law used gender, sex, sexuality, and race to legally enforce inequality between women and men (and among women)? We will examine the legal arguments feminists have used to advocate for legal change and how these arguments have changed over time, paying specific attention to debates about whether to make legal arguments based on formal equality, substantive equality, liberty, or privacy. We will also consider the pros and cons of using the law to advocate for social justice. Specific issues that may be covered include the civil and political participation of women (voting, jury service), employment discrimination, intimate relationships, reproduction, contraception and abortion, violence against women, women as criminal defendants, and women as law students, lawyers, and judges.
Course Number and Name:
HISTORY 364 – Gender and Race in US Social Policy
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 11:30am-12:45pm
Course Description:
What are the problems associated with developing equitable and just policy? Why does social policy in the United States continue to be marked by tensions between the principle of equality and the reality of inequalities in social, political, and economic realms? How might policy subvert or reinforce these differences and inequalities? This class examines the history of social policy in the United States, particularly those policies affecting concerns of gender, race, and class. We will examine a wide range of social policies, focusing on those affecting groups such as: women, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBT people, and low-income people. We will study primarily empirical work, while asking questions about how political culture, interest groups, social movements, government institutions and other factor influence U.S. social policy.
Course Number and Name:
HISTORY 397PRH – Power and Resistance in Latin America (Honors)
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45pm
Course Description:
Why have ordinary Latin Americans joined social movements, often at high personal risk? How and when have those movements achieved their goals, and what common obstacles have they faced? What factors have influenced the forms and strategies that movements adopt? This course surveys the history of Latin American and Caribbean social movements from the late nineteenth century to the present day, seeking to identify key patterns and lessons in the process. Some of the case studies will include labor movements in twentieth-century Chile and Cuba, peasant/indigenous movements in Mexico and the Andes, feminist and LGBTQ movements in Brazil and Honduras, mobilization against military dictatorship in Argentina in the 1970s, the transnational campaigns against U.S. intervention in Central America in the 1980s, and recent struggles in defense of natural resources and the environment. We will also consider some of the groups who have mobilized in opposition to these movements.
Course Number and Name:
HISTORY 397RL – Rape Law: Gender, Race, (In)Justice
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10:00-11:15am
Course Description:
The history of the legal response to rape has often resulted in injustice for both the victim/survivor and the alleged perpetrator. This course will examine the evolution of the U.S. legal system's treatment of rape, paying particular attention to the movement against lynching in the post-civil war era, the rise of the feminist anti-rape movement in the 1970s and the student movement against campus sexual assault. Through an analysis of court cases, legislation, and other texts we will consider the role sexual violence has played in maintaining gender and racialized power relationships. We will examine how and why such violence came to be seen as a crime, including who is worthy of the law's "protection" and who is subject to the law's ? punishment." We will explore issues such as: rape as a form of racialized and imperial violence, especially against black and Native American women; the criminal legal treatment of rape and the evolution of the legal concepts of force, resistance, and consent; and the civil responses to rape under the Violence Against Women Act and Title IX. We'll also look at the international law responses to rape as a weapon of war. Finally, we'll think about how the legal responses, or non-responses, to rape have differed over time depending on factors such as the race/ethnicity, income level, immigration status, sexual orientation/gender identity, age, and marital status of the victim/survivor and the perpetrator. Finally, we?ll consider how the legal system can or should respond to rape, particularly in this age of mass criminalization and mass incarceration, and whether restorative justice responses might be preferable. Prior law-related coursework is helpful, but not required.
Course Number and Name:
HISTORY 492MC – A global history of modern ethnic cleansing: testimonies, experiences, memories
Meeting Days/Time:
W 2:30-5:00pm
Course Description:
This seminar explores the removal of peoples to create homogenous nation states in the modern world. Ethnic cleansing has been all too common, in all types of regimes, from democracies to dictatorships. We shall explore what brought it about, what are the particular modern characteristics of ethnic cleansing, and issues of property, restitution, and legal matters in bringing perpetrators to justice. We shall pay attention to testimonies of victims and perpetrators as well as their experiences.
Course Number and Name:
HISTORY 692MC – A global history of modern ethnic cleansing: testimonies, experiences, memories
Meeting Days/Time:
W 2:30-5:00pm
Course Description:
This seminar explores the removal of peoples to create homogenous nation states in the modern world. Ethnic cleansing has been all too common, in all types of regimes, from democracies to dictatorships. We shall explore what brought it about, what are the particular modern characteristics of ethnic cleansing, and issues of property, restitution, and legal matters in bringing perpetrators to justice. We shall pay attention to testimonies of victims and perpetrators as well as their experiences.
Course Number and Name:
ARTHIST 391P – Identity Politics and Art: 1960s to Today
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 2:30-3:45pm
Course Description:
This course historicizes identity politics in art from the 1960s to today, examining what social identity means and why it has been a contentious topic in contemporary art history. Students will consider the problem of discussing intersectional identities when they are shifting, open-ended, and complex constructions. We will study artists whose work raises personal and political questions about social experience and authenticity in ways that break down stereotypes. The role of performative works, photography, video, and installation will be considered in relation to more traditional artistic media such as drawing and painting. We will study the history of the Black Arts Movement, Feminist Art movements, and key texts from queer studies, feminist, and critical race theory in order to examine their intersections and divergences. The relationship of art to political protest movements, the AIDS crisis, Black Lives Matter and other recent developments will be addressed along with art world controversies such as the Culture Wars (1989–91) and the Whitney Biennials of 1993 and more recent years. The course also incorporates one field trip to a current exhibition that relates to these topics.
Course Number and Name:
ARTHIST 691P – Identity Politics and Art: 1960s to Today
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 2:30-3:45pm
Course Description:
This course historicizes identity politics in art from the 1960s to today, examining what social identity means and why it has been a contentious topic in contemporary art history. Students will consider the problem of discussing intersectional identities when they are shifting, open-ended, and complex constructions. We will study artists whose work raises personal and political questions about social experience and authenticity in ways that break down stereotypes. The role of performative works, photography, video, and installation will be considered in relation to more traditional artistic media such as drawing and painting. We will study the history of the Black Arts Movement, Feminist Art movements, and key texts from queer studies, feminist, and critical race theory in order to examine their intersections and divergences. The relationship of art to political protest movements, the AIDS crisis, Black Lives Matter and other recent developments will be addressed along with art world controversies such as the Culture Wars (1989–91) and the Whitney Biennials of 1993 and more recent years. The course also incorporates one field trip to a current exhibition that relates to these topics.
Course Number and Name:
LINGUIST 101
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 1:25-2:15pm, F Section
Course Description:
This course considers language from the viewpoint of nature and of society. A central concern is the question of what distinguishes a dialect from a language. We look at how accents and dialects are important markers of regional and social identity and closely examine the pernicious effects of dialect prejudice.
Course Number and Name:
LINGUIST 413
Meeting Days/Time:
MMWF 1:25-2:15pm
Course Description:
This course deals with three aspects of language variation and use: (i) Attitudes toward non-standard dialects in the USA; (ii) How people use language to construct their own identity or impose identities on others; and (iii) The social functions of speech, particularly being (im)polite.
Course Number and Name:
PHIL 170 – Problems in Social Thought
Meeting Days/Time:
MWF 11:15am-12:05pm
Course Description:
This course serves as an introduction to social and political philosophy. We will focus on the central issue of how best to organize society. More specifically, we will consider the following sorts of questions: What kinds of societies are ideal for human beings? What is the role of government in those societies? Given that serious moral transgressions have affected how most contemporary societies are arranged, how should we characterize and respond to injustice and oppression in our non-ideal world?
Course Number and Name:
PHIL 370 – Intro to Social and Political Philosophy
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 4:00-5:15pm
Course Description:
An examination of the liberal social contract tradition through the works of Locke and Rawls, along with critiques from class, race, and gender perspectives through the works of Marx and Charles Mills, among others.
Course Number and Name:
THEATER 190SJ – The Voice as Social Justice (New number not designated yet)
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 12:20-1:35pm
Course Description:
New course!
In times of cultural, political, and social upheaval, performance modalities are often transformed and reinvented. In the wake of the Trump administration and the global COVID pandemic, and in the midst of the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement, theatre and music as forms of social commentary and protest, and the act of protest itself, have radically evolved. This course explores the various manifestations of the voice––as performance––in protests, activism, and social justice movements in the United States, from the 20th century through current times. Through a creative and critical lens, we will examine political protest songs, theatre as a form of protest and activism, and the language and theatricality of protest chants. We will also study the perspective of voice and speech trainers and vocal coaches who are working at the intersections of activism, vocal health, and the arts, and how their unique skillset contributes to the sustainability and health of activists and protestors. (Gen.Ed. AT)
Course Number and Name:
THEATER 130/130H – Contemporary Playwrights of Color
Meeting Days/Time:
Section 1: TuTh 10:10-11:15am
Section 2: TuTh 11:30am-12:45pm
Honors: MW 4:00am-5:15pm
Course Description:
Theater movements of Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, and the body of literature by contemporary playwrights of color within a historical context. (Gen.Ed. AL, DU)
Course Number and Name:
THEATER 336 – Multicultural Theater and the Latin/x Experience
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45pm
Course Description:
This course will examine the landscape of American theater and its relationship to the politics of diversity in the U.S. We will study the theater work of Latinos/as in the U.S. to broaden our understanding of multicultural theater. In addition to studying the dramatic texts, we will also consider the political implications of the work and its relationship to social activism. We will also look at theater companies whose primary missions are to produce Latino/a theater and the history of the representation of Latinos on stage in this country.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 187 – Gender, Sexuality and Culture
Meeting Days/Time:
Monday, Wednesday 10:10-11:00
Friday discussion sections 9:05, 10:10, 11:15, 12:20
Course Description:
This course offers an introduction to some of the basic concepts and theoretical perspectives in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Drawing on disciplinary, interdisciplinary and cross-cultural studies, students will engage critically with issues such as gender inequities, sexuality, families, work, media images, queer issues, masculinity, reproductive rights, and history. Throughout the course, students will explore how experiences of gender and sexuality intersect with other social constructs of difference, including race/ethnicity, class, and age. Special attention will be paid to the ways in which interlocking systems of oppression have shaped and influenced the historical, cultural, social, political, and economical contexts of our lives, and the social movements at the local, national and transnational levels which have led to key transformations.
(Gen. Ed. I, DU)
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 201 – Gender and Difference: Critical Analyses
Meeting Days/Time:
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
An introduction to the vibrant field of women, gender, and sexuality studies, this course familiarizes students with the basic concepts in the field and draws connections to the world in which we live. An interdisciplinary field grounded in commitment to both intellectual rigor and individual and social transformation, WGSS asks fundamental questions about the conceptual and material conditions of our lives. What are "gender," "sexuality," "race," and "class?" How are gender categories, in particular, constructed differently across social groups, nations, and historical periods? What are the connections between gender and socio-political categories such as race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, (dis)ability and others? How do power structures such as sexism, racism, heterosexism, and classism and others intersect? How can an understanding of gender and power enable us to act as agents of individual and social change? Emphasizing inquiry in transnational feminisms, critical race feminisms, and sexuality studies, this course examines gender within a broad nexus of identity categories, social positions, and power structures. Areas of focus may include queer and trans studies; feminist literatures and cultures; feminist science studies; reproductive politics; gender, labor and feminist economics, environmental and climate justice; the politics of desire, and others. Readings include a range of queer, feminist and women thinkers from around the world, reflecting diverse and interdisciplinary perspectives in the field.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 230/793R – Politics of Reproduction
Meeting Days/Time:
Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Course Description:
From the Black Panther Party and Young Lords in the 1970s to SisterSong and Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice in the 1990s to Ferguson and Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement in the present, communities of color and socialist feminists have fought for a comprehensive reproductive freedom platform — birth control and abortion to be sure, but also the right to raise wanted children that are safe, cherished, and educated. The names of these issues have included freedom from sterilization, high quality affordable day care, IVF, immigrant justice, social reproduction and wages for housework, welfare and neoliberalism, foreclosure and affordable housing.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 286 – History of Sexuality and Race in the U.S.
Meeting Days/Time:
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 – Angie Willey
Course Description:
This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary feminist study of sexuality. Its primary goal is to provide a forum for students to consider the history of sexuality and race in the U.S. both in terms of theoretical frameworks within women's and gender studies, and in terms of a range of sites where those theoretical approaches become material, are negotiated, or are shifted. The course is a fully interdisciplinary innovation. It will emphasize the links rather than differences between theory and practice and between cultural, material, and historical approaches to the body, gender, and sexuality. Throughout the course we will consider contemporary sexual politics "from the science of sex and sexuality to marriage debates" in light of histories of racial and sexual formations.
(Gen. Ed. HS, DU)
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 290B – Introduction to Sexuality Studies: Movements for Justice in the Contemporary World
Meeting Days/Time:
Monday, Wednesday 11:15-12:05 p.m.
Discussion sections Friday, 11:15 and 12:20
Course Description:
This interdisciplinary course will help students to understand what the term "sexuality studies" means by providing a foundation in the key concepts, historical and social contexts, topics, and politics that inform the fields of sexuality studies; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies; and queer studies. Course instruction will be carried out through readings, lectures, films, and discussions, as well as individual and group assignments. Over the course of the semester, students will develop and use critical thinking skills to discern how "sexuality" becomes consolidated as a distinct category of analysis in the late nineteenth century, and what it means to speak about sexuality and transgender politics and categories today. Topics will include queer theories and politics, trans theories and politics, LGBTQ social movements within and outside of the US, relationships with feminist reproductive justice movements, heterosexuality, homophobia, and HIV/AIDS and health discourses. The range of materials covered will prioritize developing analyses that examine the interplay between sexuality and class, gender, race, ethnicity, and neoliberalism.
(Gen. Ed. SB, DG)
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 293X – Speculative Fictions of Race/Gender/Sexuality
Meeting Days/Time:
Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This course is not a history of feminist speculative fiction, nor a survey of the genre. Instead, it is a course that takes seriously speculative fiction as a site where commonsense is made strange and, therefore, can be remade. Combining readings in science fiction studies, feminist theory, and the fiction of authors like Octavia Butler, Ursula K. LeGuin, Samuel Delany, Torrey Peters, and Kai Cheng Thom with our own experiments in critical imagination, we will explore how the tools of speculative fiction can help us to both apprehend how race, sexuality, and gender in the United States have historically been constituted and imagine them otherwise.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 301 – Theorizing Gender, Race and Power
Meeting Days/Time:
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
Ways of analyzing and reflecting on current issues and controversies in feminist thought within an international context sensitive to class, race, and sexual power concerns. Topics may include work and international economic development, violence against women, racism, class and poverty, heterosexism, the social construction of gender, race and sexuality, global feminism, women, nationalism and the state, reproductive issues, pornography and media representations of women.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 310 – Writing for Majors
Meeting Days/Time:
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
Fulfills Junior Year Writing requirement for majors. Modes of writing and argumentation useful for research, creative, and professional work in a variety of fields. Analysis of texts, organization of knowledge, and uses of evidence to articulate ideas to diverse audiences. Includes materials appropriate for popular and scholarly journal writing. Popular culture reviews, responses to public arguments, monographs, first-person narratives and grant proposals, and a section on archival and bibliographic resources in Women's Studies. May include writing for the Internet. Nonmajors admitted if space available.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 391AA – Asian American Feminisms
Meeting Days/Time:
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Course Description:
How have the figures of the Chinese bachelor, the geisha, the war bride, the hermaphrodite, the orphan, the tiger mother, the Asian nerd, the rice king, the rice queen, and the trafficked woman shaped understandings of Asian Americans, and how have these representations been critiqued by Asian American feminist scholars and writers? Is there a body of work that constitutes "Asian American feminism(s)" and what are its distinctive contributions to the field of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies? How does this body of work illuminate historical and contemporary configurations of gender, sexuality, race, class, nation, citizenship, migration, empire, war, neoliberalism and globalization? In exploring these questions, this course examines Asian American histories, bodies, identities, diasporic communities, representations, and politics through multi- and interdisciplinary approaches, including social science research, literature, popular representations, film, poetry and art.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 395J – Imagining Justice
Meeting Days/Time:
Monday, Wednesday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This course will be conducted inside the Western Massachusetts Regional Women's Correctional Center (WCC) in Chicopee and will enroll students from UMass and students who are incarcerated in the facility. As a member of this course, you will be joining an international community of educators and students who are committed to dialogue and scholarly learning inside prisons and jails. Enrollment in this course is by application only. Permission by Instructor is required. Application for admission to the course is available here: Contact department with questions.
This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of the critical, aspirational, artistic, and creative forms that Justice takes in literature and the humanities more broadly. What sorts of ethical, social, and political questions are animated by writers and thinkers who seek to imagine and build a different world? What are the tangled roots of inequality and the legacies of sexual, racial, economic, and ecological injustice? How do writers, poets, artists, and "freedom dreamers," as Robin D.G. Kelley so memorably called them, labor to expose injustice and re-invent our universe? Ursula Le Guin has written, "We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable." Taking Le Guin's focus on the radical imagination as a starting point, this course explores the relationship between literature, the arts, and a wide range of social justice projects. Topics will include: Afrofuturism; utopian and dystopian fiction; art, politics and social justice; bioethics and literature; antebellum slave narratives and fictions of restorative and transformative justice; mass incarceration and prison literature; diaspora studies and literary and artistic representations of movement, forced migration and displacement.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 493W/693W – Worlds of Migration
Meeting Days/Time:
Monday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Course Description:
This seminar takes an expansive view of migration, beginning with readings from archaeology, physical anthropology and antiquity, all of which show that humans have always traveled great distances, for resources, because of climate disturbances, and for reasons that are yet to be understood. Indeed, migration has been a consistent feature and "producer" of human existence. Taking human migration as the norm rather than the exception, we will examine when, how and why "nativism" and reactionary discourses of ethnic and racialized citizenship began imagining a different view of migration to the one we find in the records of human history. Readings on contemporary migration will focus on India, South Africa, Greece, Australia and the US, all of which have had intense debates on questions of nation, sexuality, race and labor in recent years. Theoretically, we will rely on critiques of migration that emphasize temporality, political economy and postcoloniality, especially with respect to understanding borders and how they are surveilled and enforced. Our readings and discussions will expand the terrain of what counts as "migration", why certain forms of human movement across great distances are not thought of as "migration" at all, and why legal and policy debates around the world tend to focus on cross-border migration, often at the expense of equally important discussions of domestic, "circular" and seasonal migrations that people everywhere undertake as a means of survival.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 691P – Feminist Pedagogy
Meeting Days/Time:
Tuesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Course Description:
Feminist pedagogy is a radical philosophy of teaching and learning. It is an approach, rather than a toolbox of assorted tips and strategies, that is rooted in feminist, anti-racist critiques of power and knowledge, and is deeply informed by the values of social justice feminism and feminist practice. This graduate-level course in critical feminist pedagogy will explore the epistemological, methodological, and theoretical foundations of feminist pedagogical approaches, from Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed to bell hooks? Teaching to Transgress; from readings in the Black radical tradition to the Latin American experiments with literacy and empowering the poor; and from Bettina Love's abolitionist pedagogies and Audre Lorde's pedagogies of social justice and collective dissent to the growing scholarship on participatory methods, mindfulness and presence, and feminist experiments with alternative epistemological frameworks. The course will also explore, from a feminist pedagogical perspective, the obstacles that students face in learning: why some believe we have a 'push out' problem more than a 'drop out' problem; how pedagogical practices can be painful and harmful to students; the debates over classroom 'safe space'; and the critiques of the 'corporate university' and its metrics. A combination practicum and graduate theory seminar, the course also centers the practice of feminist pedagogy in the classroom. Feminist Pedagogy will create a fully collaborative space for students to interrogate, explore, test out and reshape the methods, methodologies, theories, and critical pedagogies that support our feminist teaching practices. Over the course of the semester, students will develop and workshop a course syllabus; they will design, critique, and practice learning plans; and they will build a community of feminist teachers and learners with whom they may continue to think about, reflect on, and reimagine critical feminist pedagogy.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 693W/493W – Worlds of Migration
Meeting Days/Time:
Monday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Course Description:
This seminar takes an expansive view of migration, beginning with readings from archaeology, physical anthropology and antiquity, all of which show that humans have always traveled great distances, for resources, because of climate disturbances, and for reasons that are yet to be understood. Indeed, migration has been a consistent feature and "producer" of human existence. Taking human migration as the norm rather than the exception, we will examine when, how and why "nativism" and reactionary discourses of ethnic and racialized citizenship began imagining a different view of migration to the one we find in the records of human history. Readings on contemporary migration will focus on India, South Africa, Greece, Australia and the US, all of which have had intense debates on questions of nation, sexuality, race and labor in recent years. Theoretically, we will rely on critiques of migration that emphasize temporality, political economy and postcoloniality, especially with respect to understanding borders and how they are surveilled and enforced. Our readings and discussions will expand the terrain of what counts as "migration", why certain forms of human movement across great distances are not thought of as "migration" at all, and why legal and policy debates around the world tend to focus on cross-border migration, often at the expense of equally important discussions of domestic, "circular" and seasonal migrations that people everywhere undertake as a means of survival.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 705 – Genealogies of Feminist Thought
Meeting Days/Time:
Wednesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Course Description:
This graduate seminar in feminist theory constitutes a core course for students enrolled in the Graduate Certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies. The seminar will be organized around questions that emerge for feminisms from the rubrics of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, transnationalism, human rights, economics and postcolonialism. Feminist theory is inherently interdisciplinary and we will draw on classic and contemporary writings from the many fields that contribute to the "field" of feminist theory.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 793R/230 – Politics of Reproduction
Meeting Days/Time:
Tuesday, Thursday 1000-11:15 a.m.
Course Description:
From the Black Panther Party and Young Lords in the 1970s to SisterSong and Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice in the 1990s to Ferguson and Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement in the present, communities of color and socialist feminists have fought for a comprehensive reproductive freedom platform — birth control and abortion to be sure, but also the right to raise wanted children that are safe, cherished, and educated. The names of these issues have included freedom from sterilization, high quality affordable day care, IVF, immigrant justice, social reproduction and wages for housework, welfare and neoliberalism, foreclosure and affordable housing.