Class Schedules

The main objectives of this introductory course are: to explore the historical construction of racial categories in the United States; to understand the systemic impact of racism on contemporary social processes; to consider popular views about race in the light of emerging scholarship in the field; and to develop an ability to connect personal experiences to larger, collective realities. We will engage several questions as a group: What are the historical and sociological foundations of racial categories? When does focusing on race make someone racist? What is white privilege, and why does it matter? All students will be asked to think and write about their own racial identity. This course, or its equivalent, is required for majors and minors.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course will introduce students to interdisciplinary research approaches to the study of race, ethnicity, and other categories of difference. Students will learn to conceptualize and design research projects, and will obtain hands-on experience in executing different methods. The course will also consider the critiques of systems of knowledge production and research approaches that have been informed by scholars from fields such as African American history, gender studies, and critical race studies, as well as from the disciplines. The goal is to develop an understanding of the assumptions embedded in many fields of inquiry, and to learn to apply critical approaches to important research questions. Prerequisite(s): AMST 101, AMST 103, or AMST 110.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Poor and minority populations have historically borne the brunt of environmental inequalities in the United States, suffering disproportionately from the effects of pollution, resource depletion, dangerous jobs, limited access to common resources, and exposure to environmental hazards. Paying particular attention to the ways that race, ethnicity, class, and gender have shaped the political and economic dimensions of environmental injustices, this course draws on the work of scholars and activists to examine the long history of environmental inequities in the United States, along with more recent political movements-national and local-that seek to rectify environmental injustices.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

After a brief but essential global history of drugs, this course will focus primarily on the 20th century to the present. We will examine histories of substance use and abuse, temperance and prohibition, the "War on Drugs," the shifting concept of addiction as a moral failing to addiction as a treatable disease, as well as study the history of the recovery movement and harm reduction. This course is not intended to be an exhaustive, comprehensive history of the subject-but it will provide you with a solid base from which to explore other aspects of this fascinating and contentious aspect of human history.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This discussion-based course is entirely focused on Bruce Lee, the actor and leading martial arts icon of the 20th century. Using American Studies and Critical Race Studies frames to examine the construction of racialized and gendered bodies, we will discuss Bruce Lee in terms of his biography, identities, politics, philosophy, and filmography. We will take time to appreciate the entertainment value and athleticism that Bruce Lee brought to his work, but we will also learn to distinguish the commercialized, commodified Bruce Lee (from t-shirts to posters to action figures) from the serious historical figure who symbolized the spirit of cultural independence and political sovereignty around the world. Among the required books and movies: The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, and "Way of the Dragon" (1972).

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

In this course we will look at the intersection between race and the law in an effort to facilitate discussion and understanding of the role law has played and/or continues to play both in the subordination and promotion of the rights of people of color in America.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course is an introduction to theories and histories of social movements engaged with sovereignty struggles in the United States and Canada. We will explore key concepts and theoretical frameworks of Indigenous gender and sexuality to think critically about formations of community and governance. We will also trace the intimate roots and routes of Indigenous politics through a range of literary, visual and legal texts. No special background is needed. All students are welcome.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is an introduction to contemporary social justice organizing around water rights in the United States. This course explores how impacted communities currently navigate various systems of power to challenge and resist the violence enacted through and against water. We will map across varied geographies, emergent strategies and alternative futures where water is protected. No special background is needed. All students are welcome.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Asian Americans are often overlooked in the study of religion in the U.S., and yet the impact of Asian religious practices can be seen at every turn: yoga studios, mindfulness meditation, “zen” aesthetics of minimalism, and so on. What do we make of the gap between how Asian religions are practiced in Asian American communities and how these traditions have been reinterpreted by predominantly white, educated, middle class adherents? How do Asian American Christians negotiate their identities in the context of non-Asian Christian churches or the intergenerational tensions within their own ethnic churches? The approach of this course is interdisciplinary (and sometimes counterdisciplinary), drawing on theoretical and methodological insights from ethnic studies, religious studies, history, and sociology. Topics include: race and the racialization of Asian Americans; the politics of cultural and religious exchange; the commodification of Asian religious practices; and issues of assimilation and hybridity within Asian American Christian traditions.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course explores James Baldwin’s life and work as a writer and activist. Baldwin was a black gay man in an antiblack and heteronormative world. His queer imagination and spirituality are part of the same cloth. Deeply scared by the black church, Baldwin’s spirituality and art were, nevertheless, profoundly shaped by the spirit and language of black church religiosity. Through a heterogenous body of writing and the life he lived, Baldwin explored the souls of black folks (including queer blackness) and the nature of American identity. We will cover material that will deepens our understanding of racial formations in the US context. Racial formations refers to the history of laws, institutions (corporate, educational, religious, etc.), and social practices that create race.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In many contemporary social movements, the roles of race and class may either seem obvious or relatively easy to ascertain. But what happens when we add gender to this mix? What are the different roles that women take on in social movements and how can we account for differences across movements? How do gender, race, and class intersect in social movements? For example, what happens when we compare the ideas of progress in Black Lives Matter and white nationalist movements with particular emphasis on women’s place(s) in the future? In this course, we scrutinize the intersections of race, class, and gender as they relate to the ideals to which movements aspire. Social movements that emphasize concepts such as progress, development, and nation-making indicate visions of the future that can illuminate how gender, race, and class shape peoples’ lives. We will focus on the experiences of women (as individuals and as members of groups or organizations) in their historical and structural locations and explore what concepts such as progress, development, and nation-making mean for women in the struggle over feminist meanings and claims.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

How and why does race matter politically in Canada, Mexico, and the United States? What are the historical, ideological, and cultural roots of the racial politics we observe today? Which political theories and interpretive frameworks help us to best understand the many ways race matters? How does race intersect with other internal or external markers of identity? How does understanding processes of racialization better help us act politically in the present? At the center of this course is the idea that race is a political, historical phenomenon that is an inescapable part of present day political contexts. We start with the historical and social roots of present-day systems as they relate to race. We will study major theoretical approaches to understanding race and how it operates in our world as one among many intersectional identities. More specifically, our objects of study will be the philosophical and empirical implications of what Charles Mills dubs the "Racial Contract," and bell hooks terms "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy." In other words, we'll be studying how race was created--out of the intersection of settler-colonialism, chattel slavery, colonial rule and expropriation, orientalism--and what this implies for us as we encounter the contemporary manifestations of those phenomena. Rooted in the settler-colonial context in North America and with an emphasis on twentieth and twenty-first century racial politics, the course will include readings from, among others, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, queer, NB, and feminist writers and practitioners, as well as opportunities to interact with activists, artists, and academics working on these questions. We will also bring in questions about diasporic identity, cultural appropriation, methodology, and the status of race and racialization in academia. Texts will include writings from political theorists, analytic philosophers, historians, anthropologists, cultural theorists, sociologists, artists, playwrights, and activists, as well as films, visual, and performance art.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism OR U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

What do you imagine when you think of Southern California, New Mexico, the Texan Plains, the Sonoran desert? Perhaps you picture craggy summits, jaunty saguaros, the fading Colorado River Delta. Perhaps you see red adobe walls clinging to cliff sides, or desperately dangerous border crossings. Few people envision a densely populated Native heartland, crisscrossed by trade routes, scored by the borders between powerful Indigenous states. But long before the Spanish Empire ventured northward from Mexico City, long before the U.S.-Mexican War fractured this landscape, the Quecháns, Maricopas, Apaches, Yaquis, Tohono O’odhams, and their neighbors dominated this region and its resources.This class traces Native communities across the region’s Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. American regimes (between the 15th century and the present). We will foreground Indigenous peoples’ distinct geopolitical agendas and explore their innovative, hard-won persistence. Likewise, we will interrogate the strategies—displacement, forced labor, genocide, assimilation—that colonial governments have used to dominate native peoples. Finally, we will consider the function of the U.S.-Mexico border, and of ideas of “citizenship,” since 1848.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism OR U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course, we will investigate the current flourishing of African American detective fiction. Guided by the premise that genres perform particular “cultural work,” we will assess the aesthetic and political work being performed by contemporary detective fiction by authors such as Walter Mosley, Barbara Neely, and Attica Locke. We will develop historical contexts for our investigation by reading late 19th and early 20th century examples of each of the major types of detective fiction: the classic, the hardboiled, and the cozy. We will also read modern African American detective fiction by Pauline Hopkins, Rudolph Fisher, and Chester Himes. We will view several film adaptations, as well, examining the aesthetic and political shifts that can occur when a literary work is transformed via another medium. Requirements for the course include: presenting on one of our texts, writing a brief response paper for most of our primary readings, and writing one 5-page paper, one 7-10-page paper, and a final short reflection. This course fulfills the literature by U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In almost every town in the world, in a rich tradition spanning millennia, communities make theatrical representations of themselves: their heroes, their unsung neighbors, their struggles, their aspirations. Community-based theater is made by, for and about communities, and the varieties, strategies, controversies and triumphs of this form are the content of this course. In the United States, which is the geographical focus of this course, community-based theater has emerged from rural and urban communities, communities of color, communities of coalitions united toward a cause - we will learn from historical and scholarly accounts, and from local participants, about many of these efforts. We also will explore the Twin Cities' own deep history of community-based theater-making, and participate in a major community project during the semester. You will be off campus for a good amount of time in the later part of the semester connecting and experiencing work.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This course provides an interdisciplinary discussion of the Latino experience in the United States with a focus on Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban- Americans. Using fiction, poetry, films and critical essays, we will examine issues of race and ethnicity, language, identity, gender and sexuality, politics, and immigration. This course satisfies the Area 2 requirement for the Spanish major. Prerequisite(s): SPAN 305 .

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course provides an interdisciplinary discussion of the Latino experience in the United States with a focus on Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban- Americans. Using fiction, poetry, films and critical essays, we will examine issues of race and ethnicity, language, identity, gender and sexuality, politics, and immigration. This course satisfies the Area 2 requirement for the Spanish major. Prerequisite(s): SPAN 305 .

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this discussion-based seminar, we will examine U.S. Global presence through the lenses of empire, diaspora, and transnationalism. We will look specifically at U.S. involvement in the Philippines and Viet Nam from 1898 to 1975 as moments of military occupation and cultural domination, as well as turning points for U.S. nation-building. What is "imperialism" and how is it different from "hegemony"? How did U.S. imperial adventures in Asia help to recreate a Western geographic imaginary of the "East"? How did they reshape or reconfigure "American" positions and identities? Under what circumstances were former imperial subjects allowed to generate racialized communities? To what extent are memories of U.S. conflicts in Asia cultivated, proliferated, twisted, or suppressed? What lessons can be garnered for the contemporary historical moment? Other topics for exploration include: internment, transracial adoption, commemorations of war, and anti-imperialist/anti-war movements.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

An overview of contemporary approaches to media as culture, a determining as well as determined sphere in which people make sense of the world, particularly in terms of ethnicity, gender, identity, and social inequality. Students develop tools for analyzing media texts and accounts of audience responses derived from the international field of cultural studies and from the social theory on which it draws. Analysis emphasizes specificity of media texts, including advertisements, films, news reports, and television shows. Experience in cooperative discussion, research, and publication. Prerequisite(s): MCST 110 .

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials