These courses cover topics
introductory to the interdisciplinary study of culture and society offered on a
temporary basis before being added to the approved program curriculum.
The last two decades of the
twentieth century witnessed a variety of challenges to conventional
disciplinary thought and practice in the humanities and the human and social sciences
of western scholarship. Many of these involved a critical rethinking of usual
understandings of culture, knowledge, and power, at the least. This course aims
to introduce students to themes, questions, and ways of reading, writing, and
speaking that may be loosely referred to as "post-" thought,
analysis, and criticism that has constituted a major part of this challenge.
Influences from French post-structuralism, cultural Marxism, feminism,
psychoanalytic criticism, postcolonial studies, queer theory, critical race
theory, and science/knowledge studies will be reviewed. Students will be asked
to consider the emergence of these critical perspectives and practices relative
to established and dominant ways of thinking and writing/speaking defined by existing
disciplinary knowledges inside as well as outside the academy. Prereq.: One
entry-level course; at least 30 hours prior course credit/sophomore standing.
How does a writer's social
position affect the production of that writing? This course aims to develop a
practice of reflexivity in cultural analysis. A focus on centrality of language
and practices of representation in cultural analysis will give participants an
opportunity to experience these dilemmas first-hand as they engage in the
practices of analysis, reading, and writing. We will deploy these practices to
discuss empirical or written materials; practices may include discourse
analysis, textual analysis, forms of ethnography, interview, and other methods
of research and criticism. Prereq.: One entry-level course and at least 30
credit hours of prior course credit/ sophomore standing.
These courses cover advanced
topics in the interdisciplinary study of culture and society that are offered
on a temporary basis before being added to the approved program curriculum.
In this class, we will examine and critique dominant
conceptualizations of globalization and economic development. Globalization and economic development
are two interconnected concepts, constructed through the same historical and
social contexts of unequal power relations. Both words are typically understood as something positive,
and something that ÒweÓ in the United States have that ÒtheyÓ do not. In the class, participants will
look at how dominant economic development and globalization ideologies emerged,
how they operate, and how they are resisted. This course will investigate alternative ways of imagining
and constructing global social change using discussion, case studies, fiction,
lectures and writing. Prereq:
One entry-level sociology or anthropology course, or instructorÕs
consent.
This course critically inquires into various aspects of cultural geography of Islam. The seminar is aimed at gaining an in-depth geographic insight and understanding of the cultural geography of Islam. While the cultural aspects of Islam will be examined, the emphasis of the course will be on the spatial attributes associated with the belief system pertaining to the religion of Islam. Some of the important topics considered are : a) Hearths of the religion (the place of origin and development); b) Diffusion processes of the religion; c) Landscapes associated with Islam; d) Varied geographic environments of Islam; e) Perceptions of the religion from outsiders and insiders.
Americans in the 21st
century often think of racism as a problem of the past that crops up
occasionally in prejudiced individuals or in flawed social forms. This course
will offer instead the view that race is all around usÐit is as pervasive and
as powerful as the air we breathe or the language we speak. American public
speaking and writing is suffused with assumptions about race, with a variety of
consequences. Using a range of written and visual, historical and contemporary
texts, we will explore some of the competing and often contradictory ways in
which "race" pervades our public understandings.
SCSS 130
Contemporary Chinese Society
An examination of various
aspects of social life in post-imperial China. The course aims to increase
understanding of dominant twentieth-century cultural and institutional practices
and their links to the past. It also aims to heighten a reflexive sense of
awareness among those studying China as an "other" culture and the
implications this positioning has for the knowledge such inquiry produces.
SCS/WS 143 Speaking With Many Voices: A Sampling Of Native American Cultures
This course aims to take a step toward making audible and visible some aspects of the rich and varied Native American cultures that have flourished on this continent for millennia. We shall familiarize ourselves with some aspects of the quest for Native survival, its failures and successes; with the resistance to Western hegemony and with the interaction of Native cultures with cultures of the U.S. Some of the questions examined are concerned with how we learn about an ÒOther,Ó how we engage with cultures we hardly know and often dismiss or exoticize. The course asks if we should speak for others, and if so, why, and what are the consequences?
This course examines issues and ways of life pertaining to sexuality, education, religion, and women and the state, in various rural and urban geographical locations in the Muslim world. Gender will be used as the main filter through which we shall observe the issues and we shall use case studies in order to ÒsampleÓ different locations. The goals of the course include understanding the multiplicity of Muslim WomenÕs experience; gaining knowledge of the articulation of Islam and its complexities; and challenging media stereotypes.
This methods-intensive course will
introduce students to the interviewing methods associated with life history
research, as well as the issues of representation involved in the writing and
filming of people's lives and identities. Prerequisite: Entry-level
sociology or anthropology course or instructor's consent.
This course will explore the
history of argumentation and its role in contemporary culture. While
public speaking emphasizes the construction of speeches for contemporary policy
arguments, this course will examine the rhetoric of argument in contemporary
arenas of discourse in relation to theories of argumentation and
advocacy. The course will be divided into two major sections. The
first element will examine the function of argumentation and advocacy
historically, allowing students to learn argumentative terms and explore a wide
range of argumentation practices. The second element of the course will
examine the role of rhetoric in different contemporary arenas (public policy.
medicine, business, art, law, international conflict, and others).
The class will be speaking and writing intensive, asking students to prepare
argument exercises, write briefs, map social controversies, deliver speeches,
and engage in formal debates.
Analysis of standard practices and
distinctive examples of news photography to determine their role in the
formation of public memory and the maintenance of liberal-democratic societies.
This innovative course will teach
students life history/ ethnographic interviewing skills, send them into the
larger community to conduct interviews, and require them to use their interview
material to collaboratively write a play. As a class we will choose a topic of
inquiry we find compelling and each student will conduct an in-depth interview
with someone whose life is connected to that issue. Each student will be responsible
for integrating their interviewee's life story into the larger class project.
We will read texts that include practical methods for interviewing, plays based
in interviews, and texts that explore various ways of making sense of and
analyzing life stories.
Some say that television
functions as one of culture's primary historians. Movies function along similar
lines. What does it mean when movies and TV are the major constituents of a
nation's culture memory? Is it important that most of us rely on commercial
visual texts when we want to find out about the past? What about our own
memories about events? Can we distinguish what we "really" remember
from what others may have told us? Does it matter? The main aim of the course
is to better understand the role of the visual text as the most pervasive and
persuasive medium for conveying the past to people of the present. We live in a
time with many motivations for mining the past for specific uses--nationalism,
reparations, law, trauma, and mourning are but some of the ends. How do we know
what we know about the Vietnam War? What has shaped German
"knowledge" about the Third Reich? There is no unmediated past and as
conscientious citizens we must therefore grapple with the appropriation or
creation of private/public memories and cultural memory. War and Memory will
focus on cultural memory and representation. The course will introduce students
to various critical and theoretical cultural (mostly) theory. We shall be
working with visual texts (TV, film, documentaries), literary texts--fiction as
well as non-fiction.
This course explores contemporary
conceptions of sexual identity with particular emphasis on gay, lesbian,
bisexual, transgender and queer identities. The course examines theories and
practices of representing sexuality, including conventions for talking about or
censoring talk about sex. Writing assignments are designed to help students
think critically and creatively about the complex phenomenon of human
sexuality. Frequent writing and revision.
This course examines contemporary feminist theories of
subjectivity, focusing on how gender has been defined in various feminist
theoretical perspectives, including poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and
Black feminist thought.
Themes include language and discourse, power (Foucault), the body,
race/ethnicity, intersections of
race/gender; borderlands and hybrid identities, ÒpassingÓ; and queer theory and
the performativity of various genders (transgendering, female masculinity).
Materials drawn on include social theory, fiction, autobiography, and film. Prereq: One entry-level sociology or
anthropology course, or Introduction to WomenÕs Studies, or instructor consent. Also fulfills theory-intensive requirement
for the sociology and ANSO majors.
SCS 150/HONR 151/WS 195 Science, Cyborgs, And Monsters:Thinking Knowledge Projects For The New Millennium
This course aims to look critically at science or
technoscience as knowledge production practices embedded in social and cultural
relationships of power, hierarchy, and domination. As such, techno/science is seen always both to reflect and
to help constitute those very arrangements that are its contexts and to have
non-trivial consequences for the worlds of which it is a part. Feminism has provided one of the
critical discourses that have been used most productively to see science
differently and it provides the center for the course. Other critical resources in the course
come from history, sociology, ethnomethodology, postmodernism, literary
criticism, cultural studies, and queer theory. New awareness and understanding
about a series of questions are the course's aim, including distinctions in the
major ways to study scientific practice; how to understand changes in paradigms
for producing knowledge; class and gender influences in foundational images of
scientific practice; science and a "God's Eye View" of nature as well
as "man's" place in it; feminist and other attempts to deconstruct
dominant understandings of science and the production of scientific knowledge;
scientific objectivity and partial truths; "posthuman" perspectives
on the body and knowledge/information; the disruptive and hopeful implications
of new figures that have come to join science's more conventional
objects/subjects in the last decade, namely cyborgs, monsters, and queers. Prereq.: Entry-level soc or anth course, or WS 1/Soc 75/Eng 75 or
instr. consent.
Directed independent
interdisciplinary study on a topic proposed by the student and not otherwise
offered in a regularly-scheduled course.
The internship provides an
opportunity for students with prior course experience in the interdisciplinary
study of culture and society, working with both faculty and off-campus
supervision, to pursue projects of study, work, and change in off-campus sites.
These projects must be shaped to have both an academic component and practical
or political relevance to the details of the off-campus site.
Individually-guided
projects of inquiry and/or reflection proposed and completed in the fourth year
of study that reflect on the student's coursework in the study of culture and
society and selected relevant insights this work has enabled. Projects proposed
by student and overseen, guided, and evaluated by a supervising faculty.
Updated April 2005