Culture and Society Department Special Topics Courses

Fall 2005

Anthropology (SCSA) Special Topics Courses

SCSA 150 (CRN 2879): Women in the Global Factory

This course will explore current issues and debates relating to globalization and transnational cultures as they affect women's lives in various parts of the world. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which notions of flexible capital and the global assembly line affect third world women's lives and how women's work in transnational environments affect work and gender identities, sexuality, notions of family and kinship, cultural politics and collective resistance. We will evaluate both local and transnational struggles that respond to new inequalities engendered by globalization and will especially focus on transnational feminist networks. The course will particularly explore conditions of women's work in global factories in countries such as Mexico, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Thailand and Guatemala in a way that will evidence how the US and other countries are socially, politically, economically and culturally linked to one another.

Prereq.: One entry-level Anthropology or Sociology course.

Study of Culture and Society (SCS) Special Topics Courses

SCS 150 (CRN 2861) (SCS 110 after Fall 2005): Culture, Knowledge, Power
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/knowlege 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 andwriting/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. Cross-listed with Honors 155.

SCS 150 (CRN 2878) Performing Lives

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.

Cross-listed with Honors 152.

SCS 150 (CRN 2860) War and Memory

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 representaion. 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. Cross-listed with Hoonors 144.