Ethnic and Diasporic Studies

Images wavered in the sunlit trim of appliances, something always moving, a brightness flying, so much to know in the world. —Don Delillo, Libra

A few cartoons lead to cataclysmic events in Europe. A man’s statement that he “can’t breathe” ricochets across North America. A photograph printed in a newspaper moves a solitary reader. A snapshot posted on the Internet leads to dreams of fanciful places. Memories of a past year haunt us like ghosts. What each of these occurrences has in common is that they all entail the force of images in our lives, whether these images are visual, acoustic, or tactile in nature; made by hand or machine; circulated by word of mouth; or simply imagined. In this seminar, we will consider the role that images play in the lives of people in various settings throughout the world. In delving into terrains at once actual and virtual, we will develop an understanding of how people throughout the world create, use, circulate, and perceive images—and how such efforts tie into ideas and practices of sensory perception, time, memory, affect, imagination, sociality, history, politics, and personal and collective imaginings. Through these engagements, we will reflect on the fundamental human need for images, the complicated politics and ethics of images, aesthetic and cultural sensibilities, dynamics of time and memory, the intricate play between the actual and the imagined, and the circulation of digital images in an age of globalization and social media. We will also consider the spectral, haunting qualities of many imaginal moments in life. Readings are to include a number of writings in anthropology, art history, philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, and critical theory. Images are to be drawn from photographs, films and videos, paintings, sculptures, drawings, street art and graffiti, religion, rituals, tattoos, inscriptions, novels, poems, road signs, advertisements, dreams, fantasies, and any number of fabulations in the worlds in which we live and imagine. The seminar will be held during two class sessions each week during the fall and spring terms. Along with that, students will meet individually with the instructor every other week through the course of each semester to discuss their ongoing academic and creative work. In the fall semester, we will all also meet every other week in an informal group setting to watch films together, discuss student research and writing projects, and engage creatively with images and imaginal thought.

How does a chronic illness affect a person’s orientation to the everyday? What are the social and political forces that underpin life in a homeless shelter? What is the experiential world of a blind person, a musician, a refugee, or a child at play? In an effort to answer these and like-minded questions, anthropologists have become increasingly interested in developing phenomenological accounts of particular lived realities in order to understand—and convey to others—the nuances and underpinnings of such realities in terms that more general social or symbolic analyses cannot achieve. In this context, phenomenology offers an analytic method that works to understand and describe in words phenomena as they appear to the consciousnesses of certain peoples. The phenomena most often in question for anthropologists include the workings of time, perception, selfhood, language, bodies, suffering, and morality as they take form in particular lives within the context of any number of social, linguistic, and political forces. In this course, we will explore phenomenological approaches in anthropology by reading and discussing some of the most significant efforts along these lines. Each student will also try their hand at developing a phenomenological account of a specific social or subjective reality through a combination of ethnographic research, participant observation, and ethnographic writing.

In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore child and adolescent development through a cross-cultural lens. Focusing on case studies from diverse communities around the world, we will look at the influence of cultural processes on how children learn, play, and grow. Our core readings will analyze psychological processes related to attachment and parenting, cognition and perception, social and emotional development, language acquisition, and moral development. We will ask questions like the following: Why are children in Sri Lanka fed by hand by their mothers until middle childhood, and how does that shape their relations to others through the life course? How do Inuit toddlers come to learn moral lessons through scripted play with adults, and how does such learning prepare them to navigate a challenging social and geographic environment? Is it true that Maya children don’t do pretend play at all? How does parental discipline shape the expression of emotion for children in Morocco? How does a unique family role influence the formation of identity for Latinx youth in the United States? Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, our course material will draw from developmental psychology, human development, cultural psychology, and psychological anthropology and will include peer-reviewed journal articles, books, and films that address core issues in a range of geographic and sociocultural contexts. Students will conduct conference projects related to the central topics of our course and may opt to do fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center.

This course explores issues of identity and difference, locality and community, through the lens of space and place. Engaging with recent scholarly work in the fields of sociocultural anthropology, ethnic studies, sociology, geography, architecture, and literature, we will seek to decode sociospatial arrangements to understand structures and processes of exclusion and marginalization. At the same time, we will observe how material realities and linguistic discourse shape people’s navigations through space and how efforts at placemaking create sites of collective identity, resistance, belonging, and recognition. We will ask questions such as: How does “talk of crime” instantiate racial segregation in a Brazilian favela? What boundaries are created by gated communities in places like Texas and Mumbai? How does public policy in San Diego police green spaces to restrict access by people who are unhoused? What should we make of “placeless” spaces or states, such as those instantiated through technologies like social media, radio, or meditative practice? How should we understand notions of displacement, transborder identifications, or longings for homeland, as they play out for Sierra Leonean Muslims in Washington, DC, Ecuadorians in Italy, or Indigenous Latin American migrants in California and Wyoming? Posed in a wide range of ethnographic contexts, our efforts to puzzle through these issues will require attention to the ways in which space and place are spoken, embodied, gendered, racialized, and (il)legalized. We will likewise attend to the politics and ethics of decolonizing scholarship on space and place and to the meanings of an engaged anthropology that leans toward social justice.

This course will ask how words do things in the world, exploring the complex linkages of language, politics, and identity in both past and present contexts. We will pose a range of questions, such as: How does language enable powerful regimes to take force, and how do linguistic innovations constitute a creative means to challenge oppression? What role do the politics and poetics of language play in broader social movements and cultural revitalization efforts? How do particular political configurations produce language shift or constrain the possibilities for verbal expression in specific social groups? How does language take shape through specific narrative forms like testimonio, and how do such forms constitute or enable acts of political resistance? We will look at such topics in a range of ethnographic contexts, with a special focus on the Americas. Our readings will address case studies, including: the emergent Zapotec language and music revival in the highlands of Oaxaca, Mexico; the lexicon of terror that shaped the political kidnappings and murders of Argentina’s Dirty Wars; the legacies of secrecy, silence, and creative resistance among Pueblo nations in the US Southwest; the challenges and joys of bilingualism among transnational migrants; and the acts of narrative witnessing employed by a range of activists, including political prisoners, Indigenous rights leaders, and undocumented youth. Students will be invited to draw upon original linguistic research as a central part of their conference work.

This course asks how contemporary immigration shapes individual and collective identity across the life course. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that bridges cross-cultural psychology, human development, and psychological anthropology, we will ask how people’s movement across borders and boundaries transforms their senses of self, as well as their interpersonal relations and connections to community. We will analyze how the experience of immigration is affected by the particular intersections of racial, ethnic, class, gender, generational, and other boundaries that immigrants cross. For example, how do undocumented youth navigate the constraints imposed by “illegalized” identities, and how do they come to construct new self-perceptions? How might immigrants acculturate or adapt to new environments, and how does the process of moving from home or living “in-between” two or more places impact mental health? Through our close readings and seminar discussions on this topic, we seek to understand how different forms of power—implemented across realms that include state-sponsored surveillance and immigration enforcement, language and educational policy, health and social services—shape and constrain immigrants’ understanding of their place in the world and their experience of exclusion and belonging. In our exploration of identity, we will attend to the ways in which immigrants are left out of national narratives, as well as the ways in which people who move across borders draw on cultural resources to create spaces and practices of connection, protection, and continuity despite the disruptive effects of immigration. In tandem with our readings, we will welcome scholar-activist guest speakers, who will present their current work in the field. Prior course work in psychology or social sciences is recommended.

This course will explore the art and architecture of Spain and of Latin America as its lands emerged from colonialism to forge strong independent identities. We will focus on selected topics, including extraordinary artists such as El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, Cabrera, and Aleijadinho, as well as on complex issues surrounding art and identity in contested and textured lands—in particular, Casta painting, colonialism, and arts of revolution and national identity. Students may, if they wish, extend their conference work to later artists (e.g., Diego Rivera, Frida Khalo, José Bedia, Belkis Ayón, among others).

This course will explore the architecture and visual arts of societies in which Islam is a strong political, cultural, or social presence. We will follow the history of some of these societies through the development of their arts and architecture, using case studies to explore their diverse artistic languages from the advent of Islam through the contemporary world. We will begin with an introduction to the history surrounding the advent of Islam and the birth of arts and architecture that respond to the needs of the new Islamic community. We will proceed to follow the developments of diverse artistic and architectural languages of expression as Islam spreads to the Mediterranean and to Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America—exploring the ways in which arts can help define and express identities for people living in multiconfessional societies. We will then draw this exploration into the present day, in which global economics, immigration, and politics draw the architecture and artistic attitudes of Islam into the global contemporary discourse. Our work will include introductions to some of the theoretical discourses that have emerged concerning cultural representation and exchange and appropriation in art and architecture. One of our allied goals will be to learn to read works of art and to understand how an artistic expression that resists representation can connect with its audience. And throughout this course, we will ask: Can there be an Islamic art?

Students will be introduced to the traditional Chinese practices of Tai Chi and Qi Gong. These practices engage with slow, deliberate movements, focusing on the breath, meditative practice, and posture to restore and balance energy—called chi or Qi. The postures flow together, creating graceful dances of continuous motion. Sometimes referred to as one of the soft or internal martial arts, Tai Chi and Qi Gong are foundational practices within a lifelong, holistic self-cultivation in traditional Chinese culture.

This course will use physical embodiment as a mode of learning about and understanding various West African cultures. In addition to physical practice, supplementary study materials will be used to explore the breadth, diversity, history, and technique of dances found in West Africa. Traditional and social/contemporary dances from countries such as Guinea, Senegal, Mali, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast will be explored. Participation in end-of-semester or year-end showings will provide students with the opportunity to apply studies in a performative context.

In this course, teaching and facilitating the practice of hip-hop/urban dance technique and performance, the class will examine the theory, technique, and vocabulary of hip-hop dance. The course will facilitate the student’s development and ability to execute and perform hip-hop/urban dance steps.

Environmental injustice is both an outcome and a process. As an outcome, environmental injustice is the unequal distribution of environmental burdens (or benefits) in a society. As a process, environmental injustice is the history and institutions that project political, economic, and social inequalities into the environmental sphere. In this course, we will discuss the broad environmental justice literature and connect it with our immediate community: Yonkers, NY. We will first measure the disproportionate environmental burdens in the city’s low-income and minority neighborhoods. Then, we will utilize economics to examine the causal mechanisms of environmental injustice. We will focus on the evolution of the housing market, the changing demographics of Yonkers, the location choice of major pollution sources, political representation and power, exclusionary and expulsive zoning policies, etc. We will draw knowledge from multiple fields—economics, politics, sociology, geography, etc. We will examine the issue using multiple methodologies and assess different policy options for improving environmental and climate justice in Yonkers. We will also examine the policy implications of each environmental injustice issue. For each topic/issue, we will have in-depth discussions based on the readings, followed by in-class collaborative research activities that produce qualitative and quantitative evidence of environmental injustice in Yonkers. To visualize environmental injustice, we will use a geographic information system (GIS) to make maps. You will then be asked to write about the issue in an assignment and discuss potential policy recommendations.

Environmental injustice is both an outcome and a process. As an outcome, environmental injustice is the unequal distribution of environmental burdens (or benefits) in a society. As a process, environmental injustice is the history and institutions that project political, economic, and social inequalities into the environmental sphere. In this course, we will discuss the broad environmental justice literature and connect it with our immediate community: Yonkers, NY. We will first measure the disproportionate environmental burdens in the city’s low-income and minority neighborhoods. Then, we will utilize economics to examine the causal mechanisms of environmental injustice. We will focus on the evolution of the housing market, the changing demographics of Yonkers, the location choice of major pollution sources, political representation and power, exclusionary and expulsive zoning policies, etc. We will draw knowledge from multiple fields—economics, politics, sociology, geography, etc. We will examine the issue using multiple methodologies and assess different policy options for improving environmental and climate justice in Yonkers. We will also examine the policy implications of each environmental injustice issue. For each topic/issue, we will have in-depth discussions based on the readings, followed by in-class collaborative research activities that produce qualitative and quantitative evidence of environmental injustice in Yonkers. To visualize environmental injustice, we will use a geographic information system (GIS) to make maps. You will then be asked to write about the issue in an assignment and discuss potential policy recommendations.

The founders of the Négritude movement saw a direct line between how we use words and how we shape the world. Like the Black nationalists of the 1960s and ’70s, who championed Black power and informed the world that “Black is beautiful,” these artists and intellectuals from French colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and South America who met in Paris in the 1930s appropriated the French word nègre and developed a poetics to combat colonialism and racism. They were both poets and politicians: The poet Léopold Senghor became the first president of Senegal, while the Martinician poet and playwright Aimé Césaire became a member of the French National Assembly. In this course, we will study the Négritude movement as a test case for the notion that poetry can serve as a form of social and political action. To better understand where the founders of the Négritude movement were coming from, we will begin our study with an introduction to the history of French colonialism and France’s participation in the triangular slave trade. Using historical documents, we will look at the modern development of the concept of race at a time when cultural support for the slave trade was waning. Some of the themes that we will explore are colonialism and modernism, gender politics, Créolité, and debates around the legacy of Négritude. Readings will include works by Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Léon Damas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paulette Nardal, Jane Nardal, Jean Barnabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, Franz Fanon, and Maryse Condé.

In this yearlong seminar, we will begin by examining competing paradigms and approaches to understanding “development” and the “Third World.” We will set the stage by answering the question: What did the world look like 500 years ago? The purpose of this part of the course is to acquaint us with and to analyze the historical origins and evolution of a world political economy of which the "Third World" is an intrinsic component. We will thus study the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the rise of merchant and finance capital, and the colonization of the world by European powers. We will analyze case studies of colonial "development" to understand the evolving meaning of this term. These case studies will help us assess the varied legacies of colonialism apparent in the emergence of new nations through the fitful and uneven process of decolonization that followed. The next part of the course will look at the United Nations and the role that some of its associated institutions have played in the post-World War II global political economy, one marked by persistent and intensifying socioeconomic inequalities as well as frequent outbreaks of political violence across the globe. By examining the development institutions that have emerged and evolved since 1945, we will attempt to unravel the paradoxes of development in different eras. We will deconstruct the measures of development through a thematic exploration of population, resource use, poverty, access to food, the environment, agricultural productivity, and different development strategies adopted by Third World nation-states. We will then examine globalization and its relation to emergent international institutions and their policies; for example, the IMF, World Bank, AIIB, and WTO. We will then turn to contemporary development debates and controversies that increasingly find space in the headlines—widespread land grabbing by sovereign wealth funds, China, and hedge funds; the “global food crisis”; epidemics and public-health challenges; and the perils of climate change. Throughout the course, our investigations of international institutions, transnational corporations, the role of the state, and civil society will provide the backdrop for the final focus of the class: the emergence of regional coalitions for self-reliance, environmental and social justice, and sustainable development. Our analysis of development in practice will draw upon case studies primarily from Africa but also from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the United States. Conference work will be closely integrated with the themes of the course, with a two-stage substantive research project beginning in the fall semester and completed in the spring. Project presentations will incorporate a range of formats, from traditional papers to multimedia visual productions. Smaller creative projects are also a component of the course, including podcasts, videos, art, music, and other forms. Where possible and feasible, students will be encouraged to do primary research during fall study days and winter and spring breaks. Some experience in the social sciences is desired but not required.

Where does the food we eat come from? Why do some people have enough food to eat and others do not? Are there too many people for the world to feed? Who controls the world’s food? Will global food prices continue their recent rapid rise; and, if so, what will be the consequences? What are the environmental impacts of our food production systems? How do answers to these questions differ by place or by the person asking the question? How have they changed over time? This course will explore the following fundamental issue: the relationship between development and the environment—focusing, in particular, on agriculture and the production and consumption of food. The questions above often hinge on the contentious debate concerning population, natural resources, and the environment. Thus, we will begin by critically assessing the fundamental ideological positions and philosophical paradigms of “modernization,” as well as critical counterpoints that lie at the heart of this debate. Within this context of competing sets of philosophical assumptions concerning the population-resource debate, we will investigate the concept of “poverty” and the making of the Third World, access to food, hunger, grain production and food aid, agricultural productivity (the Green and Gene revolutions), biofuels, the role of transnational corporations (TNCs), the international division of labor, migration, globalization and global commodity chains, and the different strategies adopted by nation-states to “‘develop” natural resources and agricultural production. Through a historical investigation of environmental change and the biogeography of plant domestication and dispersal, we will look at the creation of indigenous, subsistence, peasant, plantation, collective, and commercial forms of agriculture. We will analyze the physical environment and ecology that help shape but rarely determine the organization of resource use and agriculture. Rather, through the dialectical rise of various political-economic systems such as feudalism, slavery, mercantilism, colonialism, capitalism, and socialism, we will study how humans have transformed the world’s environments. We will follow with studies of specific issues: technological change in food production; commercialization and industrialization of agriculture and the decline of the family farm; food and public health, culture, and family; land grabbing and food security; the role of markets and transnational corporations in transforming the environment; and the global environmental changes stemming from modern agriculture, dams, deforestation, grassland destruction, desertification, biodiversity loss, and the interrelationship with climate change. Case studies of particular regions and issues will be drawn from Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the United States. The final part of the course examines the restructuring of the global economy and its relation to emergent international laws and institutions regulating trade, the environment, agriculture, resource-extraction treaties, the changing role of the state, and competing conceptualizations of territoriality and control. We will end with discussions of emergent local, regional, and transnational coalitions for food self-reliance and food sovereignty, alternative and community-supported agriculture, community-based resource-management systems, sustainable development, and grassroots movements for social and environmental justice. Films, multimedia materials, and distinguished-guest lectures will be interspersed throughout the course. One farm/factory field trip is possible if funding/timing permits. The lecture participants may also take a leading role in a campus-wide event on “the climate crisis, food, and hunger,” tentatively planned for spring. Please mark your calendars when the dates are announced, as attendance for all of the above is required. Attendance and participation are also required at special guest lectures and film viewings in the Social Science Colloquium Series approximately once per month. The Web Board is an important part of the course. Regular required postings of short essays will be made here, as well as follow-up commentaries with your colleagues. There will be occasional short, in-class essays during the semester and a final exam at the end. Group conferences will focus on in-depth analysis of certain course topics and will include short prepared papers for debates, the debates themselves, and small-group discussions. You will prepare a poster project on a topic of your choice, related to the course, which will be presented at the end of the semester in group conference, as well as in a potential public session.

Why this course and speaker series/community conversations now? The rise of the New Right is a critically important phenomenon of our time, shaping politics, policies, practices, and daily life for everyone. The insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is only one egregious expression of long-term ideas and actions by a newly emboldened collective of right-wing ideologues. The violent challenges to the realities of a racially and ethnically diverse America is not a surprise. Nor is the normalization of White Power politics and ideas within mainstream politics and parties. The varied nature of the New Right’s participants—their ideologies, grievances, and goals—requires deep analysis of their historical roots, as well as their contemporary manifestations. The wide range of platforms and spaces for communicating hate, lies, and calls for violence against perceived enemies require their own responses, including the creation of platforms and spaces that offer analysis and alternatives. Seriously engaging the New Right, attempting to offer explanations for its rise, is key to challenging the authoritarian drift in our current political moment and its uncertain evolution and future. To do so requires our attention. It also requires a transdisciplinary approach, something inherent to our College and to geography as a discipline, be it political, economic, cultural, social, urban, historical, or environmental geography. The goal of this seminar, one that is accompanied by a planned facilitated speaker series and community conversations, is to build on work in geography and beyond and engage a wide array of thinkers from diverse disciplines and backgrounds, institutions, and organizations. In addition to teaching the course itself, my hope is that it can be a vehicle to engage our broader communities—at the College and in our region, as well as by reaching out to our widely dispersed, multigenerational alumni. Pairing the course with a subset of facilitated/moderated speaker series, live-streamed in collaboration with our Alumni Office, offers the chance to bring these classroom conversations and contemporary and pressing course topics, grounded in diverse readings and student engagement, to a much wider audience and multiple communities. In this class, we will seek to understand the origins and rise of the New Right in the United States and elsewhere as it has taken shape in the latter half of the 20th century to the present. We will seek to identify the origins of the New Right and what defines it, explore the varied geographies of the movement and its numerous strands, and identify the constituents of the contemporary right coalition. In addition, we will explore the actors and institutions that have played a role in the expansion of the New Right (e.g., courts, state and local governments, Tea Party, conservative think tanks, lawyers, media platforms, evangelical Christians, militias) and the issues that motivate the movement (e.g., anticommunism, immigration, environment, white supremacy/nationalism, voter suppression, neoliberal economic policies, antiglobalization, free speech). This is a reading-intensive, discussion-oriented, open, large seminar in which we will survey a broad sweep of the recent literature on the New Right. While the class focuses most specifically on the US context, conference papers based on international/comparative case studies are welcome. Students will be required to attend all associated talk and film viewings; write weekly essays and engage colleagues in conversation online the night before seminar; and write two short research papers that link the themes of the class with their own interests, creative products, research agenda, and/or political engagement. Students will also do two associated creative projects/expressions. Transdisciplinary collaborative activities across the College and community are encouraged. Film, performance, written commentary, podcasts, workshops, and other forms of action can provide additional outlets for student creative projects and engagement.

Can the biography of Black leaders replace the history of African Americans? Or does biography raise of the problem of the "Great Man" theory of history? In terms of history, what is gained and what is lost in the biographical approach? In this lecture, students will consider this question as they examine the recent award-winning biographies of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and so forth. Students will look at the lives of several artists and writers to explore different definitions of leadership. The weekly readings will be complemented by weekly film screenings, placing Black leadership in historical context.

South Asia, a region at the geographic center of the world’s most important cultural, religious, and commercial encounters for millennia, has a rich history of cultural exchanges. Its central location on the Indian Ocean provided it with transnational maritime connections to Africa and Southeast Asia, while its land routes facilitated constant contact with the Eurasian continent. The region has witnessed numerous foreign rules, from the early Central Asian Turkic dynasties to the Mughals and, finally, the British. After gaining independence from British colonial rule, the region was eventually partitioned into three different nations—India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—each with its distinctive form of government. South Asia has produced a significant diaspora worldwide, preserving its cultural heritage and creating further cultural exchanges with the adopted nations, thereby influencing global culture. Despite facing development challenges and political instability, South Asia is rapidly developing within the capitalistic world economy and becoming an important player on the global scene, both politically and culturally. This course will provide students with a survey of South Asia from the era of the early Indus Civilization to the present. Lectures and sources will trace major political events and the region’s cultural, ecological, and economic developments that have significantly shaped South Asian history. Students will analyze both primary and secondary sources, enhancing their understanding of this diverse society. They are expected to engage in lectures, reading, class discussions, group work, and writing to examine the major themes and debates in South Asian history and develop sound arguments.

“But if you ask me what offices they may fill, I reply—any. I do not care what case you put; let them be sea-captains, if you will,” Margaret Fuller wrote in Woman in the Nineteenth Century in 1845. Not 10 years later, Fanny Fern’s autobiographical protagonist tells her daughter, when asked if she would write books when a woman, “God forbid,” because “no happy woman ever writes.” In this seminar, we will discuss what US women writers imagined they could be and why they wrote (happy or not). We will read both major and forgotten works of literary activism from women writers of the 19th and early-20th centuries, focusing around issues of gender and gender convention, race, racial prejudice and enslavement, immigration, migration and national identity, class and elitism, sex and sexuality. Course readings will mainly be primary sources, coupled with historical essays to help contextualize them. Emphasis will be placed on choosing women writers outside of the mainstream, who actively worked with their writing to change the status quo—to “reconstruct” womanhood.

Marches, walkouts, and occupations roiled the campus of San Francisco State University in the fall of 1968. Among the organizers’ demands was the institution of the first Black studies department in the country. More than 50 years later, Black studies has both reshaped existing disciplines and formed departments in colleges across the nation. How might returning to this history reshape our understanding of Black studies, of student movements, of American universities, and of history more generally? This interdisciplinary course seeks to answer these and more questions by studying the archival documents on Black studies at Sarah Lawrence alongside history, literature, film, and theory. In this course, students will participate in a traditional seminar and will spend one session a week in the campus archives. The latter will both engage students in rigorous archival research and result in a conference project helping to narrate the understudied history of Black studies at Sarah Lawrence. Authors and filmmakers may include W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, Zadie Smith, Spike Lee, Robin Kelley, and more.

The Indian Ocean is the third-largest ocean in the world and contributes almost 30 percent to the total oceanic realm of our planet. Current scholars have defined the Indian Ocean to include the oceanic and littoral spaces in the southwest from the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, to the Red Sea in the north, then horizontally through to the South China Sea in the east, and down to Australia in the southeast. Commerce around the Indian Ocean continued as a web of production and trade that spanned across the ports of India, the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Indian Ocean ports were the fulcrum of maritime trade that precipitated spontaneous transcultural interactions between traders and inhabitants of different geographic regions who mingled there to exchange commodities. Ships followed monsoons or seasonal wind patterns, and sailors were obliged to wait at length for return departures from ports, which was a significant cause of cultural transfer. Various religions, including Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, were mobile across the Indian Ocean networks; and extant beliefs, practices, and material cultures are evidence. The study of the Indian Ocean World (IOW), as some historians have termed it, is a newly emerging field in world history. New evidence from historical research of the last 30 years has recovered the lost significance of this region, which was the center of a robust and complex trade and cultural network for a millennium and that continues today. This course is designed to provide students with a survey of Indian Ocean world history from the medieval to the colonial era. Lectures and sources will help students deepen their knowledge of peoples and cultures around the Indian Ocean and gain a wider appreciation for the transnational trade and cultural and religious networks that existed there. Students will learn to examine that globalization is not a modern phenomenon but, rather, an ongoing aspect of the Indian Ocean. Each week, students will evaluate sources that explore the discrete regions of the Indian Ocean, their people, and the religious networks, commercial exchanges, migrations, and political events that they engender to make a complex and dynamic connected history. Students are expected to engage in lectures, reading, class discussions, group work, and writing to examine the major themes and debates in Indian Ocean history and develop sound arguments.

Afro-Latin American subjects have had a long tradition of employing literature, newspapers, and films to participate in national and international debates, such as the push for a republic in Brazil and progress in the Dominican Republic at the end of the 19th century, the integration and celebration of Afrodescendent culture in Puerto Rico in the 1930s, and the implementation of Afrodescendent-conscious initiatives in contemporary Colombian society. While these outlets certainly served as a vehicle to disseminate their thoughts on a variety of topics, their materiality also attested to the undeniable existence and agency of these subjects in such nations. In this course, we will explore and evaluate cultural artifacts that have impacted intellectual and artistic discourses in Latin American societies from the 19th century to today. Through poems, short stories, novels, newspaper articles, and films by cultural thinkers including Maria Firmina dos Reis, Salomé Ureña, Manuel Zapata Olivella, Victoria Santa Cruz, and Marie Vieux-Chauvet, we will delve into the visions that these thinkers had for themselves and their respective societies. We will critically discuss their artistic and political achievements at both local and international levels to better situate their epistemology in the tradition of the African diaspora. Students will learn the principles of literary analysis and theory and employ them in written assignments and class discussions. We will ground our analysis of these cultural artifacts in their respective sociopolitical contexts. Another important aspect of this course is to facilitate students’ transition to college life. As a result, we will meet every other week in group conference to discuss topics related to this transition. The other weeks, students will meet individually with the professor to work on their conference projects. This course will be taught entirely in English.

Are human beings capable of self-government? What does that require? As modern authoritarian movements imperil democratic institutions, norms, and the rule of law, ancient Greek tragedies illuminate values and aspirations underpinning democracy and modern liberal ideals of justice, equality, and universal human rights. Tragedy and democracy emerged simultaneously in ancient Athens in the late 6th century BCE and flourished throughout the 5th century BCE. Ancient Greece never achieved egalitarian politics or anything close to universal human rights, but Athenian tragedies emphasize the essential equality of all human beings in our vulnerability to suffering and death. Surviving plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides dramatize the costs of tyranny, anger, vengeance, and cruelty—to perpetrators, as well as to victims. Commending honesty, generosity, and compassion, tragedies locate nobility not in genetic inheritance, group affiliation, socioeconomic status, numerical superiority, or even moral or ideological convictions but, rather, in our conduct as individuals. Tragedies expose the consequences of human words and actions, as characters make choices conducive to success or failure for themselves and their communities. State-sponsored and publicly performed, tragedies made self-reflection and self-criticism a fundamental feature of Athenian democratic politics and society. “What should I do?” encapsulates the central question of every ancient Greek tragedy and every moment of our own lives. This course is designed for anyone interested in understanding the false promise of authoritarianism and appreciating the origins, goals, and possibilities for a free, humane, equitable democratic society.

What is the relationship between the language(s) we speak, the nation in which we live, and our understanding of ourselves? If language and place help shape our identity, what can we learn from those caught between borders and living in multiple tongues? This course examines transnational literary texts and films both to learn about the lived experiences and aesthetic experimentation of a variety of Japanese-language authors and directors and to explore how language, literature, and visual media are related more broadly to conceptions of “national belonging.” The works covered in this course highlight the destabilization of identity that accompanies both the act of border crossing and the geopolitical upheavals that cause those borders to shift and be redrawn, from the forced assimilation of colonial subjects during Japan’s imperial period, to the US military’s postwar occupation of Japan, to contemporary narratives of globalization, postmodern identity, and the internal borders that today demarcate Japan’s regional cultures and dialects. Through close readings of these texts and films, we will explore the ways that authors in Japan—who have historically been marginalized based on race and ethnicity, class, linguistic ability, and/or gender—have sought to challenge the Japanese national literary cannon and the very notion of “the nation” itself. Students are expected to develop a related research project over the course of the term through conference work that delves deeply into the production, circulation, and reception of some aspect of modern Japanese media.

From Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel, I Hotel, to Emmanual Han’s photographic series, America Fever, contemporary Asian American artists and writers have often mined the historical record for creative inspiration. In this course, we will explore how 20th- and 21st-century Asian American novelists, poets, photographers, and painters have turned to the arts in order to reimagine major events in US history. Beginning with the Gold Rush (1848-1855) and concluding in the early 2000s, our chronology will be expansive, as we pay particular attention to how artists and writers have turned to their chosen media forms in order to craft more inclusive representations of American history. At the same time, we will interrogate the ethical implications and historical limitations of reconstructing and reimagining the past—especially in relation to themes of migration, violence, erasure, and identity. In reading across time periods and genres, students will ultimately develop a deeper understanding of the key themes and methods that inform the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies. Likely artists will include: Stephanie Shih, Martin Wong, Zarina, Albert Chong, Hung Liu, Linda Sok, and Phung Huynh. Likely authors will include: C. Pam Zhang, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Ocean Vuong, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Mohsin Hamid. Readings will be supplemented by primary sources and mini lectures, which will contextualize our creative readings within larger socio-historical frames.

Marches, walkouts, and occupations roiled the campus of San Francisco State University in the fall of 1968. Among the organizers’ demands was the institution of the first Black studies department in the country. More than 50 years later, Black studies has both reshaped existing disciplines and formed departments in colleges across the nation. How might returning to this history reshape our understanding of Black studies, of student movements, of American universities, and of history more generally? This interdisciplinary course seeks to answer these and more questions by studying the archival documents on Black studies at Sarah Lawrence alongside history, literature, film, and theory. In this course, students will participate in a traditional seminar and will spend one session a week in the campus archives. The latter will both engage students in rigorous archival research and result in a conference project helping to narrate the understudied history of Black Studies at Sarah Lawrence. Authors and filmmakers may include W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, Zadie Smith, Spike Lee, Robin Kelley, and more.

Many of us are struck by the growing irrationality of contemporary democratic politics to the point where we despair of our capacity to address problems like global climate change or pandemics that could pose existential threats to our species, to fashion constructive foreign policy as wars rage, or to face a whole range of urgent but more mundane policy issues. In this class, we will seek to understand disturbing trends like populism, polarization, disinformation, and self-injuring or -defeating politics, as well as the resurfacing of nativism, xenophobia, and racism in contemporary politics—in part on their own terms but also by asking whether they are deeply rooted in human nature, at least on our current best understandings of ourselves. More specifically, democracy seems to rely on at least a minimum degree of rationality, learning, openness to argument and difference, and self-control on the part of the citizens whose votes and opinions guide government policy. But is this reliance foolhardy in light of what recent history, psychology, evolutionary theory, philosophy, and cognitive science teach? Do aspects of our current social and technological circumstances make us less able to manifest these qualities of character today than our Enlightenment progenitors hoped in the era of democratic revolutions—the era from which many of the ideas and institutions that continue to inform our politics today emerged? In this course, we will survey aspects of the political history of recent centuries, as well as our own historical moment, to ask if they should temper confidence in the power of reason in politics. We will also examine recent research in cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy that conclude that it is hard to sustain a model of human behavior that places reason and rationality in the driver’s seat. What alternative accounts of human nature are emerging from recent research? And what are their political implications, especially for democratic societies? By bringing together political science, history, and theory with cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy, we should be able to occupy the intersection of distinct but equally relevant disciplines to ask whether the Enlightenment’s faith in democracy was misplaced. Or, instead, are there reasons to believe that democracy can maintain its claim to legitimacy, even after reason has been demoted in our understandings of human nature? To address this final question, we will also examine proposals for 21st-century democratic reforms that either seek to adjust downward the expectations on the capacity of citizens to engage in deliberative politics or to refashion political institutions to better summon the better angels of our nature.

Many of us are struck by the growing irrationality of contemporary democratic politics to the point where we despair of our capacity to address problems like global climate change or pandemics that could pose existential threats to our species, to fashion constructive foreign policy as wars rage, or to face a whole range of urgent but more mundane policy issues. In this class, we will seek to understand disturbing trends like populism, polarization, disinformation, and self-injuring or -defeating politics, as well as the resurfacing of nativism, xenophobia, and racism in contemporary politics—in part on their own terms but also by asking whether they are deeply rooted in human nature, at least on our current best understandings of ourselves. More specifically, democracy seems to rely on at least a minimum degree of rationality, learning, openness to argument and difference, and self-control on the part of the citizens whose votes and opinions guide government policy. But is this reliance foolhardy in light of what recent history, psychology, evolutionary theory, philosophy, and cognitive science teach? Do aspects of our current social and technological circumstances make us less able to manifest these qualities of character today than our Enlightenment progenitors hoped in the era of democratic revolutions—the era from which many of the ideas and institutions that continue to inform our politics today emerged? In this course, we will survey aspects of the political history of recent centuries, as well as our own historical moment, to ask if they should temper confidence in the power of reason in politics. We will also examine recent research in cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy that conclude that it is hard to sustain a model of human behavior that places reason and rationality in the driver’s seat. What alternative accounts of human nature are emerging from recent research? And what are their political implications, especially for democratic societies? By bringing together political science, history, and theory with cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy, we should be able to occupy the intersection of distinct but equally relevant disciplines to ask whether the Enlightenment’s faith in democracy was misplaced. Or, instead, are there reasons to believe that democracy can maintain its claim to legitimacy, even after reason has been demoted in our understandings of human nature? To address this final question, we will also examine proposals for 21st-century democratic reforms that either seek to adjust downward the expectations on the capacity of citizens to engage in deliberative politics or to refashion political institutions to better summon the better angels of our nature.

In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore child and adolescent development through a cross-cultural lens. Focusing on case studies from diverse communities around the world, we will look at the influence of cultural processes on how children learn, play, and grow. Our core readings will analyze psychological processes related to attachment and parenting, cognition and perception, social and emotional development, language acquisition, and moral development. We will ask questions like the following: Why are children in Sri Lanka fed by hand by their mothers until middle childhood, and how does that shape their relations to others through the life course? How do Inuit toddlers come to learn moral lessons through scripted play with adults, and how does such learning prepare them to navigate a challenging social and geographic environment? Is it true that Maya children don’t do pretend play at all? How does parental discipline shape the expression of emotion for children in Morocco? How does a unique family role influence the formation of identity for Latinx youth in the United States? Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, our course material will draw from developmental psychology, human development, cultural psychology, and psychological anthropology and will include peer-reviewed journal articles, books, and films that address core issues in a range of geographic and sociocultural contexts. Students will conduct conference projects related to the central topics of our course and may opt to do fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center.

Truly collaborative work between academic and nonacademic communities can be a serious challenge. This is not only an issue of method(ology) but also an issue of ethics. In this class, we will examine ontological and epistemological aspects of academic inquiry, advocacy, and activism and their relation to ethical community participatory work. How does our view of academic work affect our interactions with community members in creating and extending knowledge? How can we truly and intentionally collaborate with communities that exist within unequal power relationships with policy-making and policy-implementing bodies? What knowledge base is necessary for students and faculty to interact, with respect and intention, with communities that may be different in composition? I see this class as a bridge between the practical aspects of engagement in community participatory work and the necessary reflexive examination of worldview and practice by our academic community and partners. That reflexive examination is at multiple levels of analysis: the individual (e.g., students, faculty, staff, partner-agency staff), the organizational (e.g., SLC, partner organizations) and societal/cultural (e.g., examination of race/class/colonialism and postcolonial thought, ethics).

This course asks how contemporary immigration shapes individual and collective identity across the life course. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that bridges cross-cultural psychology, human development, and psychological anthropology, we will ask how people’s movement across borders and boundaries transforms their senses of self, as well as their interpersonal relations and connections to community. We will analyze how the experience of immigration is affected by the particular intersections of racial, ethnic, class, gender, generational, and other boundaries that immigrants cross. For example, how do undocumented youth navigate the constraints imposed by “illegalized” identities, and how do they come to construct new self-perceptions? How might immigrants acculturate or adapt to new environments, and how does the process of moving from home or living “in-between” two or more places impact mental health? Through our close readings and seminar discussions on this topic, we seek to understand how different forms of power—implemented across realms that include state-sponsored surveillance and immigration enforcement, language and educational policy, health and social services—shape and constrain immigrants’ understanding of their place in the world and their experience of exclusion and belonging. In our exploration of identity, we will attend to the ways in which immigrants are left out of national narratives, as well as the ways in which people who move across borders draw on cultural resources to create spaces and practices of connection, protection, and continuity despite the disruptive effects of immigration. In tandem with our readings, we will welcome scholar-activist guest speakers, who will present their current work in the field. Prior course work in psychology or social sciences is recommended.

This community partnership course will focus on the health of humans living within physical, social, and psychological urban spaces. We will use a constructivist, multidisciplinary, multilevel lens to examine the interrelationship between humans and the natural and built environment, to explore the impact of social group (ethnic, racial, sexuality/gender) membership on person/environment interactions, and to explore an overview of theoretical and research issues in the psychological study of health and illness across the lifespan. We will examine theoretical perspectives in the psychology of health, health cognition, illness prevention, stress, and coping with illness; and we will highlight research, methods, and applied issues. This class is appropriate for those interested in a variety of health careers or anyone interested in city life. The community-partnership/service-learning component is an important part of this class. We will work with local agencies to promote health-adaptive, person-environment interactions within our community.

In recent years, scholarship in Jewish studies has recognized that much of recorded Jewish history and writing has centered the male, heterosexual, cisgender Jew as the normative Jewish figure and has failed to reckon sufficiently with the perspectives of Jewish women, queer Jews, trans Jews, and other Jews holding marginalized gender and sexual identities. At the same time, scholars have noted that Jewish literature and rabbinic sources contain fascinating resources to interrogate gender norms and, in particular, to explore how the ambiguity of gender roles contained within rabbinic sources does or does not map onto contemporary gender binaries. Building from this perspective, this class aims to explore the evolution of debates about gender and sexuality in Judaism, focusing both on textual sources and on the lived experiences of Jewish people. Topics to be covered include: the status of women under halakhah (Jewish law); gender in the Talmud and Jewish religious texts; constructions of masculinity and femininity; debates over the proper role of the body and the gendered nature of religious practice and religious authority; the role of women in Jewish emancipation and the changing nature of Jewish gender norms in the modern era; the relationship of women and queer Jews to nationalisms and citizenship; Zionist discourses on the relationship between land, rootedness, and gender; and the gendered politics of Jewish identity in both Europe and the Middle East. Throughout the course, we will read both primary and secondary sources; the primary sources will include Jewish religious texts, as well as fiction and autobiography produced by Jewish women and queer Jews. We will ask the questions: Who claims the right to speak for a tradition, and what does it mean to say that certain Jewish bodies are and are not normative? In so doing, we will also review some of the key debates surrounding gender studies and queer studies in the field of religious studies more broadly, and students will gain a basic understanding of some of the key methodological and theoretical debates in contemporary queer theory.

This course will provide a survey of the history of the Jewish people, beginning with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and ending with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 CE—an event which some scholars have argued represented the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern world. The class will be focused on two central questions: Firstly, what does it mean when a community that was once oriented around the Temple and the Holy Land went into exile and had to reconstitute itself as a community grounded in the text and the book? Secondly, what does it mean for the Jews to be a people; and how does the idea of peoplehood relate to emergent concepts of nationhood, religion, race, and ethnicity? The class will focus heavily on the emergence of the form of rabbinic literary interpretation known as midrash and the diverse modes of reading Jewish texts that emerged after the destruction of the Temple; the place of Jews under both Christian and Muslim rule; and the forms of Jewish philosophy, literature, and mystical thought that flourished in these differing cultural contexts. We will discuss the historical development of Jewish law (halakhah), how it emerged through contested interpretations of Jewish texts, and how legal concepts had to evolve to respond to the changing sociopolitical conditions under which Jews lived. Though the class will discuss anti-Jewish persecution and violence across the centuries, we will also focus on moments of cultural interchange and cooperation. Students will read both primary sources, including rabbinic texts and Jewish philosophical and mystical treatises, as well as selected secondary source materials. This course is designed to be taken as part of a two-semester sequence with Jewish History II in the spring semester, but students are permitted to enroll in only one semester or the other, based on interest.

In current global circumstances, Islam is all too frequently represented solely in terms of political and militant ideologies. For those who wish to dig deeper, there are the rich and varied traditions of classical religious scholarship and jurisprudence. But to look at Islam through these lenses alone is to miss alternate sensibilities that are just as important in providing the material from which many Muslims construct their identities. In 1988, the Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz became the first Muslim writer to win the Nobel prize in literature. Although Mahfouz was one of the first to adopt the format of the novel, in recent years many new writers emerging from Muslim majority and minority areas around the world have found broad audiences. Their works embrace, resist, reject, transmute, and/or show nostalgia for the beliefs and practices with which the authors grew up or have adopted. As natives, immigrants, third culture, or converts, some of the writers to be explored here have actively promoted themselves as Muslim writers, while others question this label or view it as only one signifier of many. The writings that have been selected will be ones that deal substantially with issues of Muslim identity. All of them were either written in English or have been translated into English. No prior knowledge of Islam is necessary to take this course.

The Holocaust is one of the most widely discussed and studied events of the 20th century, raising vital and challenging political and philosophical questions about nationalism, the nature of the modern nation-state, the human propensity for mass violence, and the possibility of minority integration. As a result, the Holocaust has become a sort of canvas upon which a huge array of postwar and contemporary political, philosophical, and cultural figures and voices have projected their own thoughts and messages. This course will examine the way in which the Holocaust has become a symbol of human evil and destruction in contemporary cultural memory and will ask difficult questions about the use of the Holocaust as a political symbol by both Jewish and non-Jewish voices. Questions to be examined in the course include: How has the construction of World War II as the “good war” shaped contemporary American cultural identity? How do American Jews relate to the destruction of European Jewry? How has Germany reckoned with its own historical guilt through the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“coping with the past”)? How have Central and Eastern European nations confronted or denied their own collaboration and complicity with the extermination of their Jewish populations? How are countries such as Poland attempting to criminalize discussions of their potential historical complicity in the Holocaust? We will discuss Zionist and anti-Zionist mobilizations of Holocaust memory in political debates, the spread of Holocaust denial, and why political movements such as protestors against COVID restrictions have compared themselves to Jews under Nazism. We will also think about how Holocaust memory has shaped contemporary Jewish identity, as well as the fraught question of what it means to live as a Jewish person after more than one-third of the Jews on Earth were exterminated. The class will include both philosophical and literary sources, as well as select films. Students will also gain a basic introduction to some key texts in memory studies and trauma studies. We will inevitably confront moral questions about guilt, culpability, and the obligation to remember; but we will only pass moral judgment after attempting to understand the diverse perspectives animating the Holocaust as a symbol of cultural memory. Though the class will begin with a brief overview of the history of the Holocaust itself, it is not primarily a course about Holocaust history but, rather, about postwar cultural constructions of Holocaust memory. As a result, some familiarity with Holocaust history will be helpful for the course, though it is not required.

This course will provide a survey of the modern history of the Jewish people, beginning with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and continuing until the present day. In so doing, we will focus heavily on the question of what modernity itself means and how modern concepts—such as nationalism and the nation-state, race and ethnicity, religious liberty, and individualism and collectivism—were, in many senses, defined in relation to the Jewish people, with Jewish minority communities serving as test cases for questions of what it means to be a modern human. The class will focus extensively on the process of Jewish emancipation and citizenship and on the philosophical and cultural changes underpinning this process. Yet, we will not focus merely on Jews as passive observers of these historical processes but, rather, as active agents shaping their own histories and their own struggles for rights. We will examine ways in which Jewish law had to be adapted to fit into emergent concepts of civil law and how Jews responded to and contested some of those changes. The class will delve into the relationship of Jews to Enlightenment philosophy, the emergence of distinctively Jewish political ideologies such as Zionism and Bundism, and the relationship of Jews to both European and Middle Eastern nationalisms. We will discuss the Holocaust, but we will situate it in relation to broader historical processes of nationalism and violence; and we will discuss the relationship of Jews in Europe to Jews in the Middle East and North Africa. Though not primarily a class on contemporary Israeli politics, we will discuss the formation of the modern state of Israel and the way in which the founding of the Jewish state shapes the identity of Jews who have chosen in remain in diaspora. Throughout the semester, we will continually ask these central questions: What does it mean to be a modern human, and how does the concept of modernity necessarily construct itself in relation to the Jewish people? This course is designed to be taken as part of a two-semester sequence with Jewish History I in the fall semester, but students are permitted to enroll in only one semester or the other, based on interest.

In this FYS seminar, students will be introduced to the field of borders and migration studies based in the social sciences. We will start by reading some key sociological theories that provide students with an overview of sociology as a discipline and its relevance both within a liberal-arts education and to a wider social and political context. We will then focus on readings that provide students with foundational knowledge in border studies, globalization, the role of nations, nation-states, nationalism in society, and, finally, migration and displacement studies. The readings and discussions for the seminar adopt a “social problems” approach, looking at themes such as dimensions of inequality (race, class, and gender), labor, forced migration, and religious conflict through a transnational lens. As part of the seminar’s “practicum” dimension, students will learn the basics of initiating, designing, and carrying out sociological research using various methods of data analysis, including surveys, statistics, interviews, and field research. Throughout the year, students will have opportunities to engage in new and ongoing research projects related to the themes of nationalism, borders, and mobilities by engaging with cross-campus organizations and community partners in the City of Yonkers and wider Westchester County. During the second semester (spring 2025), students will be expected to engage in fieldwork, either independently or volunteering with community partners such as the Yonkers Public Library, Hudson River Museum, Wartburg, CURB, Center Lane, ArtsWestchester, or another organization. The fieldwork component will form the basis for the sociological research and writing that students produce for their conference work in the seminar. Starting in the fall, students will be introduced to some of the resources on campus that are essential for their learning and academic progress at Sarah Lawrence, such as the library and the writing center. Students will be expected to take advantage of these resources as they learn the ropes of conducting research in the social sciences and refining their academic writing skills. In addition to our regular class sessions, students will meet with the faculty instructor weekly during the fall semester for individual conferences. Conference meeting times will be used to discuss the students' progress in the class and, more generally, during their first semester at Sarah Lawrence. In the subsequent spring semester, we will move to a biweekly conference meeting schedule, depending on the student’s ongoing progress and needs.

In this lecture, students will be introduced to key areas of study in the sociology of “deviance,” detention, and illegality. We will be taking a global and transnational perspective on examining the ways in which social groups define, categorize, and reinforce deviance and illegality, from the treatment of minority and persecuted groups to the detention and expulsion of populations such as undocumented migrants and refugees. Students will learn about foundational theories and concepts in the field, starting with a reading of Émile Durkheim’s classical study of suicide and the idea of anomie, followed by Robert Merton’s strain theory and then contemporary ones such as conflict theory, labeling theory, and the infamous “broken-windows” theory. The class will take a critical approach to reflecting and challenging ideas about deviance and illegality by examining global and transnational forms of population governance, such as ongoing mutations to human rights and the technocratic management of displaced populations through humanitarianism around the world. We will be reading about major sectors of transnational deviance and crime, including industrial fishing and trafficking on the high seas (Ian Urbina’s The Outlaw Ocean), exploitation and profiteering through international logistics (Carolyn Nordstrom’s Global Outlaws), and transnational sex work and trafficking (Christine Chin and Kimberly Hoang). This critical lens is intended to help us understand how different groups and populations are rendered “deviant” or “illegal” for the purposes of management and control (or political leverage) and to what extent groups themselves are able to resist or challenge those categorizations. Finally, we will be looking at how social movements and acts of resistance can produce widescale changes in societies toward the treatment and categorization of people seen as “deviants,” “criminals,” or “illegals”—including struggles against apartheid, hunger strikes in prisons, and protest movements for undocumented groups. Additionally, we will be discussing how social transformations wrought by three years of living under a global pandemic has led to the emergence of new forms of deviance related to biopolitical and biotechnological notions of population health and well-being. For conference work in this lecture, students will work in groups to produce portfolios of research on an area of study related to deviance, detention, and illegality. Each portfolio will include presentations and discussions of the chosen area of study, as well as critical essays written by each student that bring in conceptual and theoretical discussions drawn from the class.

In public discourse, we are bombarded with assertions of the newly “global” nature of the contemporary world. This assertion assumes that former stable categories of personhood, ideational systems, nation, identity, and space are now fragmented and transcended by intensified travel, digital technology, and cross-cultural contact. This seminar is based on the premise that people have traveled throughout history; current global moves are but the most recent manifestation of a phenomenon that has historically occurred in many forms and places. This long(er) view of mobility will allow us to rethink and reexamine not only our notions of travel but their shifting connotations and significance across time and space. We will explore how supposed stable categories—such as citizen, refugee, nation, and commodity—are constructed and consider several theoretical approaches that help us make sense of these categorizations, the processes accompanying their normalization and dissemination, and their underlying assumptions. Our questions will include: What are the political, navigational, and epistemological foundations that go into mapmaking and schemas of classification? How do nomads change into settled city dwellers or wageworkers? How does time become disciplined? How does travel change into tourism? How do commodities travel and acquire meaning? What is the relationship between legal and illicit moves? How do technologies of violence, such as weapons and drugs, circulate? What is the meaning of their circulation in different contexts? How do modern technologies enable time/space compression? What are the shifting logics of globalization? What is their relationship to our notions and constructions of authenticity, subjectivity, and identity? During the fall semester, we will begin by developing an analytical approach toward our topic (which we will continue to develop throughout the year). We will then consider the implications of classification, categorization, and mapping. For the remainder of the semester, we will follow the travel(s) of ideas, commodities, and people. In the process, we will begin to think about questions of time/space compression. In the spring, we will return to some of the themes of the fall semester but examine them in a different context and through a different lens. Among our concerns in the spring semester will be issues of fusion and hybridization in cultural practices regarding people and things (e.g., food, music, romance, families); shifting places (e.g., borders, travel, and tourism); time/space compression through new technologies of travel and communication; and drugs, terror, violence, and poverty. As our sources, we will rely primarily on interdisciplinary analytical writings but will also include travel narratives, literature, and films.

What does it mean to be “beautiful”? Whose bodies qualify as beautiful? This seminar will explore the social construction of beauty as a process imbued with power and violence. Our investigation begins by overviewing Michel Foucault’s concepts of “biopower” and “biolegitimacy” to understand how the state manifests social hierarchies and control through the construction of the idealized, beautiful body. We will subsequently explore in what ways beauty standards are deployed to create gendered and raced distinctions that uphold colonial powers and white supremacy. Moreover, students will study the transformation of beauty standards across time with the goal of understanding how these changes reflect broader sociohistorical transformations and political interpretations of gender and race. Our seminar will subsequently study the impact of beauty standards on a microsocial level, including to what degree individuals come to internalize or resist notions of biolegitimacy and beauty. Within this conversation, we will study various forms of body modification and plastic surgery, as both an ontological tool for self-construction and as a means for pathologizing deviance from beauty standards. For conference, students may choose to trace the historical roots and evolution of a specific beauty standard. Alternatively, conference work might focus on how individuals collectively resist a given beauty standard, potentially within the context of subcultures that substitute alternative notions of biolegitimacy.

This seminar offers a deep dive into the multifaceted world of social connections that span across national borders, challenging the traditional notions of space, identity, and community. The seminar’s core focus is on understanding how transnational networks operate within and influence various spheres of global society, including migration, economic practices, digital communication, and social movements. Through a critical examination of these networks, the course aims to shed light on the complexities of global interconnectedness, the role of technology in facilitating transnational ties, and the implications of these networks for social change and policy-making. In order to become equipped with a nuanced understanding of global social dynamics, students will engage with contemporary sociological theories and methodologies to analyze the formation, evolution, and impacts of transnational social networks in order. The seminar will incorporate a range of scholarly articles, book chapters, and case studies to explore topics such as the dynamics of diaspora communities and their influence on homeland politics; the economic ramifications of transnational remittances; the role of social media in fostering transnational activism and solidarity; and the impacts of transnational networks on cultural identity and integration processes. Readings include works by Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou on the concept of “social capital” within immigrant communities, Arjun Appadurai's theories on the cultural dimensions of globalization, Faranak Miraftab's notion of “transnational relationality,“ and Manuel Castells’ insights into the network society.

This is a course about sports as practice, which is used here in a multiple sense. As an embodied activity, sporting practice is felt and experienced in and through the body, which is its primary but not sole “habitus”—a term the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu popularized when elaborating on his notion of “cultural capital.” In this course, taking the sporting body and Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (taste, habits, skills, dispositions) as our point of departure, we will examine sports and its habitation of worlds that reach far beyond the individual (body) in both time and space. We will examine sports along multiple axes: as a collective and/or individuated activity; as a source of leisure and recreation; as a source of profitable employment; as a site of identity and nation-building projects; and as a space that engenders transnational mobilities and interconnections, as well as ruptures. In its commoditized contemporary form, sports is more often than not controlled by big money and/or the state and is part and parcel of what Debord refers to as the “society of the spectacle,” a site of production, consumption, and entertainment. The complex relationship between sports as experienced through the body and as a set of disciplinary practices will allow us to think through the relation of the individual, the collective, and institutionalized power, linking these to questions of body politics. Taking seriously the internal dynamics and meaning of sports, we will engage sports as a contradictory field, as both a productive space and a space of consumption. Our readings will include scholarly works, sports journalism, films, documentaries, and other primary sources. Possible conference topics include sports and politics; analysis of particular sports events (e.g., Olympics, women’s basketball, World Cup); (auto)biographies and/or oral histories of athletes; sports and protest; “fitness,” health, and the body; gender, race, sexuality, (dis)ability and sports; nationalism(s), national “styles” and sports; and the phenomenology of sports.

In the 1600s, political leaders in Salem, Massachusetts, infamously executed more than 25 members accused of witchcraft. Almost 400 years later, the “satanic panic” swept across America, as parents feared for the spiritual well-being of their children. More recently, protestors in the 2017 Women’s March brandished signs reading, “We are the daughters of the witches you could not burn.” What do these disparate examples have in common? This seminar will study the “witch” as a shared cultural symbol. We will explore why the witch emerges into the American cultural zeitgeist at particular moments in history and what their emergence (and public reception) tells us about the cultural and sociopolitical contexts of our time. We will draw upon the works of theorists like Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Emile Durkheim, Sylvia Federici, and Stanley Cohen to guide our discussions and explore the capitalist, hegemonic, and gendered meanings of the witch. In the latter half of the semester, students will explore contemporary literature within the sociology of culture, as well as the sociology of social movements, to understand how the witch has been simultaneously co-opted and used as a figurehead of collective resistance to these very same systems. Throughout these conversations, we will also discuss the ways in which the witch has been strategically racialized, consequently villainizing women of color and misrepresenting indigenous practices such as Voodoo or Santería. For conference, students may unpack a particular moment in history when magic or witchcraft emerged in the public discourse. Alternatively, students may explore how the witch—or another shared cultural archetype—has been used to express group identity during moments of resistance. Finally, students are encouraged to think about these topics in non-American contexts, if they so choose.