Social and Cultural Analysis (SCA-UA)

This course is designed to provide basic communicative competence in oral and written Twi for beginners. It focuses on the structure of the language as well as the culture of the people. The areas covered include: i) oral drills; ii) orthography; iii) written exercises; iv) translation (from English to Twi and from Twi to English); v) reading and comprehension; vii) conversation and narration (dialogues, greetings, description of day-to-day activities, bargaining, giving directions); viii) grammar (parts of speech, nouns, e.g., verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, particles, determiners; tense, aspect, negation, and questions; and ix) and the culture.

This experimental, two-credit course will focus on understanding key points of social and political contention in the contemporary United States, including but not limited to: overseas war, ecological crisis, extra-judicial violence, economic inequality, reproductive rights, and deportation threat. There is no pre-set syllabus; rather, the curriculum will be developed collaboratively by students and faculty facilitators. Students will be expected to work in small groups, and to produce research that is responsive to events that are unfolding in real-time. Key goals of the course are: (1) to develop critical information-gathering, reading and communication skills that produce clear and accurate understanding of complex and contentious subjects, and (2) to learn how to engage in collaborative and deliberative decision-making toward the development of action-oriented strategies and tactics. As part of the course, students will be expected to attend and participate in SCA’s program of spring events.

Students write a 20-25 page research paper with a focus on a specific research method. Topics vary by semester; see Albert notes for details.

Introduces theories, methods, and political trajectories central to the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis (SCA). SCA 101 addresses how individuals and populations structure their worlds and navigate the resulting social, cultural, and political terrain. It privileges scholarly work with an intersectional approach, drawing on theoretical insights from such fields as social geography, feminism and queer studies, ethnic studies, urban and metropolitan studies, critical race theory, labor studies, and cultural studies.

Formerly SCA-UA 101. Either this course OR Cultures and Contexts: The Black Atlantic (CORE-UA 534) can count as the second Introductory course for the Africana Studies major or minor or the SCA major (but not the SCA minor). Specific topics may include the question of African retention in the Americas, the comparative study of slavery, the concept of creolization, an understanding of the black Atlantic, and the meaning of diasporic studies, as well as the use of history, sociology, linguistics, anthropology, literature, music, and the arts to document and transmit the experiences of black peoples.

Introduces students to the tools of cultural criticism and theory, with particular emphasis on black culture, urban environment, and black people?s relationships to a variety of social and cultural institutions and practices. The latter may include the mass media, class and poverty, the police, urban development, education, music, art, and sports.

Provides students with an elementary understanding of Swahili, a Bantu language with a rich oral and written tradition that is spoken by about 100 million people from Somalia to Mozambique and Zanzibar. After a short presentation of Swahili?s history, codification, and relation to other languages, students are drilled in phonetics and grammar. They are also introduced to poems, songs, and oral narratives.

Expands on the basic knowledge of the pronunciation, vocabulary, useful expressions, and fundamental grammatical features acquired in Swahili I to allow essential communication skills to develop into conversational ability using simple and familiar situations. Building on the early grasp of the language, students expand the range of conversational ability and understanding of various grammatical concepts associated with this agglutinative language.

The aim of this course is to enable students to communicate entirely in Kiswahili, to carry out bidirectional translation from Swahili to English and from English to Swahili, and to negotiate technical language. At this level, the students have mastered the intricacies of Kiswahili grammar, acquired a wide range of vocabulary, read Kiswahili fluently, understood Kiswahili poetry, idioms, and proverbs, and used idiomatic Kiswahili in creative writing and translation.

This interdisciplinary course explores the evolution of American football into a mirror of black life and politics and a reflection of race relations in American culture. Students will examine the growth of black players since the NFL was integrated in the late Sixties. Student writing and research will explore the growth of football as a vehicle and model for black protest and support for movements such as Black Lives Matter. Students will go to two football games this semester. The focus will also include a study of the segregated American Football League and its integration of the NFL.

Explores the production and practice of black feminist theory and activism from the 19th century to the present. Examines written and cultural work of black women artists, activists, and organizers to consider the way that theory and practice have historically intersected around questions of race and gender.

In places ranging from the political theory of Adolph Reed to the comedy of Bill Cosby we find a critique of the "hip hop generation" so dismissive it might be a useful point of departure for further historical and theoretical inquiry. Besides realizing the worst fears of a previous generation who placed its hopes in the aspirations of 60s-era social movements, this new generation's fashion sensibilities, technological savvy, and strategies for commodifying blackness suggest a demographic now more concerned with the economics of globalization than the political economy of race. This course mixes a diverse set of readings with music and film to interrogate the specific generational tensions that structure popular and intellectual discourses concerning the "hip-hop generation" and the perceived demise of contemporary black politics.

Examines the connections between gender, racial ideology and history of medicine to consider the range of ways that reproduction—medically, culturally, and experientially—produces and troubles racial ideology. In this course we will explore issues in the history of race and reproduction, focusing primarily (though not exclusively) on North American contexts. Cross-cultural breadth will help us to consider the relationship between biological experiences (which are often portrayed as universal) and socio-cultural context. While questions about biology will be central to this history, we will also locate biology within a wider set of issues around social reproduction and the practices of motherhood. Through our readings we will consider how different disciplinary orientations (social history, medical anthropology, feminist theory, art history, etc.) help us to illuminate and problematize the connections between technologies and politics of biology and difference.

Explores specific issues dealing with the black urban experience, focusing on social and cultural institutions. Possible themes, which vary from semester to semester, include class and poverty, the police, urban development, education, sports, music, and art.

Yoruba is a language spoken in West Africa by approximately 20 million people. This course is an introduction to Yoruba language, people and culture and is designed for students without prior knowledge. The main goal is to develop elementary communicative competence in the language. It is designed to enable students read, write, listen to and talk about simple concepts, ensuring that they can minimally understand and be understood in the language, while developing a fundamental knowledge of the Yoruba culture. Emphases are on Yoruba as used by contemporary native speakers in the present day West Africa. Skills are developed through intensive interactive conversations, grammar exercises, and classroom activities designed for a learner to use the language in various daily activities.

Yoruba is a language spoken in West Africa by approximately 20 million people. This is a continuation of Yoruba I, in which students learned about the fundamentals of Yoruba, primarily focusing on the language, and including the people and their cultural practices. A minimum of one semester of Yoruba or its equivalent experience is required for Yoruba II. The main objective of Yoruba II is to further sharpen the Yoruba linguistic acuity that the students acquired at the introductory level. The course emphasizes spoken and written Yoruba as used in present-day West Africa in various cultural contexts. This course is valuable for learners who work or plan to work as foreign language experts, travelers, guides, diplomats, linguists, anthropologists, etc.

Offers a survey of American studies as dynamic fields of scholarship. Using a schedule of keywords, it engages key themes and concerns, including war?s role in social and political development, the meaning of borders, the politics of entertainment, public interest in private affairs, and the interplay of goods and labor in shaping national (and transnational) conditions of fulfillment and dignity. It is intended to serve as a gateway to lines of inquiry and analysis currently animating interdisciplinary study of ?America?; as an opportunity to relate current debates to respective historical contexts; and as an occasion to interrogate presumptions of the United States? exceptionality, at a time when its interrelation with broader worlds becomes ever more clear.

This course presents an overview of changing attitudes toward work and labor. It covers patterns of agrarian, industrial, and post-industrial production, gendered and racialized segmentation of labor, and the record of worker organization. The historical scope runs from colonial agriculture to the digital labor landscape of today, and the overarching framework is one in which work is utilized as a medium of power (and counter-power) in society. Primary readings are the central learning material, but students are encouraged to make connections to real life events and experiences in today’s world of work.

Drawing on the histories of African, Asian, Latino, European, and Native Americans of both genders and many sexualities, explores the complex and important intersection of gender, race, and sexuality in the United States from the 17th century through the 20th, in historically related case studies. Starting in the period of European imperialism in the Americas, it examines the ways that gender, race, and sexuality shaped cultural and political policies and debates surrounding the Salem witch trials; slavery, abolition, and lynching; U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico and Hawaii; the politics of welfare and reproduction; cultural constructions of manliness, masculinity, and citizenship; and responses to the AIDS pandemic in a global context.

Examines media images in relation to the making of ethnic and racial identities in the United States. Surveys some of the theoretical approaches to the study of images, paying particular attention to the intersection of history and ideologies or representation. Looks into the nature and politics of stereotypes; inquires into their reproduction through discourses, representations, and practices; and then moves to a comparative examination of media images in relation to the making of African American, Latino, Asian, and Native American images in the media, looking specifically at changes and continuities in the representation of these four minority groups in the media.

This seminar focuses on the relationship between 'the economy' and 'culture' in the contemporary United States. The specific focus on this course changes by semester; for the current focus, see the NOTES section in Albert.

This class explores the political and institutional origins of the American carceral state from the early 20th century to today. The course reviews the current political, institutional and societal developments arising from the expansion of the carceral state. The political and institutional responses to “moral panics” engendered by immigration, race, ethnicity, gender and class will be explored. Policies such as felon disenfranchisement, private prisons and detention centers, and proposed criminal justice reforms will explored. The course concludes with a review of current debates about the future of the carceral state.

This course examines the rise of the modern conservative movement in America and the central role that race has played in shaping the strategies, rhetoric, and policies of the modern Right. Beginning in the post-WWII era and continuing into the present, the course will explore how questions of race, gender, and sexuality have influenced the Republican Party. Topics covered will include electoral realignment and the Southern Strategy, the Trump phenomenon, the religious right, the rise of right-wing women, and the growing role of Latino and African-American conservatives within the GOP. Authors read will include Edmund Burke, Linda Chavez, Leah Wright Rigueur, Richard Hofstadter, Russell Kirk, Joseph Lowndes, Kevin Mattson, Bethany Moreton, Angela Dillard, Rick Perlstein, Leslie Sanchez, Ronnee Schreiber, Michael Rogin, and Corey Robin.

How do we define a "normal" body? A healthy body? How do we define abnormal or unhealthy bodies? This course will examine disability as it is culturally-constructed, experienced, and represented by analyzing the complicated cultural significance of embodiment. We will examine major strands of disability theory, relating them to and understanding them through disability history, lived experience, activist movements, and cultural production. Although medical institutions have constructed disability and disease through ideas of cure and rehabilitation, we will analyze cultural meanings of disability and ability in mainstream and independent film, television, memoir, popular literature, and stand-up comedy. Through the lenses of queer, disability, and feminist theory, we will not only interrogate the issue of sexuality in the lives of people with disabilities, but also we will think critically about the role of disability and able-bodiedness in constructing norms of gender and sexuality. Students will perform cultural critique using the tools of disability and queer studies to analyze the cultural construction of "healthy" and "unhealthy" bodies, normal/abnormal bodies, dis/ability, sexuality, and mental capacity.

This course examines fashion as both a product and expression of globalization. It explores fashion's contested histories; its modes of production, consumption, and address; its relationship to colonial enterprises; its system of meaning-making. In this course, we will tackle such issues as the social uses of fashion; the fashion cycle (use, reuse, discard); the relationship between dress and the body; feminist critiques of fashion; the politicization of clothing (from ethnic dressing to green clothing); and the links between style consumption and garment production--and the relationship of all of these to the processes of globalization.

This course examines the political, cultural, social, and intellectual history of the US between 1954 and 1974. It considers the civil rights movement, national politics, liberalism and the rise of the New Right, the debate over Vietnam, student radicalism, sexual liberation and feminism, black and Latino power, the counterculture, the urban crisis, and white resistance. The course emphasizes the transformation of liberalism, the resurgence of conservatism, and the tensions between integration and separatism, between libertarianism and communitarianism that shaped the social movements of the sixties.

Examines the relationship between the cultural and political spheres with a focus on the representation of race, sex, and gender within mass-mediated controversies and scandals. Interdisciplinary in nature, it considers a wide range of topics including reproduction, the law, sports, the presidency, the trial, pornography, secrecy, music, opinion journalism, hate speech, and the news.

Prerequisite: permission of the program director. Offered every semester. 2 or 4 points per term.

This overview begins with the recovery of early writings during the 1960s-1970s and proceeds to the subsequent production of Asian American writing and literary/cultural criticism up to the present. The course focuses on significant factors affecting the formation of Asian American literature and criticism, such as changing demographics of Asian American communities and the influence of ethnic, women?s, and gay/lesbian/bisexual studies. Included in the course is a variety of genres (poetry, plays, fiction and nonfiction, literary/cultural criticism) by writers from diverse ethnic backgrounds. The course explores the ways in which the writers treat issues such as racial/ethnic identity; immigration and assimilation; gender; class; sexuality; nationalism; culture and community; history and memory; and art and political engagement.

America is not always the answer. This class offers an introduction to the many and varied fictions that have been produced by diasporic South Asians across the globe over the last 150 years: in Australia, Africa, Europe, Caribbean. Our exploration of the poetics and politics of immigration will attend to different types of traveller (inc. soldiers, students, athletes, medics, cosmonauts) and draw on a wide range of media (inc. literature, cinema and music). Particular attention will be paid to the diverse geographies of Asian migration - be they plantations, dance Floors, restaurants, call centres. Themes to be addressed include coolietude, globalization, the impact of 9/11 and techno-servitude.

An introduction to Filipino with an emphasis on mastering basic grammar skills and working vocabulary. Lessons incorporate discussions on history, current events, literature, pop culture, and native values. Open to beginning language students, and lessons are modified according to the needs of individual students. Because language is key to connecting with community concerns, the course includes field trips to Filipino neighborhoods in Queens and Jersey City.

At this level, when the basic skills and working vocabulary have been mastered, emphasis can be placed on the linguistic rules to enable the student to communicate with more competence. There is also a focus on translation. Lessons use a holistic approach and incorporate discussions on history, current events, literature, pop culture, and native values. To observe and experience the language at work, the course includes field trips to Filipino centers in the New York/ New Jersey area, as well as invited guests who converse with students in Filipino about their life and work.

An introduction to Cantonese with an emphasis on the spoken and written language and conversational proficiency as a primary goal. Emphasizes grammar, listening comprehension, and oral expressions. Designed to give beginning students a practical command of the language. Upon completion of the course, students can expect to converse in simple sentences and recognize An introduction to Cantonese with an emphasis on the spoken and written language and conversational proficiency as a primary goal. Emphasizes grammar, listening comprehension, and oral expressions. Designed to give beginning students a practical command of the language. Upon completion of the course, students can expect to converse in simple sentences and recognize and write about 350 Chinese characters. Students with passable conversational ability or native speakers from Cantonese-speaking communities should not enroll in this course.

An advanced-level language and culture course following Elementary Cantonese. At this level, when the basic skills and working vocabulary have been mastered, emphasis is placed on the linguistic rules to enable students to communicate with more competence. The lessons focus not only on language, but also use a holistic approach and incorporate discussions on history, current events, literature, pop culture, and native values. Because language is key to connecting with community concerns, the course also includes field trips to Chinatown and to other Cantonese-speaking neighborhoods.

Focuses specifically on the Asian American communities of New York and their histories. Presents filmmaking as a mode of community documentation and filmmakers as historians. Students meet as theorists and field researchers. The first phase is largely historical and theoretical, while the latter mainly deals with hands-on filmmaking. Students document various aspects of Asian/Pacific American communities in New York?sociocultural and political issues surrounding them, histories, personal stories, geodynamics of ethnic localities, domestic lives, professions, ethnic festivals and performances, etc. At the end of the course, students have made at least two collective documentaries (10 to 12 minutes each), which may be interrelated or on entirely different subjects.

Examines how the American legal system decided constitutional challenges affecting the empowerment of African, Latino, and Asian American communities from the 19th century to the present. Topics include the denial of citizenship and naturalization to slaves and immigrants, government-sanctioned segregation, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the prison industry, police brutality, post-9/11 detention issues, and voting rights. Course requirements include attendance at a community function involving constitutional issues, a midterm, and an interactive oral and written final project comparing a present-day issue affecting racial minorities in New York City and proposing measures to collectively address the issue.

This course examines a body of scholarship by Native and non-Native scholars who center decolonial knowledge engaged in global movements for decolonization. How are Native peoples and movements at the frontlines of movements against climate change? How are Native movements for decolonization offering culturally rich and historically meaningful alternatives to the current system? Organized by specific debates and/or thematics that partly comprise these movements and fields, this course examines critiques of capitalism; climate change; Indigenous resurgence and political-ecology; statist and non-statist forms of deoccupation; anti-black racism and settler colonialism; queer settler colonialism; and food sovereignty.

As a comparative survey in U.S. Indigenous studies, this course explores settler colonial power within the context of Empire. The first part of the class examines major concepts theorized in Indigenous studies such as settler colonialism and primitive accumulation. These concepts examine the historical and often ongoing transition from Indigenous economies and governance to contemporary modes of production. The second part of the class highlights movements around sustainability, Indigenous resurgence, and food sovereignty that oppose and seek to replace industries founded upon resource extraction, a military industrial complex, industrial agriculture and genetically modified crops.

Designed to interest and challenge both the student new to the study of gender and sexuality and the student who has taken departmental courses focusing on women, gender, and/or sexuality. Through a focus on particular issues and topics, explores the construction of sex, gender, and sexuality; gender asymmetry in society; sexual normativity and violations of norms; and the interactions of sex, gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation. This interdisciplinary course engages materials and methodologies from a range of media and disciplines, such as literature, the visual arts, history, sociology, psychology, and anthropology. Examines both feminist and nonfeminist arguments from a variety of critical perspectives.

How queer is New York City? How do queerness and the city shape each other? This course crosses time and space, examining the history, politics and culture of the Big Apple. Ranging from Harlem to Times Square to Greenwich Village to Park Avenue, and beyond Manhattan to Queens, Brooklyn and Fire Island outposts, we follow people and money, high and underground culture, protests and politics. Materials include fiction and poetry, music, theater and performance, photography and film, and works of urban studies, history and ethnography. Assignments may include archival research and digital cartographic work.

Develops concepts of queerness and queer cultures through historical and theoretical research. Topics might include the historical shift from an emphasis on homosexual acts to homosexual persons; the history of the study of gays and lesbians by the medical, psychology, and sexology professions; intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sex, and sexual orientation in literary and visual texts; homophobia; hate crimes; outing; activism; and performativity.

This course examines the limits and possibilities of transnational feminist practices and theories. What does it mean to be “transnationally literate” in relation to gender and sexuality? How do notions of gender and sexuality shift in the context of the gendered travel, displacements and diasporas created by globalization? How are these contemporary movements shadowed by prior movements precipitated by earlier histories of colonialism, indentured labor and slavery? This course explores these questions by looking at a variety of theoretical essays, novels, films, and other cultural texts.

In this seminar, we will explore the different meanings and uses of queer history. These histories will be critically examined within a global context, and related to histories of modernity, capitalism, and imperialism. Students will also consider the significance of historical hierarchies of race, gender, class, and nation, in interaction with histories of sexuality.

In-depth study of a particular problem or research area within gender and sexuality studies. See course schedule for current topic.

In-depth study of a particular problem or research area within gender and sexuality studies. See course schedule for current topic.

Prerequisite: permission of the program director. Offered every semester. 2 or 4 points per term.

Explores a set of principles that have guided Latino/a presence in the United States. These principles can be found in many but not necessarily all of the readings. They include urban/rural life, freedom/ confinement, memoir as source of voice/other sources of voice, generational separation and identity, and loss and healing. The course traces a movement through time from masculinist nationalism to the recognition of variations in gender, sexuality, race, class, region, and national origin. Other principles may be added to this list as the course proceeds.

This course examines the history of Latinx contributions to the artistic vitality of the United States and will introduce students to some of the contemporary artists, debates and institutions that support Latinx art in NYC and beyond. We will pay especial attention to the relationship between Latinx and Latin American art and consider linkages between museums, private and governmental art stakeholders and communities. We will visit studios, speak to artists and also learn about the role of contemporary art markets in shaping Latinx art worlds.

Interdisciplinary examination of contemporary popular culture products—music, film, graphic novels, performance—by and for Latinos, especially issues of production, circulation, and consumption. Is popular culture a site of Latino/a cultural expression? How and in what ways? How is it circulated and consumed, and how is it mediated by different culture industries?

Possible issues, which vary from semester to semester, include race and racism, politics, migration and immigration, language, assimilation, education, labor, citizenship, social movements, and expressive culture.

Designed as seminar on contemporary cultural production by Latina feminist artists. Theory/cultural criticism paired with corresponding object of study, i.e. film, fiction, poetry, visual and performance art. First half of course models rigorous scholarship for student, offering different theoretical perspectives for interpreting cultural objects as social and political texts. Advanced seminar, experience with theoretical reading recommended. Second half of the course focuses on cultural production (film, fiction, poetry, visual and performance art). We will critically analyze recurrent tropes and themes—the borderlands as geographical and psychic boundary; the "mestiza" or "mulata" body as metaphor; assimilation experiences and familial relations; racism and education; revolution and political violence as theme; the literature of exile; the figure of the Malinche/la llorona as race traitor or victim; the domestic/maquiladora worker as virgin or whore—that occur throughout aesthetics of contemporary Latina artists in order to better understand the racial politics within post-nationalist movements for social justice.

This course is an investigation of speculative film and fiction as a form of social critique and reparative justice. Speculative film and fiction are not restricted to science fiction, but rather “speculative” refers to all of those forms of narrative (genres) that engage elements of altered reality, including fantasy, futuristic (i.e.near future), dystopian/utopian, gothic, noir, horror, and mystery. Speculative film and fiction re-imagine social relations, and as such offer alternative futures (or pasts) to the present legacy of colonialisms that we all currently live in. Thus, we will engage with speculative film and fiction as a diagnosis of the present, a recuperation of the past, a prognostication of the future. As our authors and directors are, on the whole, Indigenous and Latinx, we are focused on their examination and critique of racial, ethnic, and sexual formations; gendered relations; and European and US imperial expansion. How are these authors and directors re-imagining the past, and what are the alternative futures they offer us through their speculation? In the process, students will also perfect critical writing skills and critical interpretative skills.

Over the course of the twentieth-century various Latino/a groups have mobilized their growing power to make demands for social justice and equality. This course will study the history of Latino/a organizing from the 1940s to the contemporary moment. Some of the groups we will examine include: the Chicano movement, the Young Lords Party, Chicana feminists, Third World Women's Alliance, DREAMers, resistance to Arizona's SB1070, and UndocuQueer. We will look at the history of political organizations, community formation, identity development, and movement ideology.

In this course we will examine the profound sociological and cultural implications of the growing Afro-Latino presence in light of recent theorizing on race and diasporas. After an overview of the historical background of African-descendant peoples in the Spanish-speaking Americas, we well then trace the longstanding social experience of black Latinos in the United States. Along with a discussion of migration patterns and community formations, there will be a focus on narrative accounts of Afro-Latino life and on the traditions of cultural expression; special attention will go to Afro-Latino poetry and to the rich history of Afro-Latino music through the generations, from rumba, mambo and Cubop to salsa, Latin soul and hip-hop. Finally, we will turn to the possible theoretical and political consequences of this increasingly self-conscious transnational identity formation. (Common elective, AF, AM, LAT)

Prerequisite: permission of the program director. Offered every semester. 2 or 4 points per term.

A broad and interdisciplinary introduction to the field of urban studies, surveying the major approaches deployed to investigate the urban experience in the social space of the modern city. Explores the historical geography of capitalist urbanization with attention to North American and European cities, to colonial and postcolonial cities, and to the global contexts of urban development. Major topics include urban politics and governance; suburban and regional development; urban social movements; urban planning; the gendering of urban space and racial segregation in urban space.

Few cities boast as rich a cultural life as New York City, with its plethora of neighborhoods, museums, galleries, theatres, concert halls, and alternative spaces. Through walking tours, attendance at cultural events, and visits to local cultural institutions, students explore the definition of urban culture. Sites include the familiar and the unfamiliar, the Village and the outer boroughs. Students examine the attributes that constitute culture and community from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Empowerment is defined as those processes, mechanisms, strategies, and tactics through which people, as well as organizations and communities, gain mastery over their lives. It is personal as well as institutional and organizational. Addresses these issues in a wide variety of community settings. Designed to be challenging and rewarding to those students interested in helping people work together to improve their lives.

This course traces the rise of the neoliberal city and how neoliberal policy and governance has restructured spatial and social structures in the city. The class focuses on the specific ways that neoliberal urbanism is both shaped by and is reshape by urban racial spaces and policy such as gentrification and education.

The 2008 financial crisis was distinctly urban in its origins and consequences. At the center of the geographies of boom and bust was the important role of housing. In this course, we will examine the contemporary spaces of crisis to explicate their histories, lived experiences, and emergent forms of alternative urbanisms, resistance, and protest. Moving between cities in the North Atlantic and the Global South, we will pay particular attention to property, urban land, and patterns of urbanization in producing and reinforcing financialized regimes of difference and inequality. Moving forward, we will also look to the exciting activist responses that have emerged across the globe, from the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca in Spain to the Crown Heights Tenants Association in Brooklyn.

What are the diverse ways in which New York City has been imagined on the silver screen? How does a cinematic perspective shape our understanding of urban spaces? This course analyzes films that portray New York as a site of local encounter and global exchange in both commercial and documentary films since the 1960s. We will investigate the dramatic mapping and remapping of urban space through works that articulate questions of gentrification, immigrant labor, organized crime, and sexual subcultures. In turn, we will examine how these stories have helped shape and contest the city's image of itself--as a space of struggle, belonging, illegality, emancipation, and transformation. The goal is to see how each particular film captures a distinct moment both in the city's history over the past fifty years as well as in the history of filmmaking. In so doing, we will blend the perspectives of urban studies, ethnic studies, and visual culture, placing films within their aesthetic, political, and historical context.

This class explores critical issues in contemporary urbanism through the prism of a diverse and international body of cutting-edge documentary and feature films. Drawing on an equally broad range of theoretical and historical texts, we will investigate topics such as psychogeography, catacombism, landscape hacking, surveillance, slum urbanism and many more. We will also look at the specific role of cinema in generating, framing and circulating emergent notions about the modern city. Films to be studied may include ‘The Gleaners and I’, ‘Children of Men’, ‘Manufactured Landscapes’, ‘Helvetica’, ‘War In Mostar’.

Consumption of objects, images, and places is central to the culture and economy of metropolitan life. The class will explore how the relationship between consumption and cities has developed by examining three key moments—the late nineteenth century and the invention of urban commodity spectacles, post-war America and the rise of suburban consumer spaces, and contemporary America and the selling of the commodity city. The class addresses three questions: Why do we want things? How does landscape organize our consumer desires? How does place become an object of consumption? We will begin with an examination of classic theoretical works that probe the relationships between people, things, and cities. We will then embed these in discussions of changing forms and practices of consumption and urbanism. The empirical cases we will examine range from the development of the department store, to the fashioning of commodity home, to the work of shopping, and to the emergence of a thriving urban debt industry.

Explores environmental issues in urban centers, their causes and impacts, and the rise of a movement that considers the “environment” not just as the term we use to describe the natural world from which most urban residents feel dissociated, but rather as the array of places where we live, work and play. Considers the relationship between society and public policy in the context of environmentalism. Introduces students to public policy analysis, with a focus on policy implementation and decision-making in New York City. Examines the powers of the NYC Council and explains the role of agencies, the private sector, and interest groups as critical parts of a bureaucracy through which environmental issues are shaped, managed and negotiated. Through a variety of case studies, increases students' understanding of the political, legal, economic and technical and scientific constraints of the policy decision-making process and explores the path towards managing, using and protecting environmental resources in urban centers.

Readings from climatologists, economists, anthropologists, geographers, cultural analysts, and activists. Examines the natural and social impact of global warming in the context of the climate justice movement, which is modeled on American-derived principles of environmental justice in the 1990s and poses a legal and humanitarian challenge to those who place their faith in market-driven solutions. Examines how populations are unevenly affected by climate change, and how this imbalance is being addressed by advocates of decarbonization.

This course will offer a broad survey of the history of urban and suburban development since the latenineteenth century. It will look at some of the major movements in town planning and in housing and transportation policy, and will examine several schools of thought associated with urbanism over that period of time. Suburbanization, where most Americans live, will be a focus of attention, as will environmental justice and the struggle for urban sustainability. Urban forms under scrutiny will include the creation of streetcar suburbs, garden cities, greenbelt towns, master-planned and gated communities, edge cities, and global cities. The course will analyze ghetto- and barrio-formation alongside ethnic enclaves, gentrification, and the rise of neo-traditional New Urbanism. Close attention will be given to the relationship between these urban forms and modes of industrial production, transportation, and communication.

This course will examine the complex politics and governing of New York City. Topics covered include: the structure of key political institutions; the “permanent” government; the role of interest groups; racial and ethnic politics; and, voting and elections. We examine three broad policy areas (education, housing and policing) to trace the impact of New York City’s political and governance structure on public policy.

Prerequisite: permission of the program director. Offered every semester. 2 or 4 points per term.

This course is a general introduction to the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS). The course will introduce students to the central questions and debates of NAIS, including but not limited to: Native American hidden histories and oral histories; comparative indigeneities; questions of “discovery” and colonialism; the politics and representations of lands, massacres, and museums; and questions of law, gender and sexuality. It begins by asking students to consider the history of the field and weaves throughout questions about the complicated and contested terrain of the term Indigeneity. It ends with discussions about decolonizing research and indigenous futures, thus preparing students to consider theories and methodologies they will encounter in more advanced courses for the NAIS minor. By the end of the semester, students will have gained both historical and ethnographic perspectives on how museums and other forms of representation help us to know and reproduce ourselves and “others,” and how institutions craft, control, and circulate cultural heritage in various social lives.

Historically, education has been the most accessible and effective means for groups to achieve social mobility in American society. However, access to public education has never been equal for all segments of society, and there continues to be considerable variability in the quality of education provided to students. As a result of both explicit and subtle discrimination, racialized minority groups have at various times been denied access to education or been relegated to inferior schools or classrooms. Yet education has also been the arena where the greatest advances in social justice and racial equality have been achieved. Understanding the contradictions created by the hope and unfulfilled promise of American education is a central theme of this course.

With active recording artists as class guests, and visits to selected recording studios, the class explores how multiple artists and musical forms from different continents have continued to influence African popular music. This course starts with a deep dive into the history of recorded music and leads to the current explosion of afrobeats in this region. From Fela to Davido, Shatta Wale, Burna Boy, Wizkid, Stoweboy, Wanlov, Fokn Bois, Becca Rema, and more. Classes will be enriched with excursions to recording studios and special events such as a possible masterclass with Universal Music Group on the business of selling African music to the world.The utility of music as an artistic tool of social expression and liberation within the African space is interrogated. With special attention to West Africa and Ghana, latest genres such as Afro beat and their impact on the modern African music scene; as well as the trends, challenges and opportunities presented by technology in the music evolutionary process are critically examined.

This interdisciplinary course combines ethnographic readings, representations, and interpretations of city and urban cultures with a video production component in which students create short documentaries on the city of Accra. The interpretative classes will run concurrently with production management, sights and sound, and post-production workshops. The course will have three objectives: (1) teach students the documentary tradition from Flaherty to Rouch; (2) use critical Cinema theory to define a document with a camera; and (3) create a short documentary film.

Explores specific issues dealing with the black urban experience, focusing on social and cultural institutions. Possible themes, which vary from semester to semester, include class and poverty, the police, urban development, education, sports, music, and art.

Analyzes writing from 1845 to present, surveying African-American history and literature beginning with the writings of Frederick Douglass and the Harlem Renaissance writers that originate from Washington, DC’s Howard University (Zora Hurston and Alain Locke). From this historical foundation, examines issues of race and caste from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, that focuses on the death of Coates’ Howard classmate at the hands of police. Also uses Washington, DC as a resource, visiting sites, including the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, Howard University, the National Museum of African-American Culture and History and the Martin Luther King Memorial Site.

The course description for this Topics course varies depending on the topic taught. Please view the course description in the course notes section.

This course proposes to look at migration from a contemporary perspective and to examine how it econfigures identity and citizenship. It looks at the present situation through a historical perspective, taking the current 'refugee crisis' as a point of departure, and placing it in a European and global context. The course is intentionally multidisciplinary and incorporates debates from history, sociology, anthropology, political science, geography as well as cultural and urban studies. This will permit students from different backgrounds to approach the subject from their own vantage point and with their chosen methodological instruments. The course starts from observation and media analysis to lead students to theoretical approaches, instead of using a more common deductive approach. Field trips are included where Berlin is the case study, which will give students an opportunity for experiential learning. Structured discussions are a central element of the course and follow several methods: fishbowl, panel, open space, world café etc. There is an emphasis on teamwork in class, although assessment is based upon individual performance.

This course explores urban experience in Italy from two distinct perspectives, the historical and the theoretical. We will start with a historical overview of the evolution of the urban environment in Italy. This overview will extends from ancient and roman times to the (re-)birth of towns by the year 1000, when various towns identified themselves around their piazzas, churches, streets, and within their walls, to the evolution of Italian towns in modern times, the changes in size and organization, the emergence of new spaces and new functions, and the emergence of new institutions such as Cafes, Museums, Train Station. The focus of these first lectures will be on the city of Florence. The second dimension of the course, which will be articulated at two levels, will reflect upon the way in which we conceptualize, represent and construct discourses about cities in modern times. Firstly, we will make an exploration of some texts, concepts that have contributed to shaping our way to understand modern cities. We will also explore the various possible positioning of the self towards the city, the “seer”, the “Flaneur” the Stroller”, and we will investigate how the bodies of these subjects is then constituted. Secondly, we’ll go through some discourses and representations of the city: maps, views, panoramas points, travel literature, tourist guides and narrative literature (e.g. detective novel) will provide with quite different ways to tell of (and relate to) the experience of the Italian and specifically Florentine urban environment.

The course descriptions for this Social and Cultural Analysis course varies on the location taught. Please view the course description in the course notes below.

This course provides a comprehensive examination of Berlin’s urban ecology and approaches to urban planning, while introducing their history, and the correlations between the city’s built structure, urban nature and culture. The course combines lectures, workshops and site visits to several facets of Berlin’s ‘green’ past and present. The course investigates Berlin’s ‘green’ structures in relation to the economic, socio-cultural, and political processes that shape it, while placing an emphasis on sustainable ideas and projects and how they influence Berlin’s built structure.

The course introduces students to aspects of Ghanaian society and culture. It considers both traditional aspects of life and how people live their lives in this first decade of the new millennium. How Ghanaians perceive and conceive themselves and their society; how others view the society and life of Ghanaians also receive critical attention. The course emphasizes that Ghanaians are not an undifferentiated lot and that what the different people say their behavior should be differs from what their actual behavior is. Students will get to examine these varied perceptions and perspectives as well as construct their own representations of the society. The course will also attempt to answer questions about Ghana and Ghanaians that are of interest to the non-Ghanaian getting acquainted with the country. The course combines talks, readings, discussions, visits, and students' presentations in class. There will be a written examination at the end of the semester and a dissertation on an aspect of Ghanaian society and culture that students might choose to explore.

This course offers a wide-ranging critique of Australian culture and society. It aims to interrogate Australian society with a methodology that draws on critical race theory, feminism, social geography and cultural studies. It will look at issues such as the relationship between Australian settler culture and Aboriginal Australians; Australia’s experience of migration and multiculturalism; Australians’ relationship with their environment; and Australians’ sense of national identity. In particular, it will consider how these issues have played out in popular culture. This course offers a special experience for students wishing to broaden and deepen their methodologies of cultural analysis. Australian society is fascinating in itself, but it also offers a unique perspective on transnational issues such as identity formation, social justice movements and the experience of multiculturalism. For instance, given Australia’s history of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations, the issue of race in a post-colonial context is particularly acute here. Through comparison with the Australian experience, students will develop a more critical view of American and global society. Students wishing to pursue a career that involves cultural analysis will benefit greatly from studying Australian society, in Australia, and thus developing this comparative approach.

The class will explore the sociocultural and philosophical context of the media industry and the practice of mass communication in Africa in general, and Ghana in particular. This broad perspective will be examined against the background notion that the media do not function in a vacuum. Thus, students will examine how these contexts, informed by the dominant philosophies and macro-institutional practices of society, mitigate or even dictate the operations of the media. As a special focus, we will examine the significance of the liberalization of the airwaves in emerging democracies such as Ghana.

In the last ten years, several Latin American nations have witnessed decisive progress in the legal recognition of non-normative sexualities and gender identities. Argentina passed the same-sex marriage law in 2010 and the gender identity law in 2011, followed by Uruguay in 2013; Colombia also approved the legal recognition of same sex couples, and in Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, the pressure of queer demands and visibility in the public sphere is stronger than ever. The conventional map of “advanced democracies” crafting models of democratization that could be exported to less developed nations seems definitely challenged: a new understanding of the complex, and multiple temporalities of queer cultures in North and South America is more necessary than ever. In order to explore this rich and multi-layered landscape, this course wants to trace and reconstruct the historical detours of queer cultures in Buenos Aires and New York as cities that epitomize queer struggles in Argentina and the US. Taking as starting point the present context of growing acceptance and inclusion of queer citizens both in Latin America and the US, the course revisits the last three decades in order to question the dominant and frequently reductive narratives of steady, lineal progress. This class is aimed at developing an understanding of the nuances and contradictions of this complex historical transformation.

Explores Ghana's development in historic perspective from the colonial era to the recent postcolonial period. Provides an interdisciplinary history that is attentive to political economy, social relations, geography, and politics as they congeal in particular ways throughout Ghana's developmental trajectory. Traces the key forces at play in Ghanaian development through time, paying particular attention to the transformations prompted by the region's encounter with and incorporation into a global economy. Key historical moments will include the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the colonial era in light of their attendant reconfigurations of land, labor, and natural resources—as well as landscapes of power and politics. In the postcolonial period, examines the central epochs in the country's development trajectory, in relation to its rich political history and shifting global discourses of development and geopolitics, and considers such dynamics as Asian investment, urbanization, international development aid, and the discovery of oil. Field visits will complement class discussions and take advantage of our location in Accra. Ghana's specific developmental trajectory is viewed in contexts of wider African and global south developmental trajectories.

Berlin is a unique modern Metropolis. Its alternating history with often drastic changes offers a comprehensive background to explore and investigate the nature of architecture in correlation to the various developmental processes of urban life and culture. Architecture is embedded in the urban fabric in which place and time serve as the main threads, constantly changing their multifaceted and layered relationships. This urban fabric provides the fertile soil for urban life and culture, which literally takes place in various scales between the public and the private realm, two further threads intertwined in the urban fabric. Experiencing the city through walking is essential for learning how to observe, see and read "Place, Building and Time" in Berlin.Tours will alternate with classroom discussions and workshop.

Is journalism on the brink of extinction? Or, is it simply evolving? Indeed, the frontiers of journalism are being extended with the emergence of digital technology. Particularly in Africa, this is a huge challenge. Given these developments, this course intends to examine the changes in the content and context of journalism from an Afrocentric lens.Not only that, the course considers the impact of these changes on the practice, genre, and approaches to journalism in Africa. Set within an African environment, this course focuses on reporting, and employing strong journalistic principles. Thus, students carry out experiments with forms, styles, and subject-matters with a view to understanding journalism in an African environment in a multipolar world. In doing so, the course hones the skills, knowledge, and competences of students in relation to the ethics of an exciting and demanding career. Specifically, this course examines journalism as an art, a craft, and an occupation in contemporary times. Thus, journalistic styles, procedures, techniques of news, information gathering, presentation of news information and opinion in print and electronic media form the foci of this course.

This course explores the global phenomenon of growing consumption and waste in cities, as well as the transformation of resources and natural landscapes to serve these trends. A city like Berlin consumes large amounts of energy, water and food, and produces high quantities of waste. But where do these resources come from, and where is waste disposed of? Students engage with these questions in a theoretical, methodological and ethical way by tracing the flows of water, energy, food and waste in and around Berlin and beyond. The course aims to explore urbanization as a global process with fluid boundaries and analyze the connection of cities to the natural resources and landscapes on which they rely. Drawing from geography, anthropology and history, we analyze the relationship between growing consumption and disposal and the expansion of the resource frontier, while identifying the social, environmental and spatial effects this entails.

To provide an understanding of the main immigration trends in Britain, France and Germany since 1850 To provide an understanding of the problems attending the social and political integration of immigrants in contemporary Western Europe To compare the experience and understanding of immigration in Europe with the experience and understanding of immigration in the United States To examine the ways in which the memory of immigration is represented in literature and contemporary culture.

This course studies modern and contemporary art and architecture through a strategic focus on the cities of Buenos Aires, New York, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City. We consider key artworks and architectural movements, approaching art history in urban, socio-historical and contextual terms. Emphasis is placed upon the city as a hub for the production and reception of art. Cities are multifarious complexes of paradoxical elements, where rhythms of stasis and motion coexist. Every city absorbs creative interchange, while also triggering different types of transformation. Our speculations on the urban environment will bring up multiple questions that point back to and extend beyond the mere physical structure of the city, discovering arenas of social action. How does art exploit the characteristics of the metropolis? How is art distributed and consumed throughout the dense fabric of the city? We will explore art (primarily Latin American art) as a staging ground for the city, and the city as staging ground for art. Developing comparative perspectives on Buenos Aires, New York, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City will illuminate the particularities of the places under investigation, albeit with reference to aesthetic trajectories as well as broader technological, economic, and social-political changes. New York is included in our selected network of Latin American cities, acknowledging its critical importance as a center of cultural experimentation where artists (including Latin American artists) share ideas in a global context. Work in class will focus on both visual and textual analysis, employing images, manifestos and critical essays. The course includes a lively program of tours throughout Buenos Aires, visits to museums and private art collections, and conversations with guest contemporary artists.

This course presents an overview of the political, social, and cultural history of Italy from roughly 1300 to 1600. Its aim is to provide students with a basic understanding of the forces and processes that shaped the states and the societies of the Italian peninsula in an era of extraordinary changes: from the developments of urban civilization and the rise of humanism in the fourteenth and early fifteenth century, to the political and religious crisis of the late Quattrocento and early Cinquecento, and finally to the establishment of a new balance of power and a new cultural climate in the course of the sixteenth century.

Through a focus on contemporary Paris, this course aims to explore the insights offered by anthropological approaches to cities and urban life. We will consider the relationships between urban spatial organization and an array of social, economic and political phenomena; the relevance of consumption and display to the shaping of urban identities; and the shifting dynamics of social groups and boundaries within the urban context. This will be accomplished through course readings and also through training in urban ethnographic research methods, supporting each student's own systematic observation over the semester of one locus of everyday Parisian life. The final project for the course will be a piece of ethnographic analysis based on this field research.

This course introduces students to the history, sociology, and anthropology of women, feminism, and of gender and sexuality in contemporary France from the 19th century to the present. Interdisciplinary in approach, the course draws on feminist theory and empirical studies to address a range of political, economic, social, and cultural questions and the way they have played out through time. Specifically the course addresses the following issues: the history of the relationship between the condition of women, gender roles, and feminism from the Revolution to the present day; the importance of gender to such contemporary debates as parity, sexual identities, prostitution and sex-work, hetero-centrism and homosexuality, gay marriage, sexual harassment and so on; and finally the intersection of questions of gender and post-colonialism as a means to understanding contemporary polemics, the question of the Islamic veil in particular.

Aiming to enlarge our understanding of the profound transformations of contemporary France, this course focuses first on the redeployment of identities: sex and gender, age and generation, social affiliation, ethnicity, before examining some of the profound shifts in social, economic, cultural, political and demographic factors that have transpired as a result. We will examine the way these changes have been constructed through various ideological and cultural representations, in order to deepen such notions as the crisis of the model of integration, the aging of the population, the decline in the emancipation of women, the breakdown of social mobility, the break-up of elites, and so on -- all points of entry for understanding the crisis of a "French model" in full mutation. In French.

A history of Modern Imperialism from the beginning of the nineteenth century to post-Second World War decolonisation: with particular reference to the British Empire.

This course will study a variety of texts written at particular times in the history of London. The aims of the course are to encourage the student to think historically, in terms of the way London and representations of the city have changed and developed over time; and theoretically, in terms of the way the city is mediated through different forms and genres (e.g. poetry, novels, essays, film; satire, detective and crime fiction), and the interrelationship of literary and material spaces. We will also examine the significance of gender, the definition of the modern metropolis as a labyrinthine city of Babylon, the influence of metropolitan culture on Modernism and Modernity, assimilation versus multiculturalism, immigration, and the effects of new modern spaces on individuals.

An introduction to urban societies and politics in Europe. Designed to provide students with practical and theoretical tools to understand and critically analyze European cities. Looks closely at the social, political and urban challenges these cities are currently facing. Urban concepts, as well as pertinent theories in the field, will be studied in order to better comprehend the ever-changing urban fabric of metropolitan areas across Europe. Pays special attention to Madrid and how this city is responding to issues such as gentrification, social exclusion, immigration, racial and spatial segregation, political participation and social movements, public spaces, creative industries, environmental policies, sustainability and local economic development. Specific case studies will provide concrete examples of conflicts around urban space and both participatory and bottom-up initiatives.

A historical and political inquiry into the French system of relations with Francophone Africa from the ‘race to Empire’ in the 19th century to the current day. The main goals of the course are: to describe the historical development of French-African relations from the colonial to the post-independence era; to investigate the political, economic and cultural mechanisms of French influence in contemporary Francophone Africa; to understand the consequences for France of complex developments subsequent to colonialism, such as African immigration in France. Conducted in French.