Courses

CST 200B  - T. Warner - Theories of Cultural Studies

Bad Institutions -- This course will serve as an introduction to both critical theory and cultural studies through the theme of “bad institutions.” Critical theory and cultural studies have historically had in common an inclination to unpack, interrogate, and critique the institutions that structure everyday life. Each week we will explore foundational theoretical debates in these fields through a series of keywords that include markets, borders, the law, the family, gender, citizenship and civil society, language, science, culture, and the university. Each meeting will pair authors including Adorno, Fanon, Foucault, Freud Gramsci, Hall, Hegel, Lacan, Marx, and Williams with contemporary thinkers including Ahmed, Berlant, Butler, Byrd, Crenshaw, Federici, Halberstam, Latour, Lowe, McKittrick, Moten, Muñoz, and Puar. Our goal will be to connect across disciplines, generations, and schools of thought to explore how theoretical work from earlier eras continues to structure debates in the present as well as to consider how current interventions reshape longstanding concerns. While we cannot cover all approaches in one term, together we will work toward tracing a ground from which students can define and extend their own research projects.

Tues 2:10pm - 5:00pm

CST 250  - R. Kim -  Research Seminar: 

Designed to facilitate student interaction and promote student research by guiding students through the production of a publishable essay. Essays submitted, distributed, and discussed by seminar participants.

Tues 1:10pm - 4:00pm

CST 290 - Colloquium: CST Speaker Series.  

Designed to provide cohort identity and faculty student exchange. Opportunity to present papers, hear guest lecturers, and see faculty presentations, gather for organizational and administrative news, exchange information, and make announcements.

Thurs: 4:10pm - 6:00pm

CST 295 - J. Santillana Blanco - Queer and Feminist Ecologies of Color
This course is an interdisciplinary examination of queer and feminist of color thought that investigates the ways gender, race, class, sexuality, immigration and other social categories intersect to shape ecological knowledge. Especially as it relates to human consciousness, the social organization of human society as well as animal and plant life, and the environment. As a critical response to queer theory, queer ecology, ecofeminism and environmentalism, this course will centralize women of color feminism and queer and trans of color theory to explore the historical, social, political and ecological structures in the aftermath of colonization in the United States and the Americas. Our goal will be to expand and complicate queer ecology’s overreliance on Eurocentric conceptions of gender, sexuality and queerness as central modes of oppression within ecology by considering how colonialism, settler colonialism, white supremacy, antiblackness, xenophobia, heterosexism, capitalism among other power structures intersect and structures nature, society, and the environment. We will explore how different categories such as race, class, nation, decolonization, feminism, migration, transnationalism, diaspora, indigeneity and region shape varied ecologies.

Wed 12:10pm - 3:00pm

AFFILIATE COURSES

AAS 204 - B. Ng’weno - Methodologies in African American and African Studies 

Relationship between theory and methodology, with emphasis on identifying relevant methodological approaches and constructing theoretically informed research projects for studying the experience of people of African descent whether on the African continent or in the rest of the world.

Thurs: 1:10pm - 4:00pm 

AAS 290 - B. Ng'weno - 50 Ways to Get Your Land Back: Land, Diaspora and Indigeneity

This course explores the way land is possessed and dispossessed in the context of Blackness. We will discuss how forms of care for land are expressed, sustained, and challenged with an emphasis on Black communities in the Americas and Africa. Through readings and discussion we will engage with concepts of connections to land, territory, land tenure, human-environment relationships, home and land as the creation and nourishment of identity and tradition. Through this we will seek to understand the role of removals in conceptually foreclosing relations to land and the role of care and repair in restoring them. What kinds of conceptual work needs to be done to understand the relationships to, with and of land and Blackness in the Americas, and in Africa. How are these places and concepts related to each other? What does diaspora, or indigeneity mean in these different locations? Do these concepts preclude each other? What are the temporalities of belonging? We will review the histories and futures of Black claims to and practices of land across these spaces to understand the moral, political, ethnical, conceptual boundaries needed to get land back. This course is suited for students interested in the role of interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, co-disciplinary, and transdisciplinary research in supporting land sovereignty efforts. Finally, we aim to reimagine the role of research for biocultural conservation and restoration including places that are neither “land” nor “water,”  such as swamps, mangroves, bayous, dunes, marshes, etc.

Wed: 1:10 pm - 4:00pm

AHI 290 - H. Watenpaugh - Cultures of Collecting and Exhibition 

The seminar this Winter will focus on Collecting the Arts from the Middle East in historical and theoretical perspective. We will consider all aspects of the history of collecting – such as the manifold processes that result in objects traveling across vast distances and acquiring new functions and contexts. We will also do deep dives on the “cast of characters” that often play multiple roles in this process– art dealers, art collectors, museum officials, looters, fixers, middle men, attorneys, scholars, and curators. Finally we will critically consider manifold resistance movements focused on defending cultural heritage in war and peacetime and pressing restitution claims, as well as movements that advocate the selective erasure of cultural heritage and battles over memory and history.

Mon: 1:10 pm- 4:00pm

COM 210 - S. Lu - East-West Literary Relations, Comparative Poetics, Cross-cultural Modernity
This seminar tackles a set of interrelated issues: East-West literary relations, comparative poetics, cross-cultural modernity, and inter-Asian cultural studies.  We examine the history, methodologies, important trends, and salient topics in East-West comparative literature as well as in inter-Asian literary studies (China, Japan, Korea, India).  We conduct a comparative study of discourses of modernity between East and West and from around the world. We look at how theoretical discourses and aesthetic practices in the East and the West appropriate and build upon each other’s traditions; how Asia and other cultures offer alternative narratives of modernity in a global framework.  Students will read relevant writings by scholars, comparatists, Sinologists, and critics such as Takeuchi Yoshimi, Fredric Jameson, David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, Zhang Longxi, Stephen Owen, Haun Saussy, Rey Chow, Lydia Liu, Shu-mei Shih, and many others.

Thurs 2:10pm - 5:00pm

GSW 200B - R. Jaleel - Feminism and Research Methodology 

Applications of feminist epistemology and ethics in the design of graduate research. 

Tues 1:00pm - 4:00pm

PFS 265C - L. Bogad - Performance and Society: Oppositional Performance and Social Movements

This seminar examines the often-fraught relationship between politically motivated performances (broadly defined), social movements, the media, and the state.  Students will analyze and discuss the texts, and will be responsible for independent research in preparation for class presentations. Final project will be a major research paper, or a practical project complemented by a shorter paper which theorizes and justifies the project.

Tues 1:00pm - 4:00pm

STS 205 - J. Dumit - Contemporary Issues in Science and Technology Studies

Recent topics, debates, and innovative methods in Science & Technology Studies. Issues may include the governance of technoscience, science and media, data studies, indigenous knowledge, science and globalization, citizen science, new and emerging technologies.

Wed: 2:10pm - 5:00pm