As the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship continues to grow and expand, we are excited to announce a wide range of courses offered across the humanities and social sciences. These are led by RIC kinfolk and include innovative community-engaged pedagogy. Focal areas include racism, immigration, colonialism, and critical political economy, as well as the arts.
We are especially proud to introduce two new Humanities Research Lab courses, led by Profs. Kim and Schrader, which are the result of a winning Nexus Award and will be taught both on the Homewood Campus and in DC at 555 Penn. To learn more about this year-long project, check this article on our community-engaged learning event held earlier this fall.
We encourage undergraduate and graduate students to consider these courses for the upcoming Intersession and Spring 2024 term. For further information, please consult the course catalog or contact the instructors directly.
Intersession Courses
AS.191.291 Politics of Love and Care
Instructor: Ronay Bakan, Political Science PhD candidate
MTWThF 11:00AM – 12:15PM
Departments: AS Summer and Intersession Programs, AS Political Science
Description: Can there be a life/politics without love and care? What does the study of politics look like if we center love and care in our research inquiry? When COVID-19 wreaked havoc globally, the conversation around love and care in their life-sustaining forms became central. Lockdowns reaffirmed private, heteronormative, and capitalist homes as a place of safety and stability. At the same time, it simultaneously concealed various co-habitation practices, feelings of loneliness due to isolation, as well as pervasive gender-based domestic violence. However, COVID-19 is not a moment of exception, but of an emergency in which the maintenance of life became paramount for all of us. This class focuses on life-sustaining and deeply political characteristics of love and care in the age of ever-impending crises from earthquakes to wildfires, floods to pandemics within academia and beyond. To do so, the first week of the class (re)conceptualizes love and care by predominantly drawing on feminist political thought. As such, the course aims to facilitate a collective discussion for the participants to analyze moral and political foundations of love and care by reflecting on readings and their everyday experiences. The second half of the class brings forth political science research that centers love and care as integral in analyzing political phenomena instead of the dominant focus on death, destruction, institutions, diplomacy, and so on. As such, the course creates a space to re-think how love and care can improve the political science inquiry.
AS.191.292 Global Racial Politics on Film
Instructor: Sheharyar Imran, Political Science PhD candidate and RIC Graduate Fellow
MTWThF 10:00AM – 11:20AM
Departments: AS Summer and Intersession Programs, AS Political Science
Description: This course will explore cross-racial tensions, intimacies, and solidarities through filmic representations of diasporic life. In particular, it will focus on Asian and Black diasporic communities in the US and the UK. It will examine racial dynamics between the two communities and across whiteness. Through the films My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Mississippi Masala (1991), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2013), and Gook (2017), the course will explore issues such as precarious labor and the relationship between race and class; borders, asylum, and Islamophobia; queer romance and heteronormative nationalism; policing and state violence; and multiculturalism and exclusion. Through a critical engagement with these themes, students will gain a theoretical and empirically grounded understanding of racial politics (racialization, anti-racist solidarity) from a comparative, transnational, and everyday perspective.
Spring 2024 Courses
Africana Studies
AS.362.140 Blackstorytelling: Public Health in the Black World
Instructor: Jasmine Blanks Jones, Director, Center for Social Concern
W 1:30PM – 4:00PM
Departments: AS Center for Africana Studies, AS Theatre Arts & Studies
Description: What about performance offers a unique opportunity to learn from and with communities? How might dramatic performance be used to share information while learning from an audience? This course examines the work and research of young artists from Liberia, West Africa who used street theatre to teach best practices for prevention during the Ebola crisis and considers how their use of dialogical performance contributed to critical knowledge which iteratively informed interventions throughout their awareness campaign. This community engaged course connects public health education efforts in Africa to community health education in Baltimore through the Blackstorytelling tradition with local expert Janice the Griot. Course co-educator and artist Janice the Griot Green will share her firsthand experiences and guide the class through the principles of Blackstorytelling for community change. Students will design public performance projects around local-global community-based concerns using the tools they have learned. In partnership with the Great National Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore, students will develop performance-based public health messaging drawing on their collection to support community outreach curricular materials development. This performance work will be created collaboratively in workshops during class and in team meetings. Public health researchers who are looking for innovative ways to share their data will gain insights into this experimental ethnographic method and practitioners who want to offer their communities ways to connect best practices to lived experience will develop new pedagogical tools. This is a Community Engagement course in partnership with the Center for Social Concern.
AS.362.325 Humanities Research Lab: The Military-Industrial Complex in Maryland, D.C., and Virginia
Instructor: Stuart Schrader, Associate Research Professor, Africana Studies, and Associate Director, RIC
F 10:00AM – 12:30PM
Departments: AS Center for Africana Studies, AS International Studies
Description: Washington, DC, is the capital of the United States but also the capital of its post–World War II national security state and military-industrial complex. This course will investigate the local effects of this status on the Washington-Baltimore corridor, in terms of immigration and urban development. The course will be divided into three major sections. First, we will analyze the growth and development of the military-industrial complex. Second, we will look at its place in the city and region’s development, including the construction of the Pentagon, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and other institutions. Third, we will analyze how these institutions have driven changes in the region’s population, as immigrants from war-torn parts of the globe have found new homes in and near Washington, DC. This course requires at least four Friday group trips to 555 Penn in Washington, which will take most of the day (transportation provided).
AS.362.326 Nothing About Us, Without Us: Storytelling as a Method for Community Organizing
Instructors: Daniel Cumming, RIC Postdoctoral Fellow; Tonika Berkley, Africana Archivist; Jeneanne Collins, Community Arts Fellow, and community partner Edna Manns-Lake, Fayette Street Outreach
TTh 3:00PM – 4:15PM
Departments: AS Center for Africana Studies, AS History
Description: This course offers a hands-on opportunity for students to develop new skills as community organizers by learning from the best teachers possible: residents who have been serving their neighborhoods and building grassroots power in Southwest Baltimore since the 1990s. As a community-based learning course with the Center for Social Concern, and co-taught by professors, archivists, cultural curators, and longtime residents, including the founder of Fayette Street Outreach, Ms. Edna Manns Lake, this course will leverage the narrative power of storytelling to help rewrite a multigenerational history of community organizing in a part of the city long neglected by local government and threatened historically by open-air drug markets, rampant criminalization, and predatory housing speculators. Through community immersion, including story circles, oral histories, community archiving, local meetings, and guest presentations, students will learn how to navigate, identify, and build upon existing neighborhood assets. Students will then collaborate with a community partner to co-design and complete a neighborhood project by the end of the semester. Dispelling myths, learning truths, documenting history, and honoring decades of struggle in the face of massive odds, students will help re-write the narrative of Southwest Baltimore, centering humanity and resilience among resident-activists who stayed and fought for their community.
AS.362.402 Arts and Social Justice Practicum
Instructor: Shawntay Stocks, Inheritance Baltimore Assistant Director of Fellowships and Community Engagement
Th 1:30PM – 4:00PM
Departments: AS Center for Africana Studies, AS English
Description: This course introduces students to concepts of social justice and practices of community-engaged artmaking. It also provides students an opportunity to explore the history and legacies of the Black Arts Movement, and contemporary intersections of art and social justice in Baltimore City. Local artists and scholars will share their expertise using art to challenge social injustice. In turn, students will examine their personal creative practices and how they can be used to create and advocate for change. Throughout the semester, students will develop individual art projects that respond to course topics and are rooted in the principles and process of social practice art.
Anthropology
AS.100.662 Inter Asia Research Seminar (grad)
Instructors: Clara Han, Professor, Anthropology, and H. Yumi Kim, Assistant Professor, History
T 10:00AM – 12:00PM
Departments: AS History, AS Anthropology
Description: An intensive research seminar for graduate students currently conducting research on theories, methodologies, and histories of inter-Asian movements and networks. Instructor permission required.
AS.070.406 Governing Health: Care, Inequality, and the State
Instructor: Tali Ziv, RIC Postdoctoral Fellow
F 1:30PM – 4:00PM
Department: AS Anthropology
Description: Governing health explores the vital relationship between governance and health. The class interrogates how the stratification and management of populations are linked with the diagnoses, categories, and inequities that make up our contemporary health landscape. We will explore how the concept of governance troubles our understandings of key concepts in medical anthropology like care, inequality, and the state. Moving from the level of the population to the individual body, from state institutions to the four walls of the clinic, this course traces governance as it generates and degenerates health.
English
AS.060.216 Zombies
Instructor: Jared Hickman, Associate Professor, English
MWF 9:00AM – 9:50AM
Departments: AS English, AS English, AS Medicine, Science and the Humanities
Description: This lecture survey will attempt to answer why the zombie has become such a fixture in contemporary literature and cinema. We will track this figure across its many incarnations–from its late-eighteenth-century appearance in ethnographic fictions growing out of the modern cultures of racialized slavery in the Americas right up to twenty-first-century Hollywood blockbusters in which the origins of the figure in the cultures of racialized slavery are perhaps not overt yet continue to manifest. What are the implications of the zombie’s arc from a particular human being targeted for domination by a sorcerer to a living-dead horde created by radiation or epidemic? “Texts” may include: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man Who Was Used Up”; H.P. Lovecraft, “Herbert West–Re-Animator”; Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse; Victor Halperin, dir., White Zombie; George Romero, dir., Dead series; Edgar Wright, dir., Shaun of the Dead; Alejandro Brugués, dir., Juan de los Muertos; Colm McCarthy, dir., The Girl with All the Gifts; Colson Whitehead, Zone One; Jordan Peele, dir., Get Out. Fulfills the Global and Minority Literatures requirement.
AS.060.351 The Latin Asian Imagination
Instructor: Johaina Katinka Crisostomo, Assistant Professor, English
W 3:00PM – 5:30PM
Departments: AS English, AS Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies
Description: This course explores the transnational convergence of Asians/Asian Americans and Latinxs/ Latinx Americans from a history of multiple imperialisms to the neoliberal, globalized present. We will situate the racialization of Asian and Latinx peoples within a larger, global framework and think critically about areas of solidarity and tension between these two multi-ethnic groups through readings in literature, history, and sociology.
AS.060.656 The Novel as Philosopher of History (grad)
Instructor: Johaina Katinka Crisostomo, Assistant Professor, English
M 1:00PM – 4:00PM
Departments: AS English
Description: This course will explore the intersection between philosophies of history and theories of the novel. We will be examining the novel’s function not only as an aesthetic and philosophical object, but also as a self-conscious historical artifact. The first part of the course will include readings of from history, philosophy, and literary theory to explore various perspectives on how the novel has been both shaper and receptacle of history, while the second part will delve into close-readings of several primary texts—a historical novel, an experimental novel, and a graphic novel—to investigate the different ways in which this protean form has been mobilized to engage with questions about the relationship between aesthetic form and historical knowledge.
History
AS.360.412 Humanities Research Lab: Asian Diaspora in Baltimore and D.C.
Instructor: H. Yumi Kim, Assistant Professor, History
F 10:00AM – 12:30PM
Departments: AS Interdepartmental, AS History
Description: In this humanities research lab, students will conduct original research on local histories of Asian American and Asian diasporic communities in the Baltimore area, inclusive of D.C. Students will think about how and why the histories and experiences of the region’s Asian American and diasporic communities, especially their interactions with other racialized and minoritized groups, continue to be erased from public conversation, and then engage in hands-on collaborative and reparative work in response to such erasure. The lab is organized around discussions and workshops with community collaborators, guest speakers, and scholars, as well as visits to archives, neighborhoods, and community organizations. This course requires at least four Friday group trips to 555 Penn in Washington D.C. (transportation provided).
AS.100.708 The Black World II (grad)
Instructor: NDB Connolly, Associate Professor, History, and Director, RIC
T 12:00PM – 2:00PM
Department: AS History
Description: The Black World Seminar explores historical approaches to the study of African-descended people and analyzes processes of racial formation responsible for producing “blackness,” a human invention, as a social fact. This specific iteration of Black World will consider the role of political economy in shaping the life-worlds of Africans and those living throughout the African Diaspora.
AS.100.729 British America and the Early United States in Atlantic Perspective (grad)
Instructor: François Furstenberg, Professor, History
W 2:00PM – 4:00PM
Department: AS History
Description: Introduction to the history and historiography on British North America and the United States.
Political Science
AS.190.427 Political Economy of Japan and Korea
Instructor: Erin Aeran Chung, Professor, History
T 3:00PM – 5:30PM
Departments: AS Interdepartmental, AS Political Science
Description: This upper-level seminar examines some of the major debates and issues of postwar Japanese and South Korean political economy. Topics include nationalism, gender politics, civil society, immigration, and US-Japan-South Korea trilateral relations.
AS.190.439 The American State from Above and Below
Instructors: Vesla Weaver, Professor, Political Science & Sociology, and Robert Leiberman, Professor, Political Science
TTh 9:00AM – 10:15AM
Departments: AS Political Science, AS International Studies
Description: Despite its well-known idiosyncrasies, the American state has consistently wielded substantial power, and many Americans have long experienced the state’s power as potent, omnipresent, and structuring their lives in important ways. This research-based course will examine theories of the state and political authority both from “above” – considering the political sources of both the American state’s power and its limitations – and from “below,” using people’s own narratives and political formations to explore how Americans develop knowledge about the state, confront and resist the state’s power, and expand or shift its distribution of ‘public’ goods. How do people understand the state, theorize its operations and possibilities, deploy it, and sometimes build parallel structures of provision and governance? We explore several cases of when people marginalized by race, class, gender, or precarious legal standing organized deep challenges to state power and transformed state authority. Considering the state as both formal structure and frame for everyday experience can offer a fresh perspective on contemporary democratic challenges and political struggles. Students will conduct original research using archives and sources like the American Prison Writing Archive, oral history archives like the Ralph Bunche collection and HistoryMakers collection, and archival sources in the History Vault such as the Kerner Commission interviews. The course is appropriate for advanced undergraduates (juniors and seniors), preferably having taken courses in political science or related coursework, and graduate students in political science, history, and sociology.
AS.190.605 Environmental Racism (grad)
Instructor: PJ Brendese, Associate Professor, Political Science
T 3:00PM – 5:00PM
Department: AS Political Science
Description: Environmental racism has largely been understood in terms of environmental policy-making that discriminates against people of color, particularly with respect to the state-sanctioned siting of toxic waste facilities, the distribution of pollutants, food-deserts, and the exclusion of non-white peoples from leading positions in the environmental movement. This graduate seminar explores environmental racism more broadly, pushing beyond its conventional, place-based understandings and approaching the corresponding logics that produce human disposability and environmental waste from the standpoint of both space and time. Examining colonial legacies of coding racial others in terms natural disasters, epidemics, infestations, non-human animals and dirt, we shall investigate how the natural world is subjected to exploitation and domination in tandem with the subordination of racial subjects historically identified with nature and rendered expendable. In other words, we shall illuminate the logics of power through which race-making coincides with waste-making. Accordingly, we will explore political and theoretical challenges to environmental racism in multiple registers; such as those posed by indigenous studies, decolonial thinkers and Afro-diasporic theories contesting the intersection of racial biopolitics, ecological crises and racial capitalism in an era of proliferating human disposability. Authors considered may include; Mbembe, Du Bois, Hage, Glissant, Césaire, Wynter & Chakrabarty.
AS.360.631 Race War: Theories and Histories (grad)
Instructors: PJ Brendese, Associate Professor, Political Science, and Tarak Barkawi, Professor, Political Science
Th 1:00PM – 3:00PM
Departments: AS Interdepartmental, AS Political Science
Description: In modern times, wars become sites of race making. In turn, racializations become projects of war, violence, and extraction. This seminar explores this mutual implication of race in war and war in race. It attends to the entwinement of dehumanization and humanization in race war across specific historical contexts. These include the eras of European expansion; the world wars; US-American hegemony; and contemporary ecological crisis. We shall investigate settler-colonial racializations of Indigenous peoples; racializations of Afro-Diasporic and Asian peoples; the constitution and transformation of the White races, as well as those of humanity and the Human race, all in contexts of war and extractive violence. The course takes a “history and theory” approach, one attentive to the ways in which the events, practices and theories of race war emerge and develop together in co-constitutive ways over time. Notably, alongside practitioners of race war and their theorizations, race war has been a key site for the development of critical theory, anti-colonial thought, Black radical thought, and other traditions of critique and resistance. In these and other ways, the course explores the contours of race war in modern political and social thought, amid empire building and world-ordering projects, total wars and genocides, and capitalist and ecological crises.
Sociology
AS.230.150 Issues in International Development
Instructor: Zophia Edwards, Assistant Professor, Sociology
MW 10:00AM – 10:50AM, F 11:00AM – 11:50AM
Departments: AS Sociology, AS International Studies, AS Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies, AS Public Health Studies
Description: Why do billions of people continue to live in poverty? What obstacles stand in the way of secure and dignified lives for all? Who is most likely to bring about change, what strategies should they follow, and what kinds of institutions should they put in place? This course will introduce the main theoretical perspectives, debates, and themes in the field of international development since the mid-20th century. It has three sections. The first section focuses on debates over the optimal conditions and strategies for generating economic growth and on the relationship between growth, human welfare, and inequality. The second section presents critical assessments of development interventions from various perspectives. The third section considers the role of social movements in shaping development and social change in the 21st century.
AS.230.242 Race and Racism
Instructor: Zophia Edwards, Assistant Professor, Sociology
MW 3:00PM – 4:15PM
Departments: AS Sociology, AS Center for Africana Studies, AS International Studies
Description: Race has been important in social classifications and producing inequalities. This course is designed to provide you with a global understanding of how racial categories are created and maintained, how they change over time, and how they vary from place to place. It is organized in four parts. The first part introduces the concepts and analytical tools used by social scientists to study race. Of particular concern is power and the social construction rather than “natural” categories of race, as well as the general social processes involved in the maintenance and reproduction of these boundaries. In the second part, we will study the theories and dynamics racial category formation in the United States with attention to forms and processes of racial exclusion and oppression, and evidence of socio-economic inequalities based on race. In the third part of the course, we will compare these processes in the U.S. to those occurring in other countries. The fourth and final part of the course examines how race and racism shape political struggles and resistance movements.
Special thanks to Sheharyar Imran, RIC Graduate Fellow, and Natalie Wang, RIC Undergraduate Fellow, for assistance in compiling this information.