ETHS - Ethnic Studies

Narratives around law, order, crime and justice are prevalent in US popular culture. From TV shows such as Law and Order, true crime dramas like Making of a Murder and The Tinder Swindler, to popular music forms such as gangster rap. The class will explore the role of race and racial formation in the construction of these popular narratives focusing on crime, law enforcement and the criminal justice system.

Cinema culture provides a major forum for negotiating African American inclusion within the larger American body politic. From our earliest films in the US, the image culture presented has often worked directly against the interests of African Americans. This class will explore the ways filmmakers have challenged dominant modes of racial representation and created a cinematic aesthetic of black resistance in mainstream culture.

Drawing from a range of literature, this course takes an interdisciplinary approach to environmental justice theory and practice. Students will interrogate the historical legacies of the disproportionate burdens of ecological issues on minority groups in the U.S. and worldwide. We will evaluate the roles that environmental justice movements have played in the struggle to meet the needs of vulnerable populations around the world.

This course centers on understanding global climate change from science, policy, and social justice perspectives. Rather than approaching these as individual components of climate change, the course focuses on the relationships and dynamics between all three within a global social-ecological system. Emphasis is on current context, bridging the gap between the Global North and South, and the toolsets needed to create solutions.

Comics have long been a forum to define what is essentially American within US popular culture. Debates about national belonging, gender roles and racial formation are embedded in everything from Superman to The Avengers, to graphic novels like Maus: A Survivor’s Tale and Watchmen. This class will explore constructions of heroism, relationships between text & image, and current youth culture. 

Examines political foundations of education alongside epistemological, ontological, phenomenological, metaphysical, and ethical lines of inquiry. Addresses issues relating to educational injustices, such as discrimination, oppression, colonialism. Features thinkers outside the "Western" canon of philosophy, and thinkers “outside” the discipline of philosophy, as this discipline has often been construed by the "Western" tradition.