Cultural Politics of Cumbia Music & Dance
ER&M S120 (CRN: 30332) | Learn More
Instructors: Deb Vargas
Dates: Session A, May 26 - June 27, 2025
Course Mode: In-Person
Meeting Times: MW 9.00-12.15
Distributional Requirements: Humanities
Eligibility: Open to pre-college and college students
In-person Course. Cumbia is one of the most transnational musics in the American continent currently representing a sonic renaissance. Varied cumbia sounds and dance styles are found in most countries across the Americas while sharing similar race and colonial genealogies. This class focuses on cumbia music and dance to explore that politics of race, gender, colonialism, and racial capitalism to consider the ways music reflects the cultural politics of a given moment. Enrollment limited to 20 students. 1 Credit. Session A: May 26 – June 27. Tuition: $5270.
Contemporary Asian American Drama
ER&M S168E (CRN: 30349) | Learn More
Instructors: Shilarna Stokes
Dates: Session B, June 30 - August 1, 2025
Course Mode: Online
Meeting Times: TTh 9.00-12.15
Distributional Requirements: Humanities
Eligibility: Open to pre-college and college students
Online Course. In the 1960s, the designation “Asian American” emerged to encompass a diverse array of experiences, histories, languages, and cultures. This decade also marked the establishment of the first Asian American theater companies, which subsequently led to an increasing collection of plays authored by Asian American playwrights. This seminar will facilitate in-depth readings and discussions of works by fifteen contemporary playwrights whose heritage connects them to various regions across East, South, Southeast, and Western Asia. Notable figures include Philip Kan Gotanda, David Henry Hwang, Aasif Mandvi, Qui Nguyen, Jiehae Park, and Sanaz Toossi, among others. Alongside employing various analytical methods for dramatic texts, we will explore the political, cultural, and historical contexts that influenced the consciousness of Asian American playwrights during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Our aim is to gain a renewed understanding of what it means to be (and perform) Asian Americanness for both current and future generations. 1 Credit. Session B: June 30 – August 1. Tuition: $5270. Technology Fee: $85.
Digital Platforms and Cultural Production
ER&M S295E (CRN: 30137) | Learn More
Instructors: Julian Posada
Dates: Session B, June 30 - August 1, 2025
Course Mode: Online
Meeting Times: TTh 9.00-12.15
Distributional Requirements: Humanities, Social Sciences
Eligibility: Open to pre-college and college students
Online Course. This seminar explores the phenomenon of digital platforms – intermediary infrastructures that connect end-users and complementors. These platforms have emerged in diverse socio-economic contexts, including social media (e.g., Instagram), video streaming (e.g., Twitch), digital labor (e.g., Uber), and e-commerce (e.g., Amazon). The course offers a multidisciplinary perspective on studying these platforms, viewed as an amalgamation of firms and multi-sided markets, each with their own distinctive history, governance, and infrastructures. Throughout this course, we will delve into the transformative role of these platforms in areas such as culture, labor, creativity, and democracy. Our discussions will draw upon comparative cases from the United States and abroad. In addition, the seminar aims to facilitate an in-depth dialogue on contemporary capitalism and the process of cultural production. We will engage with pertinent topics like inequality, surveillance, decentralization, and ethics in the digital age. Students are invited to contribute to these discussions by bringing examples and case studies from their personal experiences. 1 Credit. Session B: June 30 – August 1. Tuition: $5270. Technology Fee: $85.
Asian American Foodways
ER&M S315E (CRN: 30234) | Syllabus | Learn More
Instructors: Quan Tran
Dates: Session B, June 30 - August 1, 2025
Course Mode: Online
Meeting Times: MW 9.00-12.15
Distributional Requirements: Humanities, Social Sciences
Eligibility: Open to pre-college and college students
Online Course. As an incredibly diverse population, Asian Americans have contributed greatly to the foodscape of the United States. This course explores the rich foodways that Asian Americans have created and sustained historically and contemporarily. It also examines the impacts of such foodways on Asian American identity and community formations. The course is organized thematically and anchored in selected case studies. Enrollment limited to 18 students. 1 Credit. Session B: June 30 – August 1. Tuition: $5270. Technology Fee: $85.
Migrants and Borders in the Americas
ER&M S387E (CRN: 30221) | Learn More
Instructors: Alicia Schmidt Camacho
Dates: Session A, May 26 - June 27, 2025
Course Mode: Online
Meeting Times: TTh 1.00-4.15
Distributional Requirements: Humanities, Social Sciences
Eligibility: Open to pre-college and college students
Online Course. Migration and human mobility across North America, with a focus on 1994 to the present. Critical and thematic readings examine Central America, Mexico, and the United States as integrated spaces of migration, governance, and cultural and social exchange. Migrant social movements, indigenous migration, gender and sexual dynamics of migration, human trafficking, crime and social violence, deportation and detention, immigration policing, and militarized security. 1 Credit. Session A: May 26 – June 27. Tuition: $5270. Technology Fee: $85.
Histories of Racism in Science, Medicine, and the University
ER&M S391 (CRN: 30079) | Learn More
Instructors: Daniel HoSang
Dates: Session B, June 30 - August 1, 2025
Course Mode: In-Person
Meeting Times: TTh 9.00-12.15
Distributional Requirements: Humanities
Eligibility: Open to pre-college and college students
In-person Course. This course examines the influence of Eugenics research, logics, and ideas across nearly every academic discipline in the 20th century, and the particular masks, tropes, and concepts that have been used to occlude attentions to these legacies today. Students make special use of the large collection of archives held within Yale Special Collections of key figures in the American Eugenics Society. Students work collaboratively to identify alternative research practices and approaches deployed in scholarly and creative works that make racial power visible and enable the production of knowledge unburdened by the legacies of Eugenics and racial science. Enrollment limited to 20 students. 1 Credit. Session B: June 30 – August 1. Tuition: $5270.
Culture of Southeastern Europe
ER&M S281 (CRN: 30283) | Syllabus | Learn More
Instructors: Jasmina Besirevic Regan
Dates: Learn more on the Yale Study Abroad program page
Course Mode: Study Abroad
Meeting Times: M-F 10.00-12.00
Distributional Requirements: Social Sciences
Eligibility: Open to college students only
This course is part of a Yale Summer Session Program Abroad and cannot be taken independent of the program. Interested students must apply to Yale Study Abroad by February 4th. For more detailed information about the program, including a description of the courses, housing, excursions, and budget, visit the Yale Study Abroad program page.
Asian American Affect: The Cultural Politics of Emotion
ER&M S326 (CRN: 30341) | Learn More
Instructors: Minh Vu
Dates: Session B, June 30 - August 1, 2025
Course Mode: In-Person
Meeting Times: MW 9.00-12.15
Distributional Requirements: Humanities
Eligibility: Open to pre-college and college students
In-person Course. This seminar examines Asian American history and culture through the lens of affect. Whether the political demands of revolutionaries and rebels in the 1970s, the broken English of stereotyped Asian immigrants on TV, or the melancholic musings of “cut fruit” diaspora poets, affect—in other words: emotion, or etymologically, the capacity to “move” or be “moved”—generates social constructs around Asian American race, gender, and sexuality. Historically, affect has worked with and through the economic, the political, and the cultural to generate categories including (but not limited to) the orient, the indebted refugee, and the model minority. By studying a range of contemporary cultural representations—across poetry, literature, film, and music—students will consider how Asian Americans reproduce and/or trouble these reductive tropes by exhibiting and embodying their own dis/affective poetics and politics. Example texts and themes include but are not limited to: Yoko Ono, Ocean Vuong, Crazy Rich Asians, Beef, Kim’s Convenience, nerds, rave culture, “sad girl music,” and YouTube personalities (nigahiga, Lilly Singh, and Wong Fu Productions). Enrollment limited to 12 students. 1 Credit. Session B: June 30 – August 1. Tuition: $5270.
The American West: Race, Resistance, and Representation
ER&M S340E (CRN: 30339) | Learn More
Instructors: Stephen Pitti
Dates: Session A, May 26 - June 27, 2025
Course Mode: Online
Meeting Times: MW 1.00-4.15
Distributional Requirements: Humanities
Eligibility: Open to pre-college and college students
Online Course. This seminar explores the American West from the sixteenth century to the present, attending to how colonial and national projects have shaped the region, how borders have been understood and policed, how Asian American and Latinx communities have remade rural and urban areas, how activists have driven and responded to contemporary debates, how musicians and visual artists have imagined regional identities, and more. In addition to reading published accounts, participants explore unique archival collections related to the American West at Yale. Enrollment limited to 18 students. 1 Credit. Session A: May 26 – June 27. Tuition: $5270. Technology Fee: $85.