ER&M 3002 : Modes of Revolt and Exploitation in the Long Nineteenth Century (Damanpreet Pelia)
Since the 1960s, social scientists have analyzed how the scientific ideas about mental illness, mental health policies, institutions, healing practices, and popular discourses surrounding mental health have been influenced by the social and cultural contexts. This course introduces students to the debates and questions guiding the history of mental health since the Civil Rights and the Psychiatric Survivor Movements in the 1960s, especially those that relate to Critical Race Theory. Through primary sources and secondary literature, students learn about the intersections between mental illness, race, and ethnicity. The class materials include topics such as disability justice, psychopharmacology, the community mental health movement, and the history of asylums in a comparative perspective.
ER&M 3311 : Latina/o New Haven (Alicia Schmidt Camacho)
Introduction to the field of Latina/o studies, with a focus on community-based research in New Haven. Training in interdisciplinary methods of social research, including oral history, interviews, archival research, cultural analysis, and social documentation. Students design collaborative research projects.
ER&M 3018 : Race as Spectacle (Fatima El-Tayeb)
In this course, we analyze how race is both naturalized and deconstructed through visual media. We center one aspect: race as spectacle–the multiple ways in which race is produced as a visual mass culture commodity. This happens in political campaigns, music videos, local news reports, fashion, kids’ cartoons, mug shots, and countless other sites. We explore the modes of production of these racialized images as well as the conditions of their reception and political and philosophical analyses of this process–particularly those relating to questions of gender, class, sexuality, religion, and nation. We also explore counterstrategies, which rather than rejecting visual mass culture attempt to use it to undermine dominant images.
ER&M 3023 : Documenting Refugees in New Haven (Quan Tran)
This hands-on mixed methods seminar explores the historical and contemporary experiences of refugees in New Haven. The course examines the historical contexts that have led to the resettlements of different refugee populations in New Haven as well as contemporary issues concerning these communities. Through workshops, students gain qualitative research skills by exploring oral history, archival research, and ethnographic participant observation as complementary methods to document and study refugee communities in New Haven. The course also attends to questions of representation, ethics, power dynamics, and knowledge production in documenting and studying underrepresented and vulnerable communities.
ER&M 3032 : Cultural and Racial History of Mental Health (Ximena Lopez Carrillo)
Since the 1960s, social scientists have analyzed how the scientific ideas about mental illness, mental health policies, institutions, healing practices, and popular discourses surrounding mental health have been influenced by the social and cultural contexts. This course introduces students to the debates and questions guiding the history of mental health since the Civil Rights and the Psychiatric Survivor Movements in the 1960s, especially those that relate to Critical Race Theory. Through primary sources and secondary literature, students learn about the intersections between mental illness, race, and ethnicity. The class materials include topics such as disability justice, psychopharmacology, the community mental health movement, and the history of asylums in a comparative perspective.
ER&M 3022 : Mexico and the Migratory Lyric (David Francis)
What is a lyric and how does it move? How have understandings of Mexican poetry changed over the course of the nation’s history, and what factors have contributed to these changes? To investigate these questions, this course examines how different forms of lyrical communication have been disseminated within Mexico and internationally. Therein, we discuss how lyrical production has been complicated by such issues as print culture and the publication industry; race, gender, class, and economics; and cultural politics and political representation. Our explorations begin with the popular corrido. They then move to discussions of nationality, translation, and bilingual anthology production before and after the rise of boom literature; border writing, migration, and the formation of multilingual literary communities; discourse of gender, sexuality, race, and disease; and the popularization of narco-ballads. We conclude by discussing the contemporary lyric as seen in different media like the novel and the film industry.
ER&M 3041 : Qualitative Research Methods in ER&M (Leigh-Anna Hidalgo)
Qualitative research typically requires interactions (from short-term interviews and observations to long-term relationships) with people, organizations, and communities. This creates a series of unique ethical issues that must be centrally considered in the design of every qualitative research project. This course centers both the methods and the ethics of conducting qualitative research. What is involved in doing research that requires communication with human beings? What tools can we employ as we face the power relations inherent in this kind of work? These are complicated questions with no easy answers, but we spend the semester thinking together about how to design qualitative projects, how to navigate our roles as researchers and community members, while exploring how to produce work that is rigorous and meaningful to different audiences. The course takes students through the entire empirical research cycle. Students focus on a topic related to the study of race, ethnicity, and migration and are required to develop a research question, conduct qualitative research, analyze original data, and write a final paper that contextualizes findings within the existing literature. When answering their research questions students choose their own theoretical frameworks as discussed in this and other courses.
ER&M 3046 : Critical Reading Methods in Indigenous Literatures (Tarren Andrews)
This course focuses on developing critical readings skills grounded in the embodied and place-based reading practices encouraged by Indigenous literatures. Students are expected to think critically about their reading practices and environments to consciously cultivate place-based reading strategies across a variety of genres including: fiction and non-fiction, sci-fi, poetry, comic books, criticism, theory, film, and other new media. Students are required to keep a reading journal and regularly present critical reflections on their reading process, as well as engage in group annotations of primary and secondary reading materials.
This course is offered during the fall and spring term and may be taken both terms for credit. During the fall term the focus is on Indigenous literatures and new media from North America produced primarily in the 21st century. Critical readings include some historical context, both pre- and post-contact, as well as Indigenous literary theory. During the spring term, the focus becomes Indigenous literatures and games in a global context with emphasis on Indigenous land relations and ecocriticism across the 20th and 21st centuries.
ER&M 3051 : Southeast Asian Refugee Histories and Experiences (Quan Tran)
This multi-disciplinary seminar explores the historical and contemporary experiences of Southeast Asian refugees living in the United States. The course examines the historical contexts that created Southeast Asian refugee diasporas and community formations in the US as well as contemporary social, political, cultural, and economic issues concerning these communities. Organized thematically, this course is comparative in scope as it addresses topics such as: colonialism, imperialism, war, nation-building, global capitalism, migration experiences, resettlement, intergenerational dynamics, interracial/ethnic relations, and knowledge and cultural production.
ER&M 3055 Feminist Science and Technology Studies (Kalindi Vora)
This course guides participants in conceptualizing research problems through feminist commitments to justice through close study of tools, models, and case studies of research applications in STEM for feminist approaches. Feminist approaches are defined as improving objective outcomes and community benefits through incorporating multiple perspectives into each stage of the research design process. These perspectives are specific to each project, but include stakeholders in projected research outcomes. Students gain exposure to research projects designed to achieve results that will make significant contributions to their research field while also being committed to social justice outcomes. Course materials include research articles in science and technology studies, Native American and ethnic studies, and gender and sexuality studies.
ER&M 3082 : Researching Mexican American Histories (Steve Pitti)
A survey of recent scholarship on Mexican American history. Students write a research paper based on primary sources and explore issues related to migration, education, detention, religion, urban communities, ethnic politics, and youth activism since the mid-nineteenth century. Reading knowledge of Spanish preferred.
ER&M 3087 : Migrants and Borders in the Americas (Alicia Schmidt Camacho)
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.
ER&M 4009 : Latinx Ethnography (Ana Ramos-Zayas)
Consideration of ethnography within the genealogy and intellectual traditions of Latinx Studies. Topics include: questions of knowledge production and epistemological traditions in Latin America and U.S. Latino communities; conceptions of migration, transnationalism, and space; perspectives on “(il)legality” and criminalization; labor, wealth, and class identities; contextual understandings of gender and sexuality; theorizations of affect and intimate lives; and the politics of race and inequality under white liberalism and conservatism in the United States.
SOCY 3719/ER&M 4519 : Ethnography of the African American Community (Elijah Anderson)
An ethnographic study of the African American community. Analysis of ethnographic and historical literature, with attention to substantive, conceptual, and methodological issues. Topics include the significance of slavery, the racial ghetto, structural poverty, the middle class, the color line, racial etiquette, and social identity.
ER&M 4024 : Latin American and Caribbean Cities (Ana Ramos-Zayas)
Most Latin Americans are urban dwellers and cities stage and are the stage of their everyday dramas, aspirations, and location in social and racial hierarchies. This course examines the history and ethnography of Latin American and Caribbean cities. It views cities as product and expression of imperial and colonial power; of gender, sexuality, and private/public contradictions; of the long imagery of urban crime, violence, and policing; of urban protest and social movements; and of struggles over planning, aesthetics, power, urban space, and time. We examine what has come to be known as “the right to the city” as it developed out of struggles for urban resources for centuries throughout the region, and how cities impact forms of sociability and relatedness along a variety of social axes, including race, indigeneity, gender, and class.
ER&M 4030 : Islam in the American Imagination (Zareena Grewal)
The representation of Muslims in the United States and abroad throughout the twentieth century. The place of Islam in the American imagination; intersections between concerns of race and citizenship in the United States and foreign policies directed toward the Middle East.
ER&M 4031 : Community Organizing Theory and Practice (Dan HoSang)
This course focuses broadly on the history of social movements, social change efforts and community organizing, both in U.S. and in other countries. The course helps students engage several fundamental questions: What is community organizing and how can we trace its origins and development in the US? What key assumptions lie at the center of this approach to social and political change, and what differences and divisions characterize the field? How does race, class, gender, sexuality, neighborhood and nation shape different organizing traditions? Finally, what role has research and knowledge production played in community organizing history and practice. Across the term, the course pays particular attention to the ways that race, class, gender, sexuality, indigeneity and other forms of difference shape privilege and power. Many of the class sessions incorporate small group activities and other collaborative approaches and activities.
SOCY 3773/ER&M 4563 : Ethnography of Policing and Race (Kalfani Nyerere Turé, Ph.D)
Ethnography is the systematic study of culture and a method of knowledge production utilized by social scientists to apprehend, comprehend, and represent cultural groups and other social phenomena. This course explores the ethnographic representations of policing historically alongside the American construction of race. It explores the complex nature of policing in racially concentrated contexts. Additionally, it explores the warrants of ethnography as it relates to the study of policing and race. Students examine the tension between typical racial minorities and policing and the experiences of various other racialize groups that have appeared in and fallen out of focus as targets for racialize police contact.
ER&M 4444 : Race, Religion, and Transnational Mobilities (Gana Ndiaye)
This course surveys how “migrants” and “desirable migrants” are produced through race and religion in the Americas and Europe. It also examines how racial identities and religious beliefs inform human mobilities and shape the experiences of such mobile persons as settlers, exiles, asylum seekers, temporary workers, and economic migrants. By the end of the course, participants will familiarize themselves with the crucial roles that religious beliefs and practices play in causing and responding to human mobilities. Students will also gain familiarity with the ways in which migrants’ religious practices transform local cultures, politics, and societies as their own religious practices are reconfigured by and in the context of host nations. Topics to be covered include citizenship and cultural difference, religion and the public sphere, multiculturalism, Islam and democracy, Christian Pentecostal missions, liberation theology, and African diasporic religions.
ER&M 4045 : Remembering the Vietnam War (Quan Tran)
Approaching the fiftieth anniversary of its conclusion, the Vietnam War as well as its legacies and memories remain topics of ongoing debates not only in Vietnam and in the US, but also in other parts of the world given the war’s extensive reach. This multidisciplinary seminar considers what different actors remember of the war as well as how, when, where, and why they invoke war memories. The course engages with war memories in cultural productions such as literature, film, music, and art as well as in memorialization, museum, archival, and tourism efforts to name a few sites of war remembrance. The first third of the course will provide an historical overview of the war from different perspectives while the last two thirds of the class will focus on a wide range of war legacies and memories and their multilayered significance.