Courses - Fall 2024
AFRAMER 91R: Supervised Reading and Research
Instructor: Contact the Course Coordinator
- Course ID: 110605
Description:
Students wishing to enroll must petition the Director of Undergraduate Studies for approval, stating the proposed project, and must have permission of the proposed instructor. Ordinarily, students are required to have taken some coursework as background for their project.
- Course Component: Tutorial
- Divisional Distribution: Social Science
AFRAMER 97: Sophomore Tutorial: Understanding Race and Racism
Instructor: Carla Martin
Thursdays 12:45pm - 2:45pm
- Class Number:11534 Course ID:123590
Description:
This course will examine the history of race and racism – key analytical constructs that express fundamental issues not only of power and inequality, but also of justice, democracy, equity, and emancipation. The study of race in the social sciences and humanities is an established, dynamic, multidisciplinary, and international field. To understand race and racism with a global perspective, it is necessary to have a transdisciplinary, cross-cultural view to read critically the phenomena that intersect with this variable. Course readings are drawn from the fields of African and African American Studies, sociology, history, cultural studies, political science, anthropology, philosophy, journalism, and public health. The vast literature produced by scholars in diverse fields provides evidence of how race is based on narratives created to enslave, subordinate, exploit, and exclude millions of human beings across the globe. Assignments will address pressing real-world questions related to race and racism, as well as pedagogically significant areas of undergraduate intellectual and academic development.
Course Notes:
Required for concentrators in African and African American Studies. Open to all undergraduates.
Related Sections:
- Course Component: Tutorial
- Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences
AFRAMER 98: Junior Tutorial-African American Studies
Instructor: Contact the Course Coordinator
-TBA
- Course ID:118023
Description:
Students wishing to enroll must petition the Director of Undergraduate Studies for approval, stating the proposed project, and must have the permission of the proposed instructor. Ordinarily, students are required to have taken some coursework as background for their project.
Recommended Prep:
Completion of African and African American Studies 10, or a substitute course approved by the Director of Undergraduate Studies.
- Course Component: Tutorial
- Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences
AFRAMER 98A: Junior Tutorial-African American Studies
Instructor: Contact the Course Coordinator
-TBA
- Course ID:118023
Description:
Students wishing to enroll must petition the Director of Undergraduate Studies for approval, stating the proposed project, and must have the permission of the proposed instructor. Ordinarily, students are required to have taken some coursework as background for their project.
Recommended Prep:
Completion of African and African American Studies 10, or a substitute course approved by the Director of Undergraduate Studies.
- Course Component: Tutorial
- Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences
AFRAMER:99B Senior Thesis Workshop
Instructor: Contact the Course Coordinator
-TBA
- Course ID:159794
Description:
Thesis supervision under the direction of a member of the Department. Part two of a two-part series.
Course Notes:
Enrollment is limited to honors candidates.
- Course Component: Tutorial
- Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences
AFRAMER 119X: Chocolate, Culture, and the Politics of Food
Instructor: Carla Martin
Thursday 12:45pm - 2:45pm
- Class Number:15622 Course ID:108879
Description:
This course will examine the sociohistorical legacy of chocolate, with a delicious emphasis on the eating and appreciation of the so-called “food of the gods.” Interdisciplinary course readings will introduce the history of cacao cultivation, the present day state of the global chocolate industry, the diverse cultural constructions surrounding chocolate, and the implications for chocolate’s future of scientific study, international politics, alternative trade models, and the food movement. Assignments will address pressing real world questions related to chocolate consumption, social justice, responsible development, honesty and the politics of representation in production and marketing, hierarchies of quality, and myths of purity.
- Course Component: Lecture
- Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences
AFRAMER 123Z: American Democracy
Instructors: John Stauffer & Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Tuesdays 12:45pm - 2:45pm
- Class Number:20820 Course ID:111438
Description:
Democracy, inequality, and nationalism in America. The white working class and American politics. Class and race. Identities and interests. Conditions for socially inclusive economic growth and for the deepening and dissemination of the knowledge economy. Alternative directions of institutional change, viewed in light of American history. Democratizing the market and deepening democracy. Self-reliance and solidarity. We explore and discuss the past, present, and especially the future of the American experiment among ourselves and with invited guests: thinkers, politicians, social activists, and entrepreneurs. Readings drawn from classic and contemporary writings about the United States. Extended take-home examination.
- Course Component: Lecture
- Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences
AFRAMER 124: Tobacco and Sugar, Seminar in Caribbean Counterpoints
Instructor: Doris Sommer
Tuesdays 12:00pm - 2:45pm
- Class Number:20944 Course ID:126728
Description:
Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Fernando Ortiz 1940) will guide explorations of aesthetic and historical tensions throughout the Spanish Caribbean. Different crops produced different political/cultural responses. Along with musical forms, plastic arts, and politics, we concentrate on literary works including abolitionist Cecilia Valdés, El reino de este mundo, the Dominican Over, Puerto Rico's La charca, Jamaica's Wide Saragasso Sea, writings by Hostos, Bonó, Mintz, Klein, among others.
- Course Component: Lecture
- Divisional Distribution: Arts and Humanities
AFRAMER 132Z: Vision and Justice (The Seminar)
Instructor: Sarah Lewis
Mondays 3:00pm - 5:45pm
- Class Number:20931 Course ID:205873
Description:
How has visual representation—from videos and photographs to sculptures and memorials—both limited and liberated our definition of American citizenship and belonging? Art is often considered a respite from life or a reflection of the times, but this class examines how art actually has created the times in which we live. The distribution of rights is central to justice. The rights of citizenship are many, but central to them all is the right, even the responsibility, to engage and participate in collective society—to be recognized as a member of the body politic. The course will wrestle with the question of how the foundational right of representation in a democracy, the right to be recognized justly, is indelibly tied to the work of visual representation in the public realm. Social media has changed how we ingest images. Racially motivated injustices, protests, collective grief and glory now play out in photos and videos with a speed unimaginable even a few decades ago, allowing—and compelling—us to call upon skills of visual literacy to remain engaged global citizens every day. But images have always played an important part in civic life. Over the course of the semester, we will consider visual representation as a form of “civic evidence,” “civic critique,” and “civic engagement” in American history. Together we will consider the role of art and aesthetics for the invention of race, the creation of and destabilization of U.S. segregation, narratives supporting and critiquing Native American “removal,” Japanese Internment, immigration, New Negro Movement, and the long Civil Rights movement. When has art served as propaganda? How did nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americans frame arguments over racism with images—literally? How have images played a role in shaping how we envision the borders between the U.S. and other nations? By the end of the course you should be able to argue how images have persuasive efficacy in the context of citizenship, critique the comments posted under images online, and problematize the foundational right of representation in a democracy like the United States.
Jointly Offered with:
Faculty of Arts & Sciences as HAA 179V
- Course Component: Lecture
- Divisional Distribution: Arts and Humanities
AFRAMER 135Y: Black Feminist Theory
Instructor: Imani Perry
Tuesdays 9:00am - 11:45am
- Class Number:20943 Course ID:222229
Description:
This course traces the development of Black feminist theory and thought, from 19th century thinkers such as Anna Julia Cooper, Maria Stewart, Ida B. Wells through 20th century movements including identity politics, standpoint theory, matrices of domination, intersectionality, as well as Marxian and liberation feminism. Students will be expected to develop critical fluency with the movements and concepts covered and apply them to social, cultural, and political issues.
Jointly Offered with:
Faculty of Arts & Sciences as WOMGEN 1210FT
- Course Component: Seminar
- Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences
AFRAMER 143Y: African Landscape Architecture: Alternative Futures for the Field
Instructor: Gareth Doherty
Tuesdays 9:00am - 11:45am
- Class Number:15433 Course ID:224017
Description:
A central aim of this seminar is to reveal the plurality of ways landscapes are shaped across the African continent and how they help mitigate the impacts of changing climates and social injustice now and in the future. Africa is a continent rich in landscape projects and practices but only eight out of fifty-four African nations have professional associations of landscape architects. The course is framed around three central questions: 1.) How is landscape architecture currently practiced in African countries? (2.) What lessons can we learn from landscape practices in various African societies that can help mitigate the impacts of climate change and social inequities? (3.) As landscape architecture unfolds across the continent in the next 50–200 years, how can it continue assert its agency in the fight against changing climates and social inequity and claim a central space in the shaping of African cities of the future? Each week we will focus on a different country including South Africa, Botswana, Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Nigeria. In collaboration with several landscape architecture university programs across Africa and including practitioners and academics from across the continent, this seminar will explore what it means to practice and teach landscape architecture in societies in which the profession is nascent or non-existent and speculate on the future of the shaping of landscapes in the Global South.
Jointly Offered with:
Graduate School of Design as DES 3514
- Course Component: Seminar
- Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences
AFRAMER 154Y: African American Fraternal Associations in U.S. Society and Politics
Instructor: Theda Skocpol
Wednesdays 3:00pm - 5:45pm
- Class Number:21875 Course ID:225711
Description:
Cross-class fraternal associations were long central to African American civil society. Using unique primary sources as well as secondary works, this research seminar explores the development of a range of fraternal orders that flourished from the mid-1800s through the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras. Case studies include the largest U.S.-centered transnational associations; fraternal groups founded and led by Black women; and the small number of groups that tried to include both Blacks and whites. Special attention paid to relations of Black fraternal orders to churches, businesses, unions, the NAACP, and other civil rights endeavors.
- Course Component: Seminar
- Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences
AFRAMER 159Y: Healthcare and the Welfare State
Instructor: George Aumoithe
Tuesdays 6:00pm - 8:45pm
- Class Number:20946 Course ID:225821
Description:
This conference course examines state-based guarantees to healthcare through an initial comparative analysis of different welfare states, largely focused on the United States’ experience. It asks why the United States has not guaranteed a right to healthcare, unlike most other advanced, industrialized, and wealthy countries. Within the United States’ federated system, the place of healthcare varies widely amidst other demands for social insurance, which includes unemployment benefits, parental leave, childcare, and pensions. From comparative to national perspective, this course engages American political economy’s public-private mix; anti-immigration sentiment's and segregation’s limits on national health insurance; the Civil Rights Movement’s healthcare reforms; the persistent reproduction of health inequality despite de jure desegregation; resistance to and breakthroughs for Medicaid expansion in the contemporary era; and prospects for future reform.
- Course Component: Conference Course
- Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences
AFRAMER 177X: W.E.B. Du Bois and His Critics
Instructor: Henry Gates
Mondays 12:00pm - 2:45pm
- Class Number:14378 Course ID:223916
Description:
W. E. B. Du Bois was among the most profound thinkers of his time, devoting a forensic and evolving attention to the issue of race over a varied career that extended from the turn of the century to his death on the eve of the March on Washington in 1963. Although he earned his PhD from Harvard in history, he is increasingly seen as one of the pioneering scholars in the then-nascent field of sociology. In this course, we will employ a structure of text and critique to evaluate the reach and utility of his ideas, on subjects ranging from the development of racial consciousness to nuclear disarmament to the international order and the role of Africa, Africans, and African Americans in it. This course will examine Du Bois’s original writings in the context of the debates they sparked and will revisit his interactions with key figures, both Black and white, of the twentieth century.
- Course Component: Seminar
- Divisional Distribution: Arts and Humanities
AFRAMER 186: Religion, Culture, and Society in Africa
Instructor: Jacob Olupona
Thursdays 3:00pm - 5:45pm
- Class Number:20957 Course ID:222688
Description:
Exploring the meaning of religion and its impact of on African culture and society broadly, this course will highlight both religious traditions and innovations. Instead of treating each of the religions of Africa, the triple heritage in the words of Ali Mazrui of indigenous African religions, Islam, and Christianity, as distinct and bounded entities, we will explore the hybridity, interaction, and integration between categories throughout Africa. Using case studies, a unique perspective on religious diversity on the African continent and diaspora will emerge.
- Course Component: Seminar
- Divisional Distribution: Arts and Humanities
AFRAMER 191X: African American Lives in the Law
Instructor: Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
Thursdays 12:45pm - 2:45pm
- Class Number:13198 Course ID:127960
Description:
This seminar focuses on biographical and autobiographical writings in a historical examination of the role of the individual in the American legal process. We will seek to understand how specific African Americans (as lawyers, judges, and litigants) made a difference-how their lives serve as a "mirror to America"-and also to understand the ways personal experience informs individual perspectives on the law and justice.
Related Sections:
- Course Component: Lecture
- Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences
AFRAMER 223: Storied Lives: Methods in Oral History
Instructor: Amber Henry
Tuesdays 3:00pm - 5:45pm
- Class Number:21194 Course ID:225837
Description:
How can we understand the lives of people who are excluded from the historical record? How might attention to the time and space in which words are spoken allow us to treat oral history as text, and text as oral history? This course explores storytelling as a foundational element of the human experience. It analyzes the myriad ways in which orality has been used to consolidate origin stories, document events, communicate embodied experience, and transfer ancestral knowledge. By centering methodology, students will learn to prepare, collect, analyze, and share oral histories in a variety of written, digital, and artistic forms. Topics of discussion include how to build relationships, conduct interviews around difficult topics, and use citational practices that honor nonhuman and other-than-human actors. Required readings pair classic and new oral histories with texts on the theory, practice, and ethics of storytelling. By centering works by Black, Indigenous, gender minorities, and writers of color, the course examines how storytelling is used to establish and redistribute power. At the end of the semester, students will become familiar with audio-visual recording technology, learn to navigate transcription and coding software, and be able to conduct, transcribe and analyze an oral history.
- Course Component: Seminar
- Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences
AFRAMER 274: Art, Race, and Politics
Instructor: Sarah Lewis
Mondays 12:00pm - 2:45pm
- Class Number:21511 Course ID:225895
Description:
W. E. B. Du Bois was among the most profound thinkers of his time, devoting a forensic and evolving attention to the issue of race over a varied career that extended from the turn of the century to his death on the eve of the March on Washington in 1963. Although he earned his PhD from Harvard in history, he is increasingly seen as one of the pioneering scholars in the then-nascent field of sociology. In this course, we will employ a structure of text and critique to evaluate the reach and utility of his ideas, on subjects ranging from the development of racial consciousness to nuclear disarmament to the international order and the role of Africa, Africans, and African Americans in it. This course will examine Du Bois’s original writings in the context of the debates they sparked and will revisit his interactions with key figures, both Black and white, of the twentieth century.
- Course Component: Seminar
- Divisional Distribution: Arts and Humanities
AFRAMER 310: Individual Reading Tutorial
Instructor: Contact the Course Coordinator
-TBA
- Class Number:13623 Course ID:115731
Description:
Allows students to work with an individual member of the faculty in a weekly tutorial.
Course Notes:
Students may not register for this course until their adviser and the faculty member with whom they plan to work have approved a program of study.
- Course Component: Reading Course
- Divisional Distribution: None
AFRAMER 390: Individual Research
- Class Number:13624 Course ID:115732
Description:
Requires students to identify and carry out a research project under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Graduate students may use this course to begin work on the research paper required for admission to candidacy.
- Course Component: Reading and Research Course
AFRAMER 391: Directed Writing
Instructor: Contact the Course Coordinator
-TBA
- Class Number: 13625 Course ID: 119827
Description:
Requires students to identify a major essay and carry it out under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Graduate students may use this course to begin to work on the research paper that is a requirement of admission to candidacy.
- Course Component: Reading and Research Course
AFRAMER 392: Teaching, Writing, and Research
Description:
Allows students to meet necessary credit threshold while completing fellowship work and the like.
- Class Number:13622 Course ID:210981
- Course Component: Reading and Research
- Divisional Distribution: None
AFRAMER 398: Reading and Research
-TBA
- Class Number:14514 Course ID:122706
Course Notes:
Permission of the instructor and the Director of Graduate Studies is required for enrollment.
- Course Component: Reading and Research
- Divisional Distribution: None
AFRAMER 399: Direction of Doctoral Dissertations
-TBA
- Class Number:13626 Course ID:115733
- Course Component: Reading and Research
- Divisional Distribution: None