| AMST 101-02 |
Gender, Sport, and American Society
Instructor: Katie Schweighofer
Course Description:
Cross-listed with WGSS 202-01.From children tossing a ball in the backyard, to middle-aged weekend warriors on tennis and basketball courts, to athletes in their prime on quests for Olympic gold, sports affect our understandings of our bodies, relationships, and larger social groups. Gender, Sport, and American Society involves the applications of the interdisciplinary study of gender - the social creation and cultural representation of femininity and masculinity - to the field of sport cultures. Class readings and discussions will consider how sports institutions and cultures operate as interlocking systems of power shaping the shifting significance of bodies, differences, opportunity, and marginalization in the US, particularly along the lines of gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality. No WGSS or AMST experience necessary.
|
10:30 AM-11:20 AM, MWF
DENNY 211 |
| AMST 101-03 |
Gender, Sport, and American Society
Instructor: Katie Schweighofer
Course Description:
Cross-listed with WGSS 202-05.
|
09:30 AM-10:20 AM, MWF
DENNY 211 |
| AMST 101-04 |
Prisons and Policing in American Culture
Instructor: John Rufo
Course Description:
Prison and policing have long been a special point of focus and tension in American culture, with notable responses to organized state violence including calls for abolition and reform. In this class, we will ask after the carceral texture of U.S. life in and beyond its borders, especially as articulated through the categories of class, race, gender, sexuality, and disability. What do the institutions of prison and police represent in American life and what work is performed through those representations? We will attune ourselves to organizational and community efforts to engage with prison and police. We will pay special attention to how American culture depicts disciplinary regimes by way of arts and activism in the genres of journalism, visual media, poetry, theory, and memoir. Possible texts we will consider include work by Stuart Hall, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, Mike Davis, Eric Foner, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Assata Shakur, Brett Story, Barbara Harlow, George Jackson, Michel Foucault, Mariame Kaba, Alison Mountz and Jenna M. Loyd. We will potentially discuss local, national, and international organizations and campaigns such as Critical Resistance, Survived and Punished, No More Deaths, Decarcerate PA, and the Campaign to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Key areas of study addressed include Representation and Structures & Institutions.
|
03:00 PM-04:15 PM, TF
DENNY 204 |
| AMST 200-03 |
Disorderly Women
Instructor: John Rufo
Course Description:
Cross-listed with WGSS 101-01.Disorderly Women is a term used by labor historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall to describe the collectivity of working-class women in southern Appalachia. We will begin our course by reading Halls 1986 article before rapidly expanding our scope to emphasize the enormous energy created by the feminist movement in the United States. We will think about race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, and more to provide various angles on the opportunities and problems posed through the questions of feminism(s). We will
look at activist work, academic scholarship, art, music, fiction-writing, editing, and the
many avenues by and through which women fought for civil rights, freedom, and
autonomy at all scales and sites (domestic, local, state, national, regional, international,
global). Especially with the recent political repression around the overturning of Roe V.
Wade, we will treat this course as an intervention in the present by way of the past. Our
central guiding texts will be from Black Feminist activist-intellectuals such as Angela
Davis, Assata Shakur, and Toni Cade Bambara, first published in the 1980s.
|
01:30 PM-02:45 PM, TF
DENNY 203 |
| AMST 200-04 |
Indigenous Intellectual Traditions
Instructor: Daniel Schniedewind
Course Description:
The intellectual traditions of Indigenous people are varied, long, and storied. Indigenous peoples in North America have been writing in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous languages and translating cultural traditions, values, and cosmologies for centuries. This course will survey those intellectual traditions by starting with writings from the mid-18th century and vectoring those traditions though the contemporary moment, charting how the intellectual traditions of Indigenous artists and thinkers continue to inform and influence contemporary Indigenous intellectual production. We will emphasize the connection between the long tradition of Indigenous intellectuals and contemporary Indigenous culture, politics, and identity. Through proactive, community-motivated and place-based inquiry, we'll explore how a vast and varied collection of Indigenous thinkers continue to have a profound influence on contemporary expressions of art, politics, philosophy, and culture. Through this examination, the course will expose students to the varied and complex intellectual history of Indigenous people in the Americas at various historical moments. By becoming more knowledgeable about this underrepresented group within the context of America's difficult and challenging relationship to Indigenous peoples, the students will expand the ways they think about not only Indigenous intellectual traditions, but how those traditions and their reception intersect with a broader sense of identity formation both for Indigenous nations as well as the United States. Being able to learn different perspectives by way of Native American authors, thinkers, and artists will offer students a chance to think about how race/ethnicity functions in relation to issues of class and power differentials in American history.
|
11:30 AM-12:20 PM, MWF
DENNY 104 |
| AMST 200-05 |
Indigenous Peoples and Federal Boarding Schools in the United States
Instructor: John Truden
Course Description:
Cross-listed with EDST 391-03 and HIST 211-01. Between 1879 and 1980, the United States government operated a system of boarding schools designed to eradicate Indigenous cultures while also profiteering from child labor. While largely absent from the public discourse until recently, the traumas wrought by this system is still playing out in Indigenous communities across the United States. In our class, we will examine the origins, goals, impact, and legacy of federal off-reservation boarding schools, by ruminating on the experiences of Indigenous shaped by that system.
|
09:30 AM-10:20 AM, MWF
DENNY 303 |
| AMST 201-01 |
Introduction to American Studies
Instructor: Cotten Seiler
Course Description:
Introduces students to basic theories and methods used for the interdisciplinary analysis of United States and hemispheric cultural materials and to the multiplicity of texts used for cultural analysis (mass media, music, film, fiction and memoir, sports, advertising, and popular rituals and practices). Particular attention is paid to the interplay between systems of representation and social, political, and economic institutions, and to the production, dissemination, and reception of cultural materials. Students will explore the shaping power of culture as well as the possibilities of human agency.
|
03:00 PM-04:15 PM, MR
DENNY 212 |
| AMST 202-01 |
Workshop in Cultural Analysis
Instructor: Darren Lone Fight
Course Description:
This intensive writing workshop focuses on theoretical approaches to the interpretation of social and cultural materials. The course provides an early exposure to theories and methods that will be returned to in upper level departmental courses. Intended to develop independent skills in analysis of primary texts and documents.Prerequisite: Any AMST course or permission of instructor.
|
10:30 AM-11:45 AM, TR
EASTC 314 |
| AMST 303-01 |
Indigenous and Chicana Feminisms
Instructor: Jed Kuhn
Course Description:
This course examines Indigenous and Chicana feminisms as distinct-yet-overlapping schools of feminist thought. Indigenous feminisms refer to the range of feminist theories and practices that have emerged from Native American and Hawaiian communities in the U.S. as well as Indigenous communities globally. Chicana feminism refers to feminist theories and practices that have emerged from Mexican American communities of Indigenous descent in the United States in conversation with Mexican, Central American, Puerto Rican, and other Latina feminisms. Indigenous and Chicana feminisms have much in common. Both, for instance, examine the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, and both turn to their respective indigenous cultures to imagine new ways of surviving, thriving, and decolonizing the present. However, there are also sources of tension as the fundamental goals of some Native American and Chicanx scholars and activists contradict one another. Good relations between these groups are further hindered by a colonial history of violence. This course interrogates the tensions and alliances between these groups to ask how Native American and Chicanx communities can support one another in solidarity as well as why feminism has continually been the common ground from which scholars have attempted to bridge the divide between these groups. We will ground our interrogation in the historical and legal context of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands and practice applying these theories through the analysis of cultural texts. Additionally, we will bring in the insights of select Black and transnational feminist theorists to complicate these discussions. In addition to Indigenous and Chicana feminisms, major perspectives we will consider include borderlands theory, settler colonial theory, postcolonial theory, and queer of color critique. Major authors may include Gloria Anzalda, Joanne Barker, Lourdes Alberto, Eve Tuck, Tiffany Lethabo King, and Mara Josefina Saldaa-Portillo.
|
01:30 PM-02:45 PM, MR
DENNY 315 |
| AMST 401-01 |
Research and Methods in American Studies
Instructor: Cotten Seiler
Course Description:
This integrative seminar focuses on the theory and methods of cultural analysis and interdisciplinary study. Students examine the origins, history, and current state of American studies, discuss relevant questions, and, in research projects, apply techniques of interdisciplinary study to a topic of their choosing.
Prerequisite: 303, Senior American studies major, or permission of the instructor.
|
01:30 PM-04:30 PM, W
DENNY 315 |
