ENROLL

Meredith McCoy

Indigenous Studies is both a body of content knowledge and a research methodology. This course provides an overview of the history of exploitative research dynamics between universities and Indigenous peoples while exposing students to alternative methodologies that center Indigenous perspectives and research priorities. Students will discuss what it means to be an ethical research partner as they learn about decolonizing and Indigenous research strategies. This course brings together ideas from History, Anthropology, Law, Public Health, Education, Literature, Art, and Social Work to evaluate studies relating to Indigenous peoples for their methods, contributions, and ethics.

Meredith McCoy

Introduction to some of the animating debates within American Studies from the 1930s to the present. We will study select themes, theories, and methodologies in the writings of a number of scholars and try to understand 1) the often highly contested nature of debates about how best to study American culture; and 2) how various theories and forms of analysis in American Studies have evolved and transformed themselves over the last seventy years. Not designed to be a fine-grained institutional history of American Studies, but a vigorous exploration of some of the central questions of interpretation in the field. Normally taken by majors in their junior year.

Prerequisite: American Studies 115, 287 or instructor permission

Ross Elfline

Prerequisite: Any one term of art history

Judith Howard

Dance is a field in which bodies articulate a history of sexuality, nation, gender, and race. In this course, the investigation of the body as a “text” will be anchored by intersectional and feminist perspectives. We will re-center American concert dance history, emphasizing the Africanist base of American Dance performance, contemporary black choreographers, and Native American concert dance. Through reading, writing, discussing, moving, viewing videos and performances the class will “read” the gender, race, and politics of the dancing body in the cultural/historical context of Modern, Post Modern and Contemporary Dance.

Jeff Snyder

Sophomore Priority

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: EDUC 110.WL0 (Synonym 58718)

Jeff Snyder

Prerequisite: 100 or 200-level Educational Studies course or instructor permission

Extra Time Required

Nancy Cho

Nancy Cho

This course examines work by U.S. playwrights of color from the 1950s to the present, focusing on questions of race, performance, and self-representation. We will consider opportunities and limitations of the commercial theater, Off-Off Broadway, ethnic theaters, and non-traditional performance spaces. Playwrights may include Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, Luis Valdez, Cherrie Moraga, August Wilson, David Henry Hwang, Philip Gotanda, Maria Irene Fornes, Anna Deavere Smith, and Chay Yew. We will watch selected film adaptations and attend a live performance when possible. 

Mike E Jirik

This class examines the history of colleges and universities and their connections to the political economy of Atlantic slavery and colonialism. Students will examine how the inception and evolution of American higher education was inextricably tied to the pocketbooks of enslavers as well as how colleges and universities directly benefited from the labor of enslaved people and the dispossession of Native Americans. Students will consider questions such as what is the role of the university in society. Central to the course will be studying this history’s impact in our own time. We will examine how scholars, activists, and university communities are grappling with these histories and their legacies today.

Antony Adler

A two-credit course in which students work with faculty oversight to complete a variety of public history projects with community partners. Students will work on a research project requiring them to identify and analyze primary sources, draw conclusions from the primary source research, and share their research with the appropriate audience in an appropriate form. We meet once a week at Carleton to ensure students maintain professional standards and strong relationships in their work. Potential projects include educational programming, historical society archival work, and a variety of local history opportunities. 

Extra Time Required

Serena Zabin

Far from being a single entity, America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a world of vibrant, polyglot, globally linked, and violent societies. In this course we will learn how the enslavement of Africans and Native Americans created a state of war that bridged Europe, America, and Africa. We will examine how indigenous resistance to European settlement reshaped landscapes and cultures. We will focus throughout on the daily lives of the women and men who created and shaped the vast world of early America.

Annette Igra

Mike E Jirik

What does a most turbulent period in U.S. history look like from the perspectives of Black women and men? What role did Black thought and resistance play in shaping the outcome of the war? What was interracial democracy during Reconstruction and why was it ultimately overthrown? These are a few of the myriad questions we will seek to answer by studying the central role of Black Americans in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. We will examine how Black people participated in and shaped the politics of this period and we will critically engage the meanings of freedom, emancipation, and democracy.

George Vrtis

Since the nation's founding, the percentage of Americans living in cities has risen nearly sixteenfold, from about five percent to the current eighty-one percent. This massive change has spawned legions of others, and all of them have bearing on the complex ways that American cities and city-dwellers have shaped and reshaped the natural world. This course will consider the nature of cities in American history, giving particular attention to the dynamic linkages binding these cultural epicenters to ecological communities, environmental forces and resource flows, to eco-politics and social values, and to those seemingly far-away places we call farms and wilderness. 

Prerequisite: History 205 or permission of the instructor

Alfred Montero

In this course students participate in peer-led conversations about diversity and community at Carleton. Students complete readings and engage in experiential exercises that invite them to reflect on their own social identities and their attitudes toward race, gender, class, and sexuality. By taking risks and engaging in honest conversations and self-reflection, students work together to understand differences and to explore how to build communities that are welcoming and open to diversity. Students keep a weekly journal and write two reflective essays that are graded by faculty members.

Alfred Montero

In this course students participate in peer-led conversations about diversity and community at Carleton. Students complete readings and engage in experiential exercises that invite them to reflect on their own social identities and their attitudes toward race, gender, class, and sexuality. By taking risks and engaging in honest conversations and self-reflection, students work together to understand differences and to explore how to build communities that are welcoming and open to diversity. Students keep a weekly journal and write two reflective essays that are graded by faculty members.

Debby Walser-Kuntz

Prerequisite: Interdisciplinary Studies 235

Open only to students participating in OCS Winter Break Public Health Program

Mike Flynn

This course examines the nature of the endangered language Dakota, which was once spoken on what is today Carleton land. We will study several aspects of the language, including phonology, morphology, and syntax, with the assistance of speakers of the language from the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate of the Lake Traverse Reservation. The goal of the course is to produce an array of careful, accurate, and clear descriptions of parts of the language, working towards a new pedagogical grammar of the language to be used in the construction of teaching materials for Dakota children. 

Prerequisite: Linguistics 115 or Linguistics 217 (Linguistics 217 can be taken simultaneously)

Andy Flory

A survey of American music with particular attention to the interaction of the folk, popular, and classical realms. No musical experience required.

Deborah Appleman, Ronald Rodman, Melinda Russell

Music has a long, ugly history as a tool for the transmission of racism, and a vital one as a weapon against it. We will survey important instantiations at the intersections of music and racism in blackface minstrelsy, western classical music, Dalit music, Albinism, the U.S. national anthem, white nationalism, and the anti-apartheid movement, among others. Centering racism and antiracism, we will investigate the careers and musical output of five musicians: Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, Hazel Scott, Charity Bailey, and Janelle Monae. Students will complete an original guided research project on a topic of their choice. No musical experience required.

Andy Flory

This is a research-based course focused on the music and creative practices of Marvin Gaye, one of the most famous and successful popular vocalists of the 1960s and 1970s. We will begin with a furious survey of Gaye’s life and music, and move quickly into more critical readings. Along the way, students will develop individual research topics with the assistance of the instructor, and present findings to the group on a weekly basis. The seminar will culminate with individual student research presentations and a well-crafted research paper on a topic related to Gaye.

Prerequisite: The ability to read music and a previous music course, or instructor consent

Eddie E O'Byrn

The struggle of freedom against forms of alienation is both a historical and contemporary characteristic of Black/African-American philosophy. In this course we will explore how a variety of Black/African-American philosophers theorize these concepts. The aim of the course is to both offer resources for familiarizing students with African-American philosophers and develop an appreciation for critical philosophical voices in the Black intellectual tradition. The course will range from slave narratives, reconstruction, and civil rights to contemporary prison abolitionism, intersectionality, and afro-pessimism. The texts of the course will include: Angela Davis’ Lectures on Liberation, Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells Southern Horrors, George Yancy’s African-American Philosophers 17 Conversations, and Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction. As well as select articles from historical and contemporary Black/African-American philosophers.

Anna Moltchanova

What is important to individuals, how they see themselves and others, and the kind of projects they pursue are shaped by traditional and moral frameworks they didn’t choose. Individual selves are encumbered by their social environments and, in this sense, always ‘biased’, but some forms of bias are pernicious because they produce patterns of inter and intra-group domination and oppression. We will explore various forms of intersubjectivity and its asymmetries through readings in social ontology and social epistemology that theorize the construction of group and individual beliefs and identities in the context of the social world they engender.

Prerequisite: One Previous Philosophy course or instructor permission

Kristin K. Lunz Trujillo

Melanie Freeze

Modern elections have become multibillion-dollar ventures. How does money influence electoral and policy outcomes in the United States? Who donates and why do people or groups donate? Where does all the money go? How has campaign finance been regulated and what are proposed reforms? Focusing on recent elections, we will explore these questions by delving into the world of campaign finance.

Kimberly Smith

Kristin K. Lunz Trujillo

In recent years we have heard a lot about “identity politics.” This course aims to answer the question, why do people form group-based identities and how do they impact mass political attitudes and behavior? Using examples from American politics, we will examine the psychological underpinnings of identity and group-based affiliations as well as their political consequences. In doing so, we will explore how bias, prejudice, and social hierarchy are formed, maintained, and changed. Such evaluations will be based on discussions of various dominant and minority group identities including partisanship, race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and place. 

Sharon Akimoto

Prerequisite: Psychology 110 or instructor permission. Psychology 256 or 258 recommended

Elizabeth F Dolfi

How can we best understand the role of religion in the world today, and how should we interpret the meaning of religious traditions -- their texts and practices -- in history and culture? This class takes an exciting tour through selected themes and puzzles related to the fascinating and diverse expressions of religion throughout the world. From politics and pop culture, to religious philosophies and spiritual practices, to rituals, scriptures, gender, religious authority, and more, students will explore how these issues emerge in a variety of religions, places, and historical moments in the U.S. and across the globe.

Michael McNally

The American landscape is rich in sacred places.  The religious imaginations, practices, and beliefs of its diverse inhabitants have shaped that landscape and been shaped by it. This course explores ways of imagining relationships between land, community, and the sacred, the mapping of religious traditions onto American land and cityscapes, and theories of sacred space and spatial practices. Topics include religious place-making practices of Indigenous, Latinx, and African Americans, as well as those of Euro-American communities from Puritans, Mormons, immigrant farmers.

Elizabeth F Dolfi

Pandemics, global climate destabilization, the collapse of good order, the rise and fall of empires, and life at the edge of civilization -- for many religious communities, in many historical moments, it has seemed clear that the world is ending. In this course, we will examine some of the ways that religious communities in the United States have imagined and narrativized impending apocalypse(es) and the problem of living when the world is falling apart. Emphasizing the cultural politics of apocalypticism, this course will explore race, gender, affect, ritual practice, epistemology, and community formation in contexts including nineteenth century millennialist movements, alien abductions, contemporary conspiracy theories, sex panics, indigenous resistance to colonialism, cold war apocalyptic literature, and Afro-futurist responses to climate collapse.

Kristin Bloomer

The history of Christianity usually focuses on Jesus: the stories and doctrines that have revolved around him. This course will focus on Mary and the many ways she has contributed to the various lived traditions of Christianity. We will, for example, consider the mother of Jesus (Miriam, as she was first called) as she has figured in literature, art, apparition, and ritual practice around the world. We will also consider Mary Magdalene, her foil, who appears in popular discourse from the Gnostic gospels to The Da Vinci Code. Case studies, texts, images, and film will be our fare.

Annette Nierobisz

In this course we examine contemporary criminological issues from the critical perspectives offered by sociologists. Topics under examination include: how crime is conventionally defined, measured, and theorized; societal reactions to crime; and punishment of those who are deemed criminal. While exploring these topics, we will consider the impact of race, gender, and social class in shaping individuals’ interactions with the U.S. criminal justice system. Students will also seek a cross-national comparative understanding. Course readings primarily consist of theoretical and ethnographic accounts supplemented with statistical summaries.

Prerequisite: The department strongly recommends that Sociology/Anthropology 110 or 111 be taken prior to enrolling in courses numbered 200 or above

Liz Raleigh

Prerequisite: Prior Sociology/Anthropology course or instructor permission

Lizbett J Benge

Underpinned by women of color feminisms, abolitionism, and socially engaged performance practices, this course unpacks how art is a vehicle for social change in spaces of unfreedom such as: jails, prisons, ICE facilities, detention centers, and group home facilities. Work for the class will include readings and creative reading responses, researching case studies, and reflective assignments. As a culminating project, students will create individual performance-based works informed by critical understandings of punishment, crime, enslavement, surveillance, and/or state violence.