Upcoming in Spring 2025!

SCCT 510: Theorizing Food: Critical Approaches to the Global Study of Eating
Instructors: Professor's Ryan Kashanipour (History) and Joshua Schlachet (East Asian Studies)

Food, to gloss Hippocrates, is both apart of nature and from humanity. While academic interests in foodways have exploded in recent decades, the field of study has broadly rested on either positivist and materialist accounts of food and consumption or on narrow epistemological interrogations of identity formation, historical tradition, conviviality, or familial inheritance. As such, the study of food has been simultaneously overtheorized and undertheorized. This interdisciplinary seminar will expand the theoretical horizons of food studies by drawing on diverse approaches—from historical materialism and cultural studies to critical science studies and actor-network theory. The course will be organized into three units: 1. Foundational theories of social, cultural, and critical foodways; 2. Applied uses of critical food theory in humanistic and social science disciplines, often with Eurocentric ends; and 3. Critiques and alternative models from the global non-West, particularly in the area studies of East Asia and Latin America.

Upcoming in Spring 2026!

SCCT 510: Surveillance Cultures
Instructors: Professor's Steph Brown (English) and Harris Kornstein (Public and Applied Humanities)

Being surveilled is one of modernity’s quintessential experiences, however, the techniques and effects of surveillance are often felt differently across diverse populations. In recent decades, surveillance studies has emerged as a field that theorizes surveillance across the disciplinary boundaries of the social sciences, humanities, computer/data sciences, and fine arts. This course offers students an overview, emphasizing cultural studies methodologies and questions of social (in)justice. Early weeks will focus on the origins of surveillance as practices of population management under capitalist regimes, using works by Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Cedric Robinson. Latter weeks will be organized topically around how race, gender, geography, visuality, citizenship, secularism, sexuality, and computational technologies and data analytics shape cultural and political narratives around surveillance. The course will also consider how the surveillance of Black, anti-colonial, and queer cultures is encoded in cultural production by these groups—including creative techniques for evading and countering observation.

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The following courses are currently scheduled for the upcoming semesters. Please review the list of approved electives to determine other courses offered this year. Please review the schedule of classes for the most up to date information, as availability may change. To request approval for an elective course that has not yet been reviewed, please contact a member of the Executive Committee. 

FALL 2024 
Courses Offered in Fall 2024

Course NBR	Title	Time	Instructor(s)
SCCT 500	Introduction to Social, Cultural and Critical Theory (required for minor and certificate)	Tu 3:00PM-5:30PM	Leerom Medovoi
ANTH 595E	Anthropology and Education	Tu 4:15PM-6:45PM	Cindy Cruz
ANTH 608A	History of Anthropological Theory	Tu 2:00PM-4:30PM	Eric Plemons
ARH 511A	Theory and Methods in Art History: Renaissance to 1960	Tu 8:00AM-10:50AM	Paul Ivey
ENGL 515	History of Criticism and Theory	Wed 5:00PM-7:30PM	Leerom Medovoi
GWS 539A	Feminist Theories I	Tu 1:00PM-3:30PM	Wanda Alarcon
GWS 639	Feminist and Related Social Movements	Mo 3:30PM-6:00PM	Piper Sledge
GEOG 689	History of Geographic Thought	Th 2:00PM-4:30PM	Lise Nelson
GEOG 696A	Economic Geography	Tu 12:30PM-3:00PM	Mark Kear
INFO 517	Introduction to Digital Cultures	Fully Online	Laura Lenhart
LIS 557	Documenting Diverse Cultures	Fully Online	Berlin Loa
MAS 560	Chicana/o Historiography: Chicana/o Thought	We 4:00PM-6:30PM	Maurice Magana
MUS/LAS 568	Studies in Latin American Music	We 4:00PM-6:30PM	Jose Luis Puerta
SPAN 541	Topics in Spanish-American Nineteenth, Twentieth & Twenty-First Cent. Literature	Tu 3:00PM-5:30PM	Kaitlin Murphy

 

SPRING 2024 (Spring 2025 Courses available later in Fall 2024)
Courses Offered in Spring 2024

Course NBR	Title	Time	Instructor(s)
SCCT 510	Borderlands Lab: Pedagogy, Praxis, and Poetics (required for minor)	Wed 4:00PM - 6:30PM	Carol Brochin, Sandi Soto
ANTH 613	Culture and Power	Wed 2:00PM - 4:30PM	Brian Silverstein
ENGL 596L	Theories of Criticism	Tue 5:00PM - 7:30PM	John Melillo
GWS 6884	Feminist Knowledge and Methods	Mon 1:00PM - 3:30PM	Wanda Alarcon
GEOG 696I	Political Ecology	Tue 3:30PM - 6:00PM	Andrew Curley
LIS 517	Introduction to Digital Cultures	Fully Online	Laura Lenhart
LAW 527	International Human Rights and Indigenous Peoples	Wed 1:30PM - 3:10PM	Robert Williams
LAW 631H	Critical Race Practice	Tue/Thu 6:30PM - 8:20PM	Akilah Kinnison

 

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Course Descriptions

SCCT 500: Introduction to Social, Cultural and Critical Theory
Philosopher Max Horkheimer once defined critical theory as a genre of intellectual writing whose purpose is to “liberate human being from the circumstances that enslave them.” While that definition remains useful, critical theory has traveled in many different directions over the last hundred and fifty years. This is true both because the social forms of freedom and unfreedom have proliferated across the many domains of life, but equally because our critical analyses have developed across increasingly diverse schools of theoretical investigation.

This course surveys both classic and emerging intellectual traditions while also asking how they are being employed across the academic disciplines that draw on critical theory. We will consider how the humanities, social sciences, arts, and law have thought, written and employed critical theory to address the relation of power to wealth, politics, subjectivity, language, space/time, race, sexuality, gender, nationality and life itself. In addition to reading classic texts by the likes of Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud, we will also encounter contemporary scholars writing in relation to feminist theory, cultural studies, queer theory, postcolonial and critical race theory. This course is intended as a contact zone in which we can think between and across the graduate programs at the University of Arizona through intensive group discussion of shared readings. This is the first of two core courses for the GIDP minor in Social, Cultural and Critical Theory.

SCCT 510: Borderlands Lab: Pedagogy, Praxis, and Poetics (Spring 2024 Offering)
In this graduate seminar, Professors Brochin (Teaching, Learning & Sociocultural Studies) and Soto (Gender & Women’s Studies), draw on their shared expertise in Chicana, transnational feminist theory as well as their uniquespecializations (queer literacies and pedagogy; and literary & cultural studies, respectively) to offer an interdisciplinary approach to the U.S./Mexico borderlands as a rich site of knowledge & cultural production; as a fraught space of racism, gender-based violence, environmental degradation, and militarization, as well as innovative resistance to these processes; and as a concept that is too often fetishized by academics and artists.

ANTH 506: Gender and Social Identity
An analysis of the social and cultural construction of gender across cultures. Emphasis will be on preindustrial societies, using data to test theories of gender. Graduate-level requirements include additional readings and a detailed research paper.

ANTH 511: Anthropology of Religion
Comparative approaches to the study of religion, systems of ritual and symbolization in the primitive world, shamanism and possession, religious movements, and religion in the modern world. Graduate-level requirements include a major term paper

ANTH 524A: Policital Ecology
This course introduces a variety of environmental thought linking the political sphere and the biosphere. It examines ecological economics, environmental history and ethics, theoretical ecology, ecofeminism, political ecology in anthropology and intellectual property law.  Graduate-level requirements include a longer research paper

ANTH 595E: Anthropology and Education
Historical, theoretical, methodological, and practical/pedagogical foundations of the field of educational anthropology. Explores the relationships among culture, education, and identity, with a focus on learning in cross-cultural contexts both inside and outside of schools. Ethnography as a mode of inquiry is emphasized. Research projects required

ANTH 608A and B: History of Anthropological Theory
An overview of early theoretical tools used in anthropological research

ANTH 612: Anthropology and Modernity
Course identifying and analyzing characteristically modern social forms; their historical emergence; role of colonial and imperial projects; articulation with locales on various scales and impact on the politics of self and community in cases from around the world

ANTH 613: Culture and Power
Examines the development, goals, techniques and practices of anthropology

ANTH 675A and B: Anthropology and Global Health
An intensive overview of the field of global health and anthropologists' contributions to it. Responses to biotechnology, primary health care and child survival, diseases and development; health care utilization patterns; world systems and multinational pharmaceutical industry; health care bureaucracies; interaction between traditional medicine and public health

ANTH 696B: Cultural Anthropology
The development and exchange of scholarly information, usually in a small group setting. The scope of work shall consist of research by course registrants, with the exchange of the results of such research through discussion, reports, and/or papers

ARC 551P: Architecture + Performance
This course investigates the nexus of architecture and performance, and particularly the eventfulness of space through architectural, performance and performance studies methods. As a student in this course, you will be introduced to architectural, performance and related social, cultural and critical theories. You will engage in case-study research of spatial events in built / speculative spaces. Depending on the semester’s focus, weekly topics may include purpose-built event spaces and/or public structures and institutions, urban spaces and landscapes that are re-imagined through daily rituals, durational occupations, or other unique events. During the Fall 2023 semester, we will focus on public space. Students will work with and through performative concepts and practices in several ways: through writing and discussion; through case study research and analysis; and through critical and creative methods that may include drawing, modelling, and other visual media as well as documented situated and embodied practices. Performances both re-inscribe and challenge norms; participants in this course will interrogate space through performance as a means to explore how space performs, who and what does (not) appear and perform, and how ephemeral spatial events can give space and place to the previously invisible, to the contested nature of space.

ARH 511A: Theory and Methods in Art History: Renaissance to 1960
First half of required theory and methods component to introduce participants to the methods and theories of art history from the Renaissance to 1960.

EAS 556: Humanities and the Global Creative Economy
The course investigates ways in which humanities engage in the global creative economy. It examines key concepts such as creativity, aesthetics, and contemporaneity in humanities, and examines how they become inseparable to the rise of the global creative economy, whether through culture industries, digital media, creative spaces, artistic activisms, or urban development. It focuses on the connections and intersections between aesthetics and art, knowledge and information, and creative economies around the world. Examples of the creative economy include cities from Asia, America, Europe, and Africa. This course is suitable for students who are interested in humanities, global studies, media arts, e-society, visual culture and media studies, urban planning, economics, business, and even those dealing with intellectual property laws

ENGL 515: History of Criticism and Theory
A systematic introduction to the history of criticism and/or modern and contemporary critical theory.

ENGL 573: Semiotics and Language
Introduction to semiotics, survey of major figures and trends. Saussure and structuralism, Jakobson and functionalism/poetics, Pierce and pragmaticism. Focus on what these trends tell us about language. Students' written work will represent students' specific interests.

ENGL 596B: Studies in Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature and Theory
The development and exchange of scholarly information, usually in a small group setting. The scope of work shall consist of research by course registrants, with the exchange of the results of such research through discussion, reports, and/or papers.

ENGL 596U: Comparative Rhetorics
The development and exchange of scholarly information, usually in a small group setting. The scope of work shall consist of research by course registrants, with the exchange of the results of such research through discussion, reports, and/or papers.

ENGL 596L: Theories of Criticism
The development and exchange of scholarly information, usually in a small group setting. The scope of work shall consist of research by course registrants, with the exchange of the results of such research through discussion, reports, and/or papers.

ENGL 680: Reader Response Theories
This course focuses on historical and theoretical developments in modern rhetoric and composition and may focus entirely on selected figures and schools of thought.

ENGL 696T: Contemporary Rhetorical Theories
This course focuses on historical and theoretical developments in modern rhetoric and composition and may focus entirely on selected figures and schools of thought.

FREN 554: French Theory
Focuses on key concepts in theory and criticism with an emphasis on writers who have shaped modern French thought in particular. Students will read and discuss major theoretical works that are of continued relevance today within the French-speaking world

GWS 503: Latina Feminisms in the Americas
In this course, we will examine Latina feminisms as they break off from nationalist politics of the 1960's to a politics concerned with transnational practices of "feminismo popular" (popular feminism) in the United States and Latin America. Through the study of essays, testimonios, and literatures that engage feminism, we will discuss how material conditions, civil wars, and revolution allow working class women in the Americas to engage in activities that we might understand as feminist.

GWS 525: Gender, Culture, and Capitalism
This course explores the relationship between economic processes (especially capitalism), social formations such as gender, race, ethnicity, nation and sexuality, and the production and consumption of culture, in the various senses of that complex term. We will read fundamental texts of liberal and Marxist theory, various attempts to integrate Marxist, feminist and anti-racist analyses, and theories that situate culture in relation to industrialization, globalization, and international divisions of labor.  We will also take up numerous case studies, analyzing the discourses of class, gender, race and sexuality as they are deployed in and promoted by cultural texts that engage issues such as domestic labor, prisons, and welfare.

GWS 533: Feminist Political Theory
Examines the tradition of Western political theory through a gender-sensitive lens and surveys the development of feminist political theory.  Graduate-level requirements include an additional research paper and readings.

GWS 539A and B: Feminist Theories
This course is Part 1 of a two-semester survey of feminist theories. The course covers major issues, debates and texts of feminist theory and situates feminist theory in relation to a variety of intellectual and political movements. The course is a discussion format and requires active participation of all students. This course focuses on a collection of texts, scholars, and methodologies within Feminist Studies. The course covers several major issues, debates, and texts of feminist theory and situates feminist theory in relation to a variety of intellectual and political movements. The course is a discussion format and requires active participation of all students. In particular, we will center the methods of feminist scholars of color. This course looks at the intersections of heteropatriarchy, racism, colonialism, ableism, and anthropocentrism to understand the tensions and possibilities of feminist scholarship in academic spaces. We will pay special attention to the methodological significance of scholars by looking at full texts and thinking through how these scholars situate their selves and work within academic and community conversations. This course will also help graduate students craft skills necessary for feminist scholarship including: speaking, facilitation, reading, methodology, scholarly writing, and discussion. [B follows a similar description]

GWS 544: Women and the Body
Exploration of the ways that women have defined their bodies; how the representation of woman as body permeates  culture and affects women's sense of self and self-esteem. Examination of feminist theoretical analyses of women's power and the control of women's bodies. Graduate-level requirements include a more comprehensive research paper and preparation of a lecture/summary on several books in the topic.

GWS 554: Contemporary Feminist Theories
Introduction to contemporary feminist theories, posing and analyzing the questions that propel theorizing about women's relationships to processes of gender differentiation. By examining the assumptions about gender relations that ground theoretical positions from various disciplines, analytic traditions, and subject areas, students will be enabled to read, synthesize and critique across the spectrum of feminist theorizing.

GWS 561: Feminist and IR Theories
Issues in epistemology; survey and integration of feminist and IR theories; application of feminist theories to IR.  Graduate-level requirements include a classroom presentation, an additional paper, or more extensive writing on papers.

GWS 586: Transnational Feminisms
The transnational turn in feminist studies has generated wide-ranging debates, projects and alliances. This course introduces key theorists and debates within transnational feminist theory and invites students to consider how their own research might contribute to this field-in-formation. Throughout the course, transnationalism is conceived neither as free-floating nor as “elsewhere,” but rather, as involving tension between movement and social structuring at interlinked local, national, and global scales. Centering scholarship by women of color, feminism is conceived as entailing struggles for social justice across multiple social hierarchies that include gender, race, sexuality, class, and geopolitics. Overall, the course explores how transnational processes rescale multiple inequalities while nonetheless opening up possibilities for transformation. 

GWS 596S: Technology and Social Theory
Seminar in technology and social theory.

GWS 605: Moral Politics
This course will engage the terms of morality, ethics, and pietistic practice as they appear in social and cultural analysis.  Though often used in religion and religious studies, we will focus on how these terms are used in progressive and feminist analyses that may not be fundamentally about religion or religiousness.  In other words, we will examine how 'the moral' is understood to function in 'the social,' 'the cultural' and 'the analytical,' rather than in the study of religion, per se

GWS 639: Feminist and Related Social Movements
The graduate course will explore feminist social movements as well as related social movements that overlap and intersect with race/class/gender/sexualities. The “queering” of social movements through a queer of color lens will be a central focus. But first, we must ask, how do we define social movements? And what makes a social movement feminist? Traditional definitions describe a social movement as groups or organizations working toward social change, usually with an agreement about how to achieve those social and political transformations. By adding feminist to the description, we locate gender as a driving force in that social movement. However, feminism must intersect with race, class, sexualities as well as embrace trans-feminism if it is truly feminist. We will read an amalgam of books, articles, and chapters that address feminist social movements in various ways even if not directly. The point, however, is to grasp historical and theoretical groundings that shape many social movements.

GWS 645: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory
Course will provide an in-depth introduction to psychoanalysis and its utilization in cultural theory.  The first half of the course will be devoted to reading the work of Sigmund Freud.  We will then explore the uptake of Freudian psychoanalysis within cultural studies of race, gender, sexuality and nation.  Particular attention will be paid to the work of Frantz Fanon and his critical interlocutors

GWS 684: Feminist Knowledge Production
Exposure to issues in feminist research design, methods, methodology, and epistemology, and consideration of critiques of methodology and assumptions in disciplinary inquiry. Discussion of feminist critiques of methodology, and consideration of issues of ethics and power in the research process

GWS 695B: Gender and the Law

GWS 696A: Latina/o Literary and Cultural Studies
This course will analyze Latina/o cultural production through a variety of Cultural Studies approaches.  Whether Latina/o literary representations can help us move beyond some of the impasses of Cultural Studies will be considered. Readings include R. Williams, C. Sandoval, C. Pineda

GWS 696G: Queer Theories
This seminar examines theories of sexuality, focusing on relations between sexuality, gender, race, and economic processes. The course may include foundational theorists such as Foucault, Butler, and Sedgwick as well as the most recent publications in the field

GWS 696H: Science and Social Theory
Science and technology are prominent features of contemporary society.  The sociology of knowledge, science, and technology are rapidly growing and increasingly important areas of inquiry in the social and behavioral sciences, arts, and humanities.  This seminar will be an opportunity to read very broadly across social and political theory and its relations to science (both the natural and social) and knowledge.  The goals of the course are to expose students to the various schools of thought, methodologies, and themes in the sociology of science and knowledge and the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies, and to explore resources from which to develop research questions in these areas

GWS 696J: Sexuality and Aesthetics
The study of sexuality as it pertains to cultural and aesthetic production. Topics may include camp, kitsch, "subcultures," film, music, and popular culture

GWS 696M: Gender, Sexuality and International Migration
The course explores how gender and sexuality structure and become restructured by international migration. We particularly examine how nation-states came to control migration across their borders; how these controls reproduce yet offer possibilities to contest gender and sexual norms that are inseparable from empire, global capitalism, and unfree labor; and how individuals, families, and communities refashion their subjectivities, social bonds, economic strategies, and politics at multiple scales in response. We also inquire how the gender and sexual dynamics of international migration, and state controls and public discourses about migration, rearticulate citizenship norms and transnational fields. Centering feminist, queer, critical race theory, and abolitionist materials, students are invited to develop critical, reflexive methodologies, theories, and frameworks for understanding migration.

GEOG 689: History of Geographic Thought
History of geographic philosophy and methodology

GEOG 696A: Economic Geography
Based on the exchange of information, usually in a small group setting, this course examines contemporary developments in economic geography. The selected topics rotate according to the interests of the faculty convener and the graduate student enrollees. Generally grounded in economic theories of space and place, typical topics include regional inequalities and development; location theory, urban economics, and transportation; marxist and post-marxist political economy; retailing and consumption; alternative economies; resources and agriculture; gender and work; migration and economic change; institutional approaches; the intersection of culture and economy; and money, finance, and trade. The scope of work shall consist of research by course registrants, with the exchange of the results of such research through discussion, reports, and/or papers

GEOG 696B: Cultural Geography
Based on the exchange of scholarly information, usually in a small group setting, this course examines contemporary developments in cultural geography. The selected topics rotate according to the interests of the faculty convener and the graduate student enrollees. Generally grounded in cultural theories of space and place, typical topics include transnationalism, globalization, resistance, identity, landscape, postcolonialism, social nature, the body, and media. The scope of work shall consist of research by course registrants, with the exchange of the results of such research through discussion, reports, and/or papers

GEOG 696G: Urban Geography
Based on the exchange of scholarly information, usually in a small group setting, this course examines contemporary developments in urban geography. The selected topics rotate according to the interests of the faculty convener and the graduate student enrollees. Generally grounded in theories of urban space, typical topics include urban politics and governance, economic restructuring, alternative urbanisms, gender and race, urban subcultures, migration and cities, urban form and the built environment, world cities, and transportation. The scope of work shall consist of research by course registrants, with the exchange of the results of such research through discussion, reports, and/or papers

GEOG 696H: Political Geography
This course will consist of a seminar format allowing different topics in political geography to be presented.  Topics offered will likely include the state, governance, critical geopolitics, social movements, or an exclusive focus on a number of key political/social theorists inside and outside of the discipline of geography from Frederich Ratzel, to Karl Marx to David Harvey

GEOG 696I: Political Ecology
This course is a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding resource access by different people, the institutions and environmental conditions through which resource access is mediated, and the sorts of environmental change that these systems may create.  It also involves an analysis of the political institutions that have a bearing on environmental outcomes.  It frames local resource use systems within the 'nests' of processes that help to shape them - e.g. political economy, globalization, gender relations, and historically produced 'narratives.'

GEOG 696N: Geography and Social Theory
Based on the exchange of scholarly information, usually in a small group setting, this course examines developments in socio-spatial theory. Selected topics and thinkers will rotate according to the interests of the faculty convener and the graduate students enrolled. Course organization may be historical, e.g., based on a survey of trends in socio-spatial theory, or thematic, e.g., examining the intersection between spatial theory and such topics as politics, resistance, feminism, globalization, etc. The scope of work shall consist of research by course registrants, with the exchange of the results of such research through discussion, reports, and/or papers.

GER 506: Representing the “Other”
Explores narratives that construct the Other, the foreigner, and the outsider; discusses the politics of racism, sexism and exclusion using texts from various fields

GER 507: Criticism and Creativity in German Culture
Examines the relationship between theories of literature and literary practice, and the question of the nature of writing in general

HED 626: Theories of Inequality, Oppression, and Social Stratification
Within this class, students will learn about the relevance of social theory to social science research, and then apply it to a specific research proposal of their choosing. They will do this by a) reading some seminal theorists in educational research who center some form of inequality in their analyses (e.g., Gramsci, Bourdieu, Freire, and Foucault); b) explore how contemporary scholars apply these theorists; and c) develop their own research interest strongly contextualized within a theoretical framework of their choosing. While the focus of the paper is theory, the application of that theory should be in an educational environment or surrounding an educational issue.

HED 629: Whiteness and Education
When conversations arise regarding ‘diversity’ or ‘race,’ this usually implies a focus on People of Color. Generally absent is the subject of Whiteness. Within this course, students will explore the historical construction of Whiteness. Additionally, they will examine how this concept has evolved, been challenged, and continually reconstructed over the past three hundred years. Students in this course will gain an understanding of key concepts within Critical Whiteness Studies as well as the relevance of Whiteness to education. Finally, students will become engaged in several of the unresolved and ongoing issues regarding Whiteness, race, and education.

HED 633: Introduction to Critical Race Theory in Education
The purpose of this course is to provide students with an in-depth exposure to Critical Race Theory (CRT), with a particular focus regarding the current innovations and limitations within this analytical framework. CRT provides race-based epistemological, methodological, and pedagogical approaches to the study of inequalities in social institutions, especially in education.  During the class, we will consider the endemic challenges faced regarding the struggle to include multiple voices and multiple perspectives in the public discourse.  Students will learn to both apply this framework to research designs as well as critically interrogate tensions within CRT (e.g., Derrick Bell refers to the “permanence of racism” yet race is a social construct).   

HED 642: Gender & Education
Recently, there has been an increasing focus on gender in educational research and practice. Scholars and practitioners are taking note not only of the differential outcomes for students in relation to gender but are also discussing how systems of privilege and oppression (e.g., sexism, masculinity, transmisogyny) mediate educational environments. Furthermore, there has been both a call by some to address gender in expansive, non-binary ways that include students with diverse genders beyond just thinking about “men” and/or “women,” as well as a backlash to this call, which has taken the form of legislative efforts on federal, state, and local levels. In this class, students will survey the current literature regarding gender in education—both K-12 and postsecondary education—as well as discuss how policies and practices both inhibit and promote expansive understandings of gender as a social, political, and cultural identity. Students will also develop educational interventions that reflect this literature.

HED 643: Activism in Higher Education
Since its inception, colleges and universities have been robust sites for student activism. Much of this activism has been led by students with marginalized identities seeking broader diversity, inclusion. And equity throughout their college experience. While college student activism has led to curricular and co-curricular change, there has been a recent focus on the various nodes of college student activism (e.g. Black Lives Matter, The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement, the Labor Movement), as well as its broader purposes and effects on and off campus. In this course, students will explore college student activism as an historical, social, cultural, and political phenomenon, as well as the potential for student activism to reimagine university life. 

INFO 696E: Art, Media, & Knowledge: Visual Epistemologies in teh Age of Immersive Computing
“Technological advances integrating computational capacities with lived experience will soon blur the perception of analogue phenomena and digital projections in our daily lives.... We have to have a way to talk about what it is we are doing, and how, and to reect critically and imaginatively if tools of the new era are to be means to think with, rather than instruments of a vastly engineered ideological apparatus that merely has its way with us.” (Johanna Drucker, 2014, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production).

Rapid developments in immersive, digital technologies are changing how we form knowledge about our world, increasingly blurring the lines between digital information and reality. We use visual, aural, and other media formats to record, process, and make sense of natural phenomena, social reality, and human thought. The emergence of virtual reality and other immersive media foregrounds the body as a holistic system of perceiving and knowing. This seminar will develop a critical framework for engaging with current trends in art, media, and information technologies and their impact on human knowledge. Students will engage with theories of knowledge production, with a focus on the role of institutions and the materiality of media formats. Close reading of theoretical texts will be complemented by student-led investigations of research applications and methodologies.

LIS 517: Introduction to Digital Cultures
Digital information technologies shape our lives.  The benefits and the possible dangers of digital information technologies will be explored from a multidisciplinary perspective, looking at the insights into our digital age from history, linguistics sociology, political theory, information science, and philosophy.  Students will have opportunities for active reflection on the ways in which digital technology shapes learning and social interaction.  Graduate-level requirements include different percent break-down of requirements and more stringent expectations in work produced.

LIS 557: Documenting Diverse Cultures
Addresses themes associated with the production of information artifacts and issues in documenting cultural diversity across the American culture landscape. The practices of collection and documenting cultures and communities will be explored in relation to the mission of libraries, archives, historical societies and other cultural heritage institutions concerned with the acquisition of information in books, journals and other textual materials, and in sound and visual documents.

This is not a class on the delivery of information services to diverse populations but on building cultural awareness, and documenting and creating archives with ethnically diverse populations. The course will also provide an opportunity to contribute to our knowledge about our local communities as sites of cultural diversity. While the focus of many of the course materials are on Latino, Indigenous, and Black populations as marginalized ethnic communities, the concepts contained in the course materials are applicable to other populations as well.

LAW 527: International Human Rights and Indigenous Peoples
Over the last few decades, international law's human rights regime has developed to address the concerns of indigenous peoples worldwide, giving rise to new international norms and procedures that generally favor their cultural survival, land and resource rights, and self-determination.  Because international law is part of the law of the United States law by virtue of the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent, international human rights law as it concerns indigenous peoples does not just function on the international plane, but it also should be considered part of Federal Indian Law.  This course provides students with an exposure to the theory and practice of international human rights law and to how it is developing in this field.  Particular attention will be paid to developments in the U.N. and the Organization of American States, and how those developments relate to the domestic legal systems of the United States and selected other countries.

LAW 631F: Law and Culture
With increasing frequency, disputes arise over who can control the use of culture and cultural resources, particularly as culture has come to be viewed as a marketable commodity.  These disputes often involve protection of cultural property and both items and places of cultural importance; ethical and legal issues involved in collection, display and return of cultural objects; and intellectual property issues involved in traditional knowledge.  These issues most commonly arise with respect to indigenous cultures, and this course will concentrate primarily on native culture, but we will also examine other discrete and insular communities.

LAW 631H: Critical Race Practice
This course, limited to twenty students, will explore the legal history of racism in the post-colonial and post-modern West from critical race and post-colonial theoretical and practice-oriented clinical perspectives.  This seminar will focus on the difficulties in defining and understanding the meanings of the term 'race;' the nature of 'racism' and racial oppression; theories of racial formation; the differing implications of colonization and immigration; the formation of stereotypes; unconscious racism; the gendered and sexualized nature of race and theories of racial identity.

LAW 682: Cyberlaw
The nature and scope of the Internet and the World Wide Web, including the role of web browsers as both search and transaction tools, the proposed national information infrastructure; the general impact of technology on law and law on technology; encryption, anonymity and privacy.

MAS 508: Mexican American Studies: Cultural Perspectives
Our goal in this seminar is to build a theoretical and methodological foundation from which to critically examine issues facing Chicanx/Latinx communities.  To this end, we will engage foundational texts in disciplines that have studied Chicanx and Latinx communities, as well as those foundational to the interdisciplinary fields of Chicanx Studies, Latinx Studies, Native American Studies, and Ethnic Studies, and the ways they are connected (at times in tension) to Latin American and Hemispheric Studies. The seminar is structured around keywords, such as culture of poverty, internal colonialism, borderlands, indigeneity/mestizaje and race/racialization and ethnicity, decoloniality and decolonization, migration and diaspora, culture, and activist/decolonial/engaged research. Through this course, students will learn to critically assess the power relations involved in conducting and presenting research with marginalized populations and epistemologies that are marginalized within academia itself. We will also consider the possibilities and limits of academic research in advancing social justice.

MAS 560: Chicanx Historiography: Chicanx Thought
This is a course in the historical writing on the ethnic Mexican experience. It deals with a) the succession of authors, books, and schools on the subject; b) the development of historical writing within a social and political framework; and c) the changing attitudes to the question and nature of history itself. It is designed to encourage students to understand and to challenge past and present historians and to reflect upon their own ideas of history. 

MAS 575A: Latinxs & Education
This course presents a theoretical and empirical overview of Latinx educational issues in the U.S. Special emphasis will be placed on disentangling the effects of race, gender, class, and immigrant status on Latinx educational access and “achievement.” We will also examine how historical, social, political, and economic forces impact Latinx educational experience. Given our location in southern Arizona, this course will highlight these issues with an emphasis on Mexican, Chicanx, and immigrant communities in the Southwest and the forces that impact their educational experiences and opportunities. Rather than study our region and communities in a vacuum, however, we will also examine how experiences from other regions and for other racialized and minoritized students and their communities overlap with local conditions. These issues will be approached primarily through anthropological, sociological, ethnic studies and critical youth studies lenses. 

MAS 580: Advanced Research Methods
The goal of this course is for students to understand the complex relationships between research methods, epistemologies of knowledge, and the production of scholarly texts. The focus will be primarily on qualitative research methods, especially ethnographic research which is the instructor’s specialty.  We will also benefit, however, from visits by invited scholars who will join our class to share their expertise in related methodologies and allied disciplines. The idea of this course is not to provide students with a rigid template of what their research methods need to look like but rather offer students tools that they can continue to hone and incorporate into their own research projects as needed.   

Students will be invited to practice and experiment with a variety of research techniques, however, a fundamental focus will be on understanding how particular methods are driven by the larger ethical, political, and theoretical frameworks and epistemologies they are connected to. In other words, the models of knowledge we choose also drive the methods we use in our research and our standards of ethics. In this quest we will look at a variety of perspectives on the purpose of research including: understanding meaning, the quest for “objective” knowledge and the scientific model, the positionality of the researcher, decolonizing research methods, and collaborative, engaged, and activist research.   

It is my hope that our dialogue around these different approaches and purposes of research will foster critique, debate, and some degree of discomfort as we question some of the traditional tenants of social science research through discussions of ethics, collaboration, and decolonization. In this process, the course introduces students to a variety of research techniques including participant observation, oral and life histories, archival work, textual analysis, interviewing, panel discussions, focus groups, visual and spatial analysis, cultural analysis, video interviews and video testimonials. We will also deal with the process of turning field notes into academic and more popular forms of writing.  The basic assumption behind our explorations is that we cannot study “methods” in isolation but must tie them to particular purposes of knowledge creation, and ethical, and theoretical choices. Finally, we will emphasize the political and personal relationships researchers build and maintain with those they work with as well as the political implications of how they work and what they do with the information they gather.

MUS/LAS 568: Studies in Latin American Music
Studies of selected topics in Latin American music in social context, with emphasis on shared patterns of transmission, development and reception.  Case studies of musical genres, styles and historical periods, from pre-conquest to contemporary pop and folkloric to classical.  Graduate-level requirements include reading additional scholarly literature, as necessary, and will deliver a conference-style presentation of their final project.

MUS 695B: Sound, Music, and Our Changing Environment
This graduate seminar addresses the myriad ways sonic practices—from soundways to music making—reveal the characteristics of place, the health of natural resources, and the wellbeing of local communities. Such sonic information also exposes vulnerability, social inequality, and environmental injustice. To explore these areas, we will draw from sources documenting sonically engaged activities, especially interdisciplinary literature from ethnomusicology and ecomusicology, environmental anthropology, and soundscape study in landscape ecology. Our case studies will include local community studies in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific.

RELI/EAS 550: Graduate Readings in Theories and Methods for the Study of Religion
The course provides graduate training in the theories and methods of religious studies and guides students in contextualizing their own work within this discourse. It is an opportunity to contemplate how religion became an object of study, to explore the approaches of key theorists, and to assess the efficacy of these approaches for our own research. Controversies surrounding ritual, canon, representation, power, translation, embodiment and experience will inform our conversations. Finally, this course challenges students to evaluate the broader role of religious studies in the humanities and to set goals for their contributions to this discourse. 

SPAN 541: The Politics of Memory: Major Works, Debates, and Questions in Memory Studies
Memory activism and the politics of cultural memory spaces and practices have become a lightning rod for fervent public debate from both the Left and the Right. Should historical statues to racist figures and pasts be left as they are or removed and destroyed? Should they be rehomed in statue parks intended as final resting places for disgraced statues? Or should they be left but with additional plaques and memorials added to provide further context? These questions are often linked to deeper questions about truth, history, and justice. In the aftermath of political violence and atrocity, how do individuals and communities reckon with the past and reconstruct the social fabric? How do people live together again after suffering and inflicting horrific violence? What do justice and reconciliation truly mean, and are they ever possible?  

This graduate seminar examines these important questions through study of the key scholarship, debates, and major contemporary works in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies. Our inquiry will also take us into other areas of study that intersect with memory studies in significant and interesting ways, including genocide and atrocity prevention, visual culture, performance studies, literary studies, music history, and decolonial theory. Some of our case studies will come from World War II, the Holocaust, and the subsequent trials, conventions, and covenants that led to contemporary practices of human rights and transitional and restorative justice, while others draw from Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Vietnam, and the Hemispheric Americas, including Canada, the U.S., Chile, Argentina, and Guatemala.