LLS 199 Undergraduate Open Seminar

Topic: Race, Gender, and Sexuality - *H
Instructor: Ngo, F.
This course is designed to introduce students to some of the issues that emerge at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, dis/ability, and nation.  The course will be taught through comparative perspectives in terms of both race and nation; so students will be introduced to issues of gender and sexuality across many racialized and nationalized groups including African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and indigenous peoples.  The goal of the course is to introduce students to the intersectional and comparative frameworks and methodologies, debates in these fields, and to the critical language that surrounds those debates.  The course will draw from a wide range of sources including music, plays, film, anthropological texts, fiction, and poetry.  The course provides both an historical and contemporary context for thinking through topics including of representation, war, globalization, labor, imperialism, nation building, and racialization.

In composing this course, I am less interested in imparting the "right" point of view than in encouraging students to think cricially about issues of race, gender, secuality, and nation, drawing your own thoughtful conclusions.  In this spirit, the course is designed to give students the chance to interact not only with the lecturer, but with eachother as well.  A great deal of classroom time will be given over to discussion so that students can articulate their ideas, rather than passively listening to lectures all the time.  Each student brings a range of experiences that add to their understanding of the material presented in class.

Ideally, the classroom serves as a forum to exchange and debate ideas from a wide range of perspectives.  When more people participate fully, the section is both more engaging and enjoyable.  Please come prepared to articulate your ideas, and bring the day's required reading to class with you.

This course counts towards elective credits for the Asian American Studies minor, the Gender and Women's Studies major and minor, and Latina/Latino Studies minor (meets with AAS 199).

Topic:  Citizenship Comparatively - *SS
Instructor: Cacho, L.
This class will examine how citizenship has always been conferred and/or denied according to race and gender, focusing on Latinas/os and Asians.  We will begin by looking at the ways in which legislation and court cases used race and gender to confer citizenship to Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, but denied citizenship to Asians.  Through examining marriage, we will see how women, regarldess of race, could be stripped of citizenship if they married "aliens ineligible to citizenship;" we will also analyze how marriage determined whether children born overseas were conferred US citizenship.  The second half of the class will explore two interrelated themes:  1) how has the United States used the "noncitizen" category to further exclude people along racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual lines? and 2) how are Asians, Latinas/os, and other immigrants of color challenging and changing the meanings and definitions of US citizenship?  (Meets with AAS 299 and GWS 390).

Topic:  Body, Culture, and Power - *H
Instructor: Inda, J.
This seminar offers a critical examination of the dynamics related to the embodiment of difference.  Although the body is usually equated with nature, our focus will be on how truths about the body are produced in ways that justify and contest formations of power.  In other words, we will argue that the body, rather than being in any simple way natural, is a construct of culture and therefore always implicated in relations of dominance and subordination.  The course will focus primarily on the body in western culture (with some emphasis on the Latino body) and will emphasize the optics of science, technology, and visual culture in the making and remaking of bodies.  Specifically, it will interrogate how difference has been tracked, represented, and rendered visible through the body -how difference has been marked, contained, and dispersed - and how modern knowledge regimes have not merely observed and reported on bodies but have produced them.  In effect, this course will explore the construction, imaging, and experience of the body in light of modern regimes of power/knowledge.  3 hours.

Topic: Diversity Research Project:  Assessing and Enhancing Campus Climate at UIUC - *SS
Instructor: Chapa, J.
This is a combined undergrad/grad research colloquium modeled after the Policy Research Projects which were a major curricular innovation of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas Austin.  The initial focus of the Diversity Research Project would e multidisciplinary research and scholarship to review and evaluate various surveys and other approaches that have been or could be used to assess the UIUC campuss climate as it perceived by racialized minority students and faculty.  At least 30% of the course credit will be tied to activities directly related to EOTU including ethnographic research on the campus climate as is experienced by students who are members of under-represented minorities.  In addition to ethnographies focusing on campus climate issues, the class may also conduct research on the "cyberbullying" and "cyberhatered" i.e., internet postings that demean, insult, or threaten groups or individuals at UIUC; the self-segregation of UIUC students in social situations; "Two-Faced Racism," as documented by Picca in her forthcoming book; and other related issues.  Students will be expected to create web-based ethnographic "inquiry pages" with links to fieldnotes, interviews, maps, and other critical documents and to present their work at an EIU conference.

The Diversity Research Project would also review the literature on actions and programs that comparable campuses have used to improve their campus climate.  One aspect of the class will include public lectures by invited experts and open forums for faculty and students.  The goal of the Diversity Research Project will be to produce a multi-authored report detailing these findings as they may be applied to UIUC.  The report and possibly some project-related occasional papers will be published by CDMS.  Project findings and publications will be an important part of the major diversity conference planned at UIUC for spring 2008. (Meets with LLS 596, SOC 496, and SOC 596).

For more information, contact the instructor at jchapa@uiuc.edu.  

This is an EOTU (Ethnography of the University) course.

Topic: Immigration and Health - *SS
Instructor: Viruell-Fuentes, E.
This interdisciplinary seminar examines the social determinants of US racial and ethnic health inequalities through the lens of (im)migration.  Topics to be addressed include:  conceptualizations of race and ethnicity, immigrant-adaptation theories, discrimination, and the intersections of race, ethnicity, poverty, immigration and health.

Topic: The US-Mexico Borderlands - *SS
Instructor: Rosas, G.
The intensification and reconfiguration of global capitalism, the collapsing of time and space, and-- of central importance to this course---the vast movements of populations across international boundaries, have reoriented academic and political discourses towards geographic conceptualizations of culture and politics.  These conceptualiztions are reflected in such terminology as enclosures, borders, territorializations, and deterritorializations.  This course explores whether such phenomena inaugurate critical, new political thinking and new political subjects.  In addition, the course explores the implications of such new formations as exemplars of knowledge productions, epistemologically, and in terms of the intersections between academic and activist knowledges.  This course will combine class discussion and collective reading and research.  Its primary focus will be the relationships between globalization(s) and critical knowledge productions in the US and Mexico.  Special emphasis will be placed on the intersections of knowledge production, migrations, social movements, as well as borders and policing. 

Topic: Diversity Research Project:  Assessing and Enhancing Campus Climate at UIUC - *SS
Instructor: Chapa, J.
This is a combined undergrad/grad research colloquium modeled after the Policy Research Projects which were a major curricular innovation of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas Austin.  The initial focus of the Diversity Research Project would e multidisciplinary research and scholarship to review and evaluate various surveys and other approaches that have been or could be used to assess the UIUC campuss climate as it is perceived by racialized minority students and faculty.  At least 30% of the course credit will be tied to activities directly related to EOTU including ethnographic research on the campus climate as is experienced by students who are members of under-represented minorities.  In addition to ethnographies focusing on campus climate issues, the class may also conduct research on the "cyberbullying" and "cyberhatered" i.e., internet postings that demean, insult, or threaten groups or individuals at UIUC; the self-segregation of UIUC students in social situations; "Two-Faced Racism," as documented by Picca in her forthcoming book; and other related issues.  Students will be expected to create web-based ethnographic "inquiry pages" with links to fieldnotes, interviews, maps, and other critical documents and to present their work at an EIU conference.

The Diversity Research Project would also review the literature on actions and programs that comparable campuses have used to improve their campus climate.  One aspect of the class will include public lectures by invited experts and open forums for faculty and students.  The goal of the Diversity Research Project will be to produce a multi-authored report detailing these findings as they may be applied to UIUC.  The report and possibly some project-related occasional papers will be published by CDMS.  Project findings and publications will be an important part of the major diversity conference planned at UIUC for spring 2008. (Meets with LLS 596, SOC 496, and SOC 596).

For more information, contact the instructor at jchapa@uiuc.edu.  

This is an EOTU (Ethnography of the University) course.