First-Year Seminars 110WR - The West and the Rest

This course traces the administrative and popular categorizations of Muslim populations in Europe and the United States following the events of September 11, 2001. The course examines the mechanisms through which Muslims are designated as a coherent, timeless category associated with backwardness, violence, and an urgent threat. By the end of the semester, the students will gain a critical, comparative perspective to identify and analyze some common mechanisms such as racialization, securitization, and gendering, as well as practices of border-making and border-crossing that travel across time and space to define certain groups as "dangerous others."

First-year students only, by placement.