This course focuses on the transition from high school to college-level learning by facilitating processes of exploration, awareness, empowerment, communication and community. These are strengthening qualities – necessary for academic success at Smith. The seminar offers opportunities to continue to develop these strengths. The work of cultivating these strengths within the seminar take place when given opportunities to explore and share thought processes, biases, and “real” and “false” beliefs, especially as they relate to ascribed social identities as well as chosen ones.

This two-credit course designed to immerse students in drone avionics, photogrammetry, image processing, surveying/mapping, and aerial photography and videography. The course encourages teamwork, curiosity, critical thinking, perseverance, and creativity, as well as collaboration and etiquette regarding fieldwork and community-based research We seek motivated students who want to learn practical techniques for acquiring and analyzing aerial data, and students who may be skeptical about drone technology and want to improve Smith’s approach to teaching and research with drones.

This course offers an interdisciplinary, historical, and critical examination of race in the United States. Although race is no longer held by scientists to have any biological reality, it has played a central role in the formation of legal codes, definitions of citizenship, economics, culture, and identities. Where did the concept of race come from? How has it changed over time? What pressures does it continue to exert on our lives?

A consideration of how the study of history, broadly conceived, gets translated into curriculum for middle and secondary schools. Addressing a range of topics in American history, students develop lesson and unit plans using primary and secondary resources, films, videos and internet materials. Discussions focus on both the historical content and the pedagogy used to teach it. Limited to juniors and seniors and graduate students. Does not count for seminar credit in the history major.

The history of students of color at Smith College. Draws from readings about African American, Latinx, Asian American, Indigenous, international and other students of color in higher education. Explores the Smith College archives for documents, ephemera and oral histories. Students also familiarize themselves with archival materials compiled by student activists and scour The Sophian (Smith’s weekly newspaper) to uncover the histories of racial policy, racism, community-building, social justice and activism at Smith College.

This is an advanced research seminar in which students work closely with archival materials from the Sophia Smith Collection and other archives to explore histories of resistance, collective action and grassroots organizing among domestic workers in the United States, from the mid-18th century to the present. Domestic work has historically been done by women of color and been among the lowest paid, most vulnerable and exploited forms of labor.

This comparative course invites you to explore the history of childhood and youth in the Global South during the past five centuries. Questions we will ask include: What political and symbolic meanings have been attached to the categories of “child” and “youth” in different times and places? What are some of the lived experiences of young people around the world in their roles as workers, members of families, and targets of state policy? To what extent have children and youth been constrained by norms and institutions made by adults, and when have they been able to resist these strictures?

This course, focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries, will delve into the history of how marginalization happens in countries in the Global South. Treating poverty and wealth as the products of historical processes rather than as natural conditions for certain groups of people, we study how hierarchies are formed. The thematic/regional units covered span the Global South, including ethnicity in Latin America, modernity in the Middle East, and urban worlds in South Asia.

Survey of women’s and gender history with women of color, working-class women and immigrant women at the center and with a focus on race, class and sexuality. This course is guided by the cultural and theoretical work of women of color feminists to decolonize knowledge, history, and the world. Topics include labor, racial formation, colonialism, imperialism, im/migration, popular culture, citizenship, education, medicine, war, consumerism, feminism, queer cultures, capitalism and neoliberalism. Emphasis on discussion and analysis of original documents.

Survey of women’s and gender history with women of color, working-class women and immigrant women at the center and with a focus on race, class and sexuality. This course is guided by the cultural and theoretical work of women of color feminists to decolonize knowledge, history, and the world. Topics include labor, racial formation, colonialism, imperialism, im/migration, popular culture, citizenship, education, medicine, war, consumerism, feminism, queer cultures, capitalism and neoliberalism. Emphasis on discussion and analysis of original documents.