This course seeks to understand how protest fuels the creation and sustenance of black religious movements and novel spiritual systems in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will examine the dissentive qualities of selected African American activists, community workers, scholars, spiritual/religious leaders and creative writers. By the end of this course, students will be able to thoughtfully respond to the questions, "What is spirituality?"; "What is dissent?"; and "Has blackness required resistive spiritual communities?"

In popular movies such as Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell, cyberpunk dystopias have often been associated with Asian cities, neon signs, and crowded bustling streets. What can exploring past and current portrayals of a cyberpunk future tell us about how we view Asia now? What can this aesthetic tell us about corporate dystopias? This course will look at film and texts that interrogate the intersection of race, technology, history, nation, and capital flows.

This class introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of Critical Social Thought. Students will learn to interrogate and challenge structures of social, cultural, and political power from a variety of theoretical traditions, such as Marxism, critical ethnic studies, queer and gender critique, critical race theory, media studies, performance studies, disability studies, history of science, the Frankfurt school, and settler colonial and postcolonial theory.