This course is intended to introduce students to the field of theorizing about processes of development and to the ways that different actors - states, social movements, international financial institutions, development agencies, NGOs, and the "populations" (farmers, women, ethnic/racial groups, refugees, street children, sex workers, small entrepreneurs etc.) on whose behalf they claim to act - have engaged with one another through their practices in this field.

This course examines how media technologies shape the way we communicate and how the way we communicate in turn shapes the development of media technologies as evolving cultural practices. We will read technologies not as machines or tools invented to perform preconceived functions, but as forms of tech, understood as way of making things. So, in this course, we will try to understand how media users cause media to improve their efficiency as much as how media users themselves are changed as they continue to communicate.

In this course we will study how the Spanish Civil War has been portrayed and memorialized in literature, film, theater, and art. Our course will focus on the representation of the fight against fascism that happened in Spain and abroad by among others George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, and Pablo Neruda. We will pay special attention to archives of the American volunteers that formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Other materials include recent scholarship on the Spanish Civil War, Picasso's Guernica, Robert Capa and Gerda Taro's photographies, films, plays, and performances.

A deep understanding of the customer is essential to developing innovative products, services, and marketing strategies. To achieve these goals, increasing numbers of firms use qualitative research methods to study customer and user experiences. These methods can uncover in-depth insights about customers' lives and behavior, which are often not accessible through quantitative analyses of big data or conventional marketing metrics. This course introduces students to a set of concepts and research methods for generating, communicating, and leveraging customer insights.

The seminar will examine the co-constitutive historical formations of race and caste in relation to the expansion of capitalism and European high colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Rather than seeing this as a period for the 'origins' of race or caste, the course will examine the ways in which race and caste were discursively mediated in the period of high colonialism to shape the kind of racialized hierarchies that we are familiar with today.

Rebecca Solnit has written, "Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place." This course approaches the study of rape and other forms of gender-based violence with particular attention to storytelling, narrative, and the politics of representation.

We will explore 150 years of black protest music. From the ring shout and Congo Square, through blueswomen, hard bop, R&B, funk, and 90s rap, through to contemporary artists such as Janelle Monae, Kendrick and Noname, the course will consider how music has been mobilized to empower the subjugated, subvert power, and provide commentary on social injustices. Attention will be paid to the opportunities, contradictions and limitations of black performance?s potential for anti-establishment protest.

This course will explore queer feminist thinking about sex, love, and relationality. We will begin by examining how these terms are used and concepts mobilized in our worlds and in scholarship. Together over the course of the semester we will consider topics such as desire, pleasure, pornography, consent, monogamy, polyamory, marriage, friendship, and community. Through our treatments of these topics we will explore questions such as: What is compulsory sexuality? What counts as sex? What is love? What sorts of hierarchies structure the relationships in our lives?