What kind of life should a person live? What can we know about the world? Do we have souls that are separate from our bodies? The aim of the course is to learn how to do philosophy by engaging with philosophical thinkers throughout the globe. We read some philosophers from the Western tradition (such as Plato and Sartre) alongside philosophers from other historical traditions, such as the Daoist thinker Zhuangzi and the Sufi mystic al-Ghazali, and we also read some contemporary thinkers from a variety of cultural traditions (such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jorge Gracia).

This course offers an interrogation of overt and embedded narratives of migrants and the migration process in popular and documentary film, paying specific attention to cinematic representations of non-citizen bodies confronting migration, deportation, labor, acculturation, and anti-immigrant hysteria. Film screenings and class discussions comprise the interpretative lens through which students will examine the aesthetic, cultural, economic, gendered, historical, political, racial and sexual dimensions of cultural texts.

This course focuses on Critical Race Theory, its history and application in the field of Education. Through course readings and assignments, students will explore and discuss key issues such as race/racism, class/classism, gender/sexism among other "isms" and how they impact the teaching and learning experiences of students of color. This course is specifically designed to challenge students and make them think critically about their multiple identities, privileges and challenges as students and future leaders.

What is Latina Feminism? How does it differ from and/or intersect with other feminisms? This interdisciplinary course explores Latina feminism in relation to methodology and epistemology through a historical lens. We will explore topics related to knowledge production, philosophies of the "self," positionality, the body, and representation. Our approach in this class will employ an interlocking analysis to feminist theory that understands the interconnectedness between multiple forms of oppression, including race, class, sexuality, and ability.

This course analyzes the concepts of race and racism from an interdisciplinary perspective. Students will be asked to bring a critical lens to the ubiquitous, yet frequently misunderstood concepts of race and racism. We will study the sociocultural, political, economic, and historical forces that collaborate and compete with one another in the production of racial categories. This approach will require us to draw connections between wide-scale processes and everyday interactions.

The course provides an overview of current and past social conditions of Latinas and Latinos within the U.S. We will address laws, policies and institutions that shape the complexity of Latinas'/os' social location and serve as critical sites of resistance. The course addresses legal constructions of race and citizenship, nomenclature, border politics, public health, education, and labor. We will consider the critical intersections of class, gender and sexuality as well as inequality in relation to other persons of color.

The medium of cinema has shown persistent concern with war and memory, and has constituted a heated battleground for rememberance and erasure of the past. Through cinema, in other words, we most clearly see both memories of war and subsequent wars among competing memories. The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the repressive military regime of Francisco Franco (1939-1975), and recent attempts to "recuperate" memory all dramatize these dynamics and raise a number of larger questions. How do destruction and devastation register through the visual?

Study of this crucial and problematic relationship in modern novels, short stories, and films from Romance cultures. Exploration of the mother-daughter bond as literary theme, social institution, psychological dynamic, and metaphor for female creativity. Readings include Western myths and diverse theories of family arrangements (Rousseau, Freud, Rich, Walker, Benjamin, Irigaray, Juhasz, Giorgio, Mernissi, Nnaemeka).

This course will equip students of Spanish with a variety of skills that prepare them for upper-division courses. Specific areas of study will include introduction to literary genres and movements; practice in critical reading and writing; study of figures of speech, rhetoric, and style; presentation of oral reports; use of library resources. In addition, students acquire basic knowledge of the geography, history, and culture of the Hispanic world.