This seminar will examine foundational and recent US-based feminist and queer disability studies scholarship and activism. In particular, the course will focus on how scholars and activists have answered the question: What is disability justice? In order to answer this question, we will look at how disability has been constructed and treated historically and currently, particularly at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality.

This research seminar offers an in-depth opportunity to explore the 1960s. To what extent was it a unique historical era? Does it make sense to think of a long 1960s, beyond that decade? We will focus on several political and cultural movements, including civil rights, the anti-Vietnam war struggle, the counter culture, the emergence of feminism and gay rights, and the conservative backlash. How do the political, cultural, and intellectual conflicts of that day continue to shape American life today?

The United States emerged from the Second World War as the most powerful nation on earth. This course explores American political, cultural, and social life in the postwar era, with an eye toward helping students gain a firmer understanding of contemporary issues and conflicts in our nation and around the world.

Designed for music and non-music majors, this advanced seminar examines core theoretical and methodological issues in ethnomusicology and the debates that have shaped its practice since its origins in the early twentieth century as comparative musicology. Drawing on musical traditions from different parts of the world and supplemented by workshops conducted by visiting professional musicians, the course explores the interdisciplinary approaches that inform how ethnomusicologists study the significance of music in and as culture.

Are children wired to be able to learn without direct instruction? Does the process of schooling diminish or enhance our capacity to be self-directed learners? What factors determine one's readiness for self-directed learning, and can self-directed learning be taught? What role, if any, do teachers play in self-directed learning? This seminar explores these questions in the context of an ongoing ethnographic study of an alternative education program within a public high school.

We will explore the development of children's moral reasoning about helping and caring for others. Our goal is to understand social processes of development by examining how children engage with cultural messages about helping. Students will work on one of three projects, which will likely involve children's conversations about helping with parents, and with peers, and naturalistic classroom observations among elementary-school-aged children. In small groups, students will formulate a hypothesis, create materials and measures, collect and analyze data, and write a research report.

What are emotions, and how should we think about them? How are our emotional experiences related to our actions within the social realm? This course will attempt to address these questions and investigate the functionality of emotions in our relationships and in our lives more generally. We'll cover classic and contemporary emotion theories and consider recent work addressing the usefulness of emotions like gratitude, disgust, pride, jealousy, happiness, and anger.

This course explores cities in East Asia from the late nineteenth century to the present. Why did the demolition of imperial city walls in Beijing, Tokyo, and Seoul symbolize modernity while Western-style architecture in treaty ports such as Shanghai and Yokohama represented a new civilization? How did monumental buildings such as Tiananmen Square, the Yasukuni Shrine, and the Kyungbok Palace play vital roles in formulating new national identities? Why did these cities become centers for mass movements?

The seminar will draw upon Foucauldian analytics of governmentality to engage the concept of race/racism as founded on, and maintained by, colonial material conditions mobilized for political outcomes. In exposing race as constituted by a colonial and governmental lineage rather than a biological or ethnic ancestry of origins, the course shifts the conceptual meaning of race/racism from its contemporary anchorage in ideology and biology, to the constitutive logics of colonial practices of governmentality in contemporary western liberal democracies.

The central focus of this course is to explore theory and organizing practices of grassroots democracy. Each week the seminar will move back and forth between historical and theoretical reflection and reflection upon the experience of organizing communities. The course is motivated by citizens acting together to generate responses to the most challenging questions and issues of the present.