Education, both within and outside of school settings, can be viewed as a site for imaging and creating ideal citizens, nations, and global orders. From this lens we will explore theories, methods, and practices of inter/national development. Understanding education as indispensible to European colonial and imperial projects, (post)colonial notions of liberation, and 21st century human rights discourses, we will examine educational development in Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, and the U.S.

This course focuses on the biological and cultural components of reproduction from an evolutionary and cross-cultural perspective. Beginning with the evolution of the pelvis, this course examines the nutritional problems, growth and developmental problems, health problems, and the trauma that can affect successful childbirth. The birth process will be studied for women in the ancient world and we will examine historical trends in obstetrics, as well. Worldwide rates of maternal mortality will be used to understand the risks that some women face.

Students and their parents see the value of their life histories in the classroom and they become more engaged with projects that draw from cultural-familial knowledge. How are teachers drawing from these sources of knowledge? What are the struggles of integrating children's community/family histories into schools? Does the integration of pedagogies of the home/family histories necessarily disrupt educators' deficit thinking? What does the process of integrating one's silenced history into school mean for under-represented/marginalized/silenced children and their families?

Professor and activist Angela Davis recently asked "Are prisons obsolete?" And Grier and Cobb once noted "No imagination is required to see this scene as a direct remnant of slavery." Since the 1980s state and federal authorities have increasingly relied on the costly and unsuccessful use of jails and prisons as deterrents of crime. This upper division course will grapple with ideas of incarceration and policing methods that contribute to the consolidation of state power and how it functions as a form of domestic warfare.

An examination of the causes and distinctive characteristics of armed conflict in the post-Cold War era, with an emphasis on the role of resource competition in the initiation and prolongation of warfare. The course will examine various explanations for the onset and prolongation of recent conflicts, especially civil wars and insurgencies. It will also assess various strategies for preventing and terminating such conflicts.

This seminar will explore approaches to writing about people in the outdoors -- working, playing, transforming nature, or simply contemplating the world. We will read and critique a number of genres including traditional nature writing, historical accounts, creative nonfiction, fiction, and academic analyses. We will pay particular attention to narrative choices and the role of the narrator as well as to the use of landscape description, scientific language, and other vehicles for constructing ideas of nature.

In his last interview Fluxus artist Dick Higgins said, ".one of the areas that has been understated since the immediate post-war era has been ethics. Exploring the nature of kindness or of cruelty, or of the various implications of Bosnia or of militarism or things like that. Ethical exploration is an area of subject matter that has to be dealt with." More recently, Canadian cultural critic and psychoanalyst Jeanne Randolph has explored how we act morally and ethically while participating in a culture of abundance, opulence and consumerism.

Chinese food is more American than apple pie, suggests writer Jennifer Lee in The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. In this course, we will take Chinese food as our starting point for exploring food as a system that connects individuals and communities, locally and globally. Students will carry out a multi-sited ethnographic research project that begins with a question about Chinese food, whether about production and consumption, identity and belonging, health and environment, memory and desire, community and activism.

In this course we will shift the way we see Latin America in two important ways. First, we will approach it as the heart of the New World African Diaspora since colonial times. For this reason, we will study black presence in Latin America by examining the historical and contemporary contributions of afrodescendants to the region's nations, cultures and societies. However, we will not limit our analysis of the African Diaspora to the national borders of Latin American nation-states.

Building on the notion that racial identities are historically constructed, this course will examine popular culture as a site for forming and constructing race. We'll interrogate how social and political forces shape popular culture, and how popular culture shapes our popular imaginations. Approaching popular culture as a contested space of meaning, we'll also explore the ways cultural workers of color have utilized popular culture to resist, respond to, and reveal the conundrum of "race" throughout American history.