This course explores the relationship between the temporal and material structures of everyday life -- including objects, housing, gifts, dress, food, drugs, sex toys, accessories, and technologies -- and queer identities, communities, and practices. Taking an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach that includes narrative, archival, ethnographic, visual, and historical sources, we will consider not only how queer life shapes and is shaped by objects, but also the extent to which "objecthood" can be tied to structural and state power through the politics of consumption.

Do bodies matter in religious traditions? Whose bodies matter? How do they matter? By studying religious body ideals and practices, we examine the possibilities and problems different kinds of bodies have posed in religious traditions. Topics include religious diet, exercise, and dress; monasticism, celibacy, and sexuality; healing rituals, and slavery and violence. We pay special attention to contemporary challenges to problematic body ideals and practices coming from feminist, disability, postcolonial, queer, and trans theorists and activists.

This course centers the experiences, activism, and creative work of Trans Fem& people, which includes, but is not limited to, trans women, Two-Spirit, Hijra, (c)amab people, and others who identify with trans femininity. Throughout the term, we'll engage historic and contemporary activisms, read and watch creative work, and do our own creative work. We'll focus on activism ranging from Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries to Famillia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement and creative work by artists such as Kai Cheng Thom, Tourmaline, and Arielle Twist.

The overall goal of this course is to make explicit connections between mutual aid and transformative justice, and the intertwined place-based and community histories in which these interventions continue to be made. Students will leave with a grounded understanding of the connections, tensions and differences between transformative justice and restorative justice and criminal justice.

The course is an overview of the social conditions of Latinx people within the US. It addresses laws, policies and institutions that shape the complexity of Latinxes' social location and activism as well as legal constructions of race, citizenship, nomenclature, border politics, public health, education, and labor. We will consider the intersections of class, gender and sexuality as well as inequality in relation to other persons of color. Students will develop a firm sense of the importance and breadth of the Latinx political agenda and acquire skills to think across social issues.

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.

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the relationship between food, race, and migration for Latinx populations in the U.S. We will draw upon readings from the social sciences and the humanities to investigate processes of racial formation embedded in the production, labor, and consumption of foods and how these processes affect Latinx populations. What can Latinx foodstuffs and foodways reveal about U.S. racial and migration dynamics, landscapes, and politics? What social worlds and power relations emerge at the nexus of food, race, and migration?

This course analyzes the concepts of race and racism from an interdisciplinary perspective, with focus on Latinas/os/x in the United States. It explores the sociocultural, political, economic, and historical forces that interact with each other in the production of racial categories. We will focus on structural, systemic, and institutional racism and processes of racialization. The course examines racial inequality from a historical perspective and investigates how racial categories evolve and form across contexts.

Examines the life, work, and legacies of WEB DuBois. Drawing on domestic and diasporic fictional and nonfictional meditations on black life and progress in and beyond the 'DuBoisian century,' the course considers the changing meanings of and movements for global racial justice for people of African descent. The course also confronts the globalization of the color line in the post-Civil Rights/Black Power era.

This course will be an interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary exploration of grassroots organizing, community experiences, and social movements from 1700 to the present day by highlighting how community organizing has been affected by socio-structural problems and, in the words of Patricia Hill Collins, "the matrix of oppression"; but also by critically analyzing the historical contributions of grassroots organizations to dismantling all systems of domination. We will track how various organizations and social movements have understood, challenged, contested, and transformed power hierarchies.