1 - 10 of 37 results for: AFRICAAM

From the beginning of jazz to the war years.

Students to engage in an intellectual discussion about the African Diaspora with leading faculty at Stanford across departments including Education, Linguistics, Sociology, History, Political Science, English, and Theater & Performance Studies. Several lunches with guest speakers. This course will meet in the Program for African & African American Studies Office in Building 360 Room 362B (Main Quad). This course is limited to Freshman and Sophomore enrollment.

In recent decades genes have increasingly become endowed with the cultural power to explain many aspects of human life: physical traits, diseases, behaviors, ancestral histories, and identity. In this course we will explore a deepening societal intrigue with genetic accounts of personal identity and political meaning. Students will engage with varied interdisciplinary sources that range from legal cases to scientific articles, medical ethics guidelines, films, and anthropological works (ethnographies). We will explore several case studies where the use of DNA markers (as proof of heritage, disease risk, or legal standing) has spawned cultural movements that are biosocial in nature. Throughout we will look at how new social movements are organized around gene-based definitions of personhood, health, and legal truth. Several examples include political analyses of citizenship and belonging. On this count we will discuss issues of African ancestry testing as evidence in slavery reparations cases, revisit debates on whether Black Freedman should be allowed into the Cherokee and Seminole Nations, and hear arguments on whether people with genetic links to Jewish groups should have a right of return to Israel. We will also examine the ways genetic knowledge may shape different health politics at the individual and societal level. On this count we will do close readings of how personal genomics testing companies operate, we will investigate how health disparities funding as well as orphan disease research take on new valences when re-framed in genetic terms, and we will see how new articulations of global health priorities are emerging through genetic research in places like Africa. Finally we will explore social implications of forensic uses of DNA. Here we will examine civil liberties concerns about genetic familial searching in forensic databases that disproportionately target specific minority groups as criminal suspects, and inquire into the use of DNA to generate digital mugshots of suspects that re-introduce genetic concepts of race.

Preference to sophomores. The inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president in May 1994 marked the end of an era and a way of life for South Africa. The changes have been dramatic, yet the legacies of racism and inequality persist. Focus: overlapping and sharply contested transitions. Who advocates and opposes change? Why? What are their historical and social roots and strategies? How do people reconstruct their society? Historical and current sources, including films, novels, and the Internet.

(Same as HISTORY 150B. History majors and others taking 5 units, register in 150B.) Territorial expansion, social change, and economic transformation. The causes and consequences of the Civil War. Topics include: urbanization and the market revolution; slavery and the Old South; sectional conflict; successes and failures of Reconstruction; and late 19th-century society and culture.

This course encourages students to think critically about historical sources and to use creative and rigorous historical methods to recover African American women¿s experiences, which often have been placed on the periphery of American history and American life.

This course examines various landscapes of segregation in U.S. history from 19th century reconstruction and settler expansion through the contemporary U.S. security state. Each week we consider different histories of segregation including native reservation and boarding school stories, Jim Crow and post-World War II urban/suburban segregation, school integration and bussing, and the rise of the carceral state. We will ask: How have Americans moved through space with different degrees of freedom and constraint over time, and how has that shaped what it has meant to be an American in different ways for different groups? How has access to land, property, consumer, recreational and educational spaces and resources been regulated by categories of race, gender, sexuality, colonial subjectivity, immigrant status and class? To gain a better sense of our local history, we will also consider how structures of segregation have historically mapped the Bay Area. Sources include primary and secondary historic texts, feature and documentary films, photography, and poetry.

Some scholars argue that New Orleans is not quite an American city, but is instead a cultural hybrid of Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. This course will investigate that claim by studying New Orleans from its colonial period to the present. Topics include colonial empires, the role of New Orleans as the largest slave market in North America, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, Civil Rights, Carnival, tourism, religion, and state and federal responses to Hurricane Katrina, among others.

Capoeira is an African Brazilian art form that incorporates, dance, music, self-defense and acrobatics. Created by enslaved Africans in Brazil who used this form as a tool for liberation and survival, it has since become a popular art form practiced around the world. In this course students will learn basic movements for both Capoeira Angola and Capoeira Regional, and the history of this rich and physically rigorous art form. Students will learn basic acrobatic skills, be introduced to Capoeira songs, and learn to play rhythms on the drum, pandeiro (tambourine), and the Berimbau -- a single stringed bow instrument. This course will be physically rigorous and fun! No previous experience necessary.