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This discussion-rich course is for students to learn design thinking to more confidently navigate life and careers as members and allies of the Black community. This course will allow students to navigate identity while building community to uplift Black voices through design thinking tools to help leverage their experiences and gain a competitive edge. Students will gain a deeper understanding of intersectionality, how to create and cultivate alignment, and learn to effectively navigate life design schemas, ideas, and options.

Looks do matter, notably when it comes to how one is perceived and treated in society. In this course we will investigate how various groups within the Caribbean region experience racialization and the methods they utilize to perform their various identities. In the first part of the class, we will address how race and color function in the Caribbean. How does an individual's appearance and how they are subsequently racialized affect their position and experiences in society? This will include an in-depth examination of racism and colorism: how they operate and how they differ. The second part of the class will be dedicated to ethnographic research that addresses how people in the Caribbean work to modify how they are racialized or perceived in their societies, often for a particular benefit or need. From skin bleaching in Jamaica, to hair straightening in the Dominican Republic, to codeswitching in Aruba, we will examine various examples of how different individuals in the Caribbean transform themselves to perform calculated (though sometimes simultaneously authentic) identities.

From street names to monuments, the material sediments of colonial time can be seen, heard, and felt in the diverse cultural archives of ancient and contemporary Africa. This seminar aims to examine the role of ethnographic practice in the political agendas of past and present African nations. In the quest to reconstruct an imaginary of Africa in space and time, students will explore these social constructs in light of the rise of archaeology during the height of European empire and colonization. Particularly in the last 50 years, revived interest in African cultural heritage and preservation raises complex questions about the problematic tensions between European, American, and African theories of archaeological and ethnographic practice.

Poetry Is Not a Luxury * These places of possibility within ourselves are dark... The titles of this course are words thought and dreamed by Audre Lorde in her essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury" (a version of which was first published in 1977). In this essay she writes: "For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare." In this course we will consider the powers, resuscitations, and strategies found in the texts of a constellation of contemporary Black poets whose work emerges out of Black feminist thought and practices. My hope is that we will together listen toward the possibilities of this work, and through experiments in reading and writing, realize some of what these texts make it possible for us to think and feel and write and be.

Presented by IDA, the Institute for Diversity in the Arts. In this course we will explore science fiction and speculative fiction as readers, writers, creators, and organizers to learn how artists engage with futurist thinking to reimagine and build better worlds in the present. Together we will draw from scholarship across Indigenous, Latinx, Pasifika, Arab, African and Afro futurisms; as well as science fiction and other creative traditions to imagine and build better worlds rooted in liberation and solidarity. Students will explore the groundbreaking television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as one example of alternative futurisms and will be joined by a special visiting artist and actor from the show's original cast. Visits by guest artists from across genres will round out this year's IDA Spring Class. Does not fulfill the WR1 or WR2 requirement.

What stories do data tell? In this course, we will follow digital traces by excavating, interrogating, and pursuing the digital evidence in data. What is the relationship between narratives and digital evidence? How do we address the tension between computational data models, the complexity of the lived experience, and the plurality of voices and methods? How can we understand and identify biases in data structures, archives, and repositories? The course offers the opportunity for extensive hands-on practical work with records, archives, and data collections. Supported by readings on archival practice, data colonialism, and the socio-cultural context of algorithms we will discuss what a critical anthropological perspective can contribute to this debate.

From texts to techne, from artifacts to discourses on science and technology, this course is an examination of how Black people in this society have engaged with the mutually consitutive relationships that endure between humans and technologies. We will focus on these engagements in vernacular cultural spaces, from storytelling traditions to music and move to ways academic and aesthetic movements have imagined these relationships. Finally, we will consider the implications for work with technologies in both school and community contexts for work in the pursuit of social and racial justice.

Required for seniors. Weekly colloquia with AAAS Director and Associate Director to assist with refinement of research topic, advisor support, literature review, research, and thesis writing. Readings include foundational and cutting-edge scholarship in the interdisciplinary fields of African and African American studies and comparative race studies. Readings assist students situate their individual research interests and project within the larger. Students may also enroll in AFRICAAM 200Y in Winter and AFRICAAM 200Z in Spring for additional research units (up to 10 units total).