CRPE-180 Introduction to Latinx Studies: Structural Inequalities
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. The course may include a Community Based Learning (CBL) Mentor.
CRPE-200 Foundations of Africana Studies
This reading- and writing-intensive course draws upon the intellectual traditions of African American, African, and African diasporic studies in order to explore the connections and disjunctures among people of African descent. While the course pays attention to national, regional, and historical contexts, it asks this question: what do African descended people have in common and when and how are their experiences and interests different? What can we glean from contemporary discourses grounded in the consideration of global black lives?
CRPE-205 Foundations in Critical Social Thought
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. Developing skills in theoretical and social critique to address pressing social issues, students will be equipped with an interdisciplinary toolbox to pursue independent projects.
CRPE-208 Introduction to Twentieth-Century Critical Race Theory
This course examines the discursive relationship between race, power and law in contemporary U.S. society. Readings examine the ways in which racial bodies are constituted in the cultural economy of American society where citizens of African descent dwell. We explore the rules and social practices that govern the relationship of race to gender, nationality, sexuality, and class in U.S. courts and other cultural institutions. Thinkers covered include W.E.B. DuBois, Kimberle Crenshaw, Derrick Bell, and Richard Delgado, among others.
CRPE-228 Visualizing Immigrant Narratives: Migration in Film
This course offers an interrogation of overt and embedded narratives of migrants and the migration process in popular and documentary film, paying specific attention to cinematic representations of non-citizen bodies confronting migration, deportation, labor, acculturation, and anti-immigrant hysteria. Film screenings and class discussions comprise the interpretative lens through which students will examine the aesthetic, cultural, economic, gendered, historical, political, racial and sexual dimensions of cultural texts. The course is supplemented with readings about immigration policies and histories.
CRPE-231 Dialoguing for Racial Change
A critical analysis of race, racism, and justice in the United States, as set in a socio-historical context defined by power. In addition to traditional modes of teaching-learning, students use intergroup dialogue and collaborative group work to examine how race is constructed, experienced, reproduced, and transformed within social structures. Topics include racial identity development and how individuals internalize and 'live race' in everyday interactions; historical mechanisms for how bodies and spaces have become 'raced' over time; institutional dimensions of racial inequality (e.g., law, education, popular culture); and practices for pursuing racial justice.
CRPE-239 Latinx Urbanism
This course examines the relationship between the urban and Latina/o/x placemaking, identities and culture(s). Urban scholars have long studied the "evolving" city-this course explores the changing city in relation to Latina/o/x populations and urban social change movements. We examine historical and contemporary conditions and cover a broad range of topics including: urbanization, urban planning, "new urbanism," placemaking, gentrification, migration/immigration, segregation, and more. The readings in this course aim to provoke a consideration of the dynamic between space and place, as well as how urban life, culture, and form impacts Latina/o/x populations and vice versa.
CRPE-240 Intermediate Topics
CRPE-240BE Intermediate Topics: 'Black Ethnographers'
The aim of this class is to underscore the significance of Black perspectives and contributions within the field of anthropology. Black anthropology, and especially Black feminist anthropology, has historically been sidelined within anthropological discourse. In this course, we will collectively challenge this historical erasure by centering the work of Black ethnographers. By delving into works spanning continental Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, students will begin to understand the vast impact Black ethnographers have had both in and outside the field of anthropology.
CRPE-240BR Intermediate Topics: 'Borderlands Film and Literature'
In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua asserts that material change is impossible without changing the cultural imagery in our minds. Latinx Borderlands artists have effected such change through their cultural production. This course will introduce students to Borderlands literature and film, and will provide an overview of Mexican American, Chicanx, and other Latinx artistic production from the U.S- Mexico border region. The course will closely examine how these texts reflect borderland folklore, social issues, and "fronterizo" identities. Students will read multiple registers of artistic production, including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, testimonio, and folk song lyrics.
CRPE-240EF Intermediate Topics: 'Ethnographic Food Documentary'
Students will learn basic skills on ethnographic methods in anthropology as they are introduced to issues of food and culinary cultural practices, politics and history. Selected readings and films will explore the intersections of food with colonialism, race and ethnicity, gender, health, political economy, and social movements. The course has a focus on Latinx and Latin American/Caribbean foodways, however students will apply the course's conceptual toolkit in a wide range of cultural settings. Students will learn techniques of participant observation, interviews, script writing and visual analysis to conduct fieldwork in a local cultural community in South Hadley and surroundings, as they are guided towards producing a short ethnographic food documentary.
CRPE-240FD Intermediate Topics: 'U.S. Latinx Foodways'
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? The course is organized thematically and anchored in selected case studies.
CRPE-240LC Intermediate Topics: 'La Cultura Cura: Healing Through Language and Culture'
Using the lens of anthropology and Latinx studies, this course offers theoretical and practical tools for understanding difference, transforming conflict and advancing social change. We will learn how racial, ethnic and other social differences are created through culture, power, language and representation. As we learn to recognize our differences we will also learn, practice and take away a toolkit of transformational skills and frameworks for healing and communicating effectively across those differences, including la cultura cura (culture heals), cultural competence, non-violent communication, emotional literacy, mindfulness and storytelling.
CRPE-240RE Intermediate Topics: 'Representing Race'
This class takes a ~look~ at the components of racial representation in audio-visual media: How can ideas and theories be conveyed or communicated through a visual mode? What ethical concerns emerge when representing others in different media? Drawing from written texts, documentaries, graphic novels, and artwork, we will explore the myriad ways media creatives construct racial representations, and question the perceived boundary between research and art. Starting with early anthropological film, this class will move through both conventional and nontraditional material that is used to tell stories, make political statements, and represent people's lived experiences.
CRPE-244 The Historical-Grammar of Black Feminist Thought Across the Caribbean and the Americas
This class aims to raise student awareness of and exposure to different cultural backgrounds and contributions of Black feminist thought, womanism, and afro feminism across the Caribbean and the Americas. We will take a historical journey exploring the roles of cisgender Black women and gender-non-confirmative Black people in the formations of Black feminist thought, highlighting their contributions and struggles in dismantling the Western matrix of domination, but also in the radical building of new societies. Students will learn about the groundbreaking theories and methodologies that helped pave the way for contemporary feminist organizations and social movements.
CRPE-254 Nueva York
This course will explore the history of Latina/o/x populations in New York City. Students will learn about histories of migration and settlement, urban inequality, community building, and urban transformation with particular focus on the Puerto Rican population in New York City. The course will examine the many ways Latinas/os/x have transformed New York City and built vibrant communities.
CRPE-256 Trap Doors and Glittering Closets: Queer/Trans* of Color Politics of Recognition, Legibility, Visibility and Aesthetics
In 2014, Time magazine declared the "Transgender Tipping Point" as a popular moment of transgender people's arrival into the mainstream. Using a queer and trans* of color critique, this course will unpack the political discourses and seeming binaries surrounding visibility/invisibility, recognition/misrecognition, legibility/illegibility, belonging/unbelonging and aesthetics/utility. How might we grapple with the contradictions of the trapdoors, pitfalls, dark corners and glittering closets that structure and normalize violence for some while safeguarding violence for others? This course will center the 2017 anthology Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility.
CRPE-257 Transforming Justice and Practicing Truth to Power: Critical Methodologies and Methods in Community Participatory Action Research and Accountability
This course will offer an overview of select methodologies and methods from Community-based Participatory Action Research (CBPAR), Participatory Action Research (PAR), collaborative ethnography and other social justice research interventions such as radical oral history, grassroots research collectives, experimental digital archives, research and data justice networks and organizations. We will center on questions of "accountability"; that is, to whom, for whom, and to what end do processes of accountability serve those already in power? Moreover, we will investigate the chasms between academia and activism in order to explore the possibility of unlikely collaborative research alliances.
CRPE-261 Race, Racism, and Power
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. The analysis that develops will ultimately allow us to think rigorously about social inequality, transformation, and liberation.
CRPE-295 Independent Study
CRPE-308 Luminous Darkness: African American Social Thought After DuBois
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. Due to increasing precarity for the masses, emphasis is given to more recent ideas like afro-pessimism, racial capitalism, and afro-futurism, as contemporary responses to DuBois's 1903 question, 'How does it feel to be a problem?' Readings by Jemisin, Gyasi, Robinson, Fields, Butler, Davis, Ransby, Hartman, Wilderson, Fanon, YamahttaTaylor, among others form the core of the course.
CRPE-323 Latina Feminism(s)
In this seminar, we will explore the relationship between Latina feminist theory and knowledge production. We will examine topics related to positionality, inequality, the body, reproductive justice, representation, and community. Our approach in this class will employ an intersectional approach to feminist theory that understands the interconnectedness between multiple forms of oppression, including race, class, sexuality, and ability. Our goal is to develop a robust understanding of how Latina feminist methodologies and epistemologies can be tools for social change.
CRPE-339 Abolitionist Dreams And Everyday Resistance: Freedom Memoirs, Struggles, and Decolonizing Justice
This seminar will offer close theoretical readings of a variety of anti-colonial, abolitionist, anti-imperialist, insurgent and feminist-of-color memoir, autobiographical and social justice texts. We will read works from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Assata Shakur, Patrisse Cullors, Grace Lee Boggs, Audre Lorde, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinna, Leila Khaled, Fannie Lou Hamer, Sarah Ahmed, Lee Maracle, Kai Cheng Thom, Angela Davis, Sojourner Truth, adrienne maree brown, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mary Brave Bird, Jamaica Kincaid, Gabby Rivera and Haunani-Kay Trask. We will center the interlinking and capacious concepts of liberation, revolution, freedom, justice and decolonization.
CRPE-352 Latina/o/x Studies in Action
Latina/o/x Studies in Action explores university/college-community partnerships and civic engagement with/in Latina/o/x communities in the United States. Drawing from the field of Latina/o/x Studies, the course explores and interrogates "traditional" academic understandings of knowledge production, research, and service learning. Focusing on questions of power, inequality, and social change, this course will examine how university/college-community partnerships can be based on reciprocity, exchange, and the centering of community assets, needs, and voices.
CRPE-356 Latinas/os/x and Housing: Mi Casa Is Not Su Casa
Housing is closely tied to quality of life and the health of neighborhoods and communities. As a main goal of the "American Dream," homeownership has important significance on an individual and societal level. For immigrants, this goal is often out of reach as a result of racism and discriminatory housing policies. This interdisciplinary seminar explores Latinas/os/x relationship to housing and homeownership by examining the history of exclusionary housing policies in the United States. By exploring a range of topics (affordability, ownership, gentrification, etc), we will develop a sharper understanding of why housing is one of the most pressing issues for Latinas/os/x today.
CRPE-363 A Social Movements' History of the States from Grassroots Organizing to Social Movements
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. Simultaneously we will enter the history of community organizing in the United States of America and interrogate how multidimensional processes of racialization, gender classification, class, and sexual division inform experiences within and around these social movements.
CRPE-364 Critical Refugee Studies
Critical Refugee Studies will address a unique and growing portion of the migration flow to the United States -- refugees and asylum seekers. The course will discuss the historical development of persons in flight from their home nations and the U.S.'s ability (and sometimes reluctance) to receive them. The course will address their legal and popular categorization, the various reasons for their displacement abroad, and overt and buried expressions of their identities based on their categorization and displacement.
CRPE-366 Disposable People: A History of Deportation
Taught in English, the course explores comparative racial and ethnic politics in the U.S. during the 20th century. We will analyze the creation and maintenance of structural inequalities through laws and policies targeted at persons of color in the areas of healthcare, transportation, immigration, labor, racial segregation, and education. Through readings, lectures and films, we will discuss critical histories of community struggle against social inequality, registering the central impact that race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship have had on efforts toward social justice.
CRPE-367 Slavery, Prison, and Captivity: Narratives of Life in and out of Bondage
This course will be a multidisciplinary exploration of narratives produced by enslaved people, captivity experiences, and histories of imprisonment from the 17th to the present day by highlighting how these narratives were connected to artistic and socio-political movements of their times. The class will critically analyze the historical contributions of the narratives of enslaved people that shape ideas of justice, emancipation, and new societies. We will chronologically track how several narratives of enslaved and captive people described, challenged, contested, and attempted to dismantle hegemonic power structures.
CRPE-371 Free Them All: Abolition Feminism and Anticarceral Action Research
This course will center the activism, theories and praxis of abolition feminism. We will collectively study how interpersonal violence (gender, racial, sexual, ableist) is intertwined with state violence (from domestic policing to militarism abroad). Through investigating the legal history of the criminalization of survivors alongside mainstream antiviolence research and statistics, we will challenge the use of criminological binaries such as victim/perpetrator and violent/nonviolent. Partnering with coalitions like Survived and Punished National, this course is structured by a series of anti-carceral action research projects such as contributing to active survivor defense campaigns.
CRPE-372 Transforming Harm and Mutual Aid: A Transformative Justice Lab
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. Alongside Dean Spade's Mutual Aid Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), students will be introduced to the radical history of mutual aid-- learning the difference between "charity" and "solidarity" -- and how mutual aid might interrupt systemic to interpersonal harm.
CRPE-373 Abolition and Radical Textiles
How do the topics of abolition and textiles come together? Marginalized communities have historically used folkloric, textile arts and material culture to amplify abolitionist causes. From secret quilt codes of the Underground Railroad to an abolitionist community sustained by a silk mill in Florence, Massachusetts how might thinking with textiles intervene on patriarchal systems rooted in rigidity, isolation and punishment? From the social devaluation of domesticized and feminized labor of weaving, quilting, sewing to banners, students will theorize and experiment with textiles, leaving with a grounded understanding of how textiles/fibers can and have played an essential role in the history of abolition.
CRPE-374 Latinx Immigration
The course provides an historical and topical overview of Latina/o migration to the United States. We will examine the economic, political, and social antecedents to Latin American migration, and the historical impact of the migration process in the U.S. Considering migration from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, we will discuss the social construction of race, the gendered nature of migration, migrant labor struggles, Latin American-U.S. Latino relations, immigration policy, and border life and enforcement. Notions of citizenship, race, class, gender, and sexuality will be central to our understanding of the complexity at work in the migration process.
CRPE-392 Senior Seminar
This capstone course brings seniors together to think through relationships among empirical research, theory, activism, and practice in gender studies and critical social thought. Majors with diverse interests, perspectives, and expertise will have the opportunity to reflect on, and share with each other, the significance of their major education in relation to their current and past work, their capstone or senior projects, their academic studies as a whole, and their engagements outside of academia. Course readings and discussion will be shaped by students in collaboration with the instructor.
CRPE-395 Independent Study
Collaboratories are courses designed to foster in-depth critical studies of race, colonialism, migration, and political economy. The department will offer one collaboratory per year.
