Course	SST 214 Black Thought: Francophone
Professor	Tabetha Ewing
CRN	16024
Schedule	Tu Th 4:00 – 5:20 pm OLIN 202
Distribution	OLD: C	NEW: History

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, SRE

Titled after the famous C.L.R. James essay, this course reviews ideas that push the boundaries of nation, race, and identity held by influential 20^th-century writers who considered themselves to be subjects of the African diaspora. Their works, including those of James, Franz Fanon, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, and Maryse Condé, have shaped whole schools of political and social thought in the later 20^th century. As the debates around the politics of race, identity, gender, and empire shift, do these once- canonical figures still have relevance today? We will read scholars and polemicists commenting on the complexion of the new world order to assist us in drawing conclusions to this question. On-line

Course	SST 236 Classification, Taxonomies, Folksonomies: Tagging the World
Professor	Karin Roffman
CRN	16479
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 – 2:50 pm HDR 106
Distribution	OLD:	NEW:

This course examines the kinds of unconscious cultural assumptions that result from systems of organizing knowledge.  For example, in the 1880s as the library was becoming an increasingly central repository for knowledge, Melvil Dewey created a "scientific system" for the organization of all current, and he believed, all future knowledge.  The two assumptions in his system were that he had created the best system for organizing all existing knowledge and that any knowledge which could not be fit into his system was, by his definition, irrelevant.  It wasn't until the 1920s that an increasing number of writers and librarians argued that Dewey's system was, in fact, one of exclusion.  By classifying all writing by black authors, for example, under the number for "slavery," Dewey was consciously imposing his dated world-view on the future.  Now, in the Internet age and with the ubiquity of search engines such as Yahoo! and Google which provide access to the expanding universe of the Web, systems for classifying information have emerged that are, by necessity, increasingly fluid and dynamic.  Individual users can now create their own systems, and new open architectures created to organize individual classification systems—called folksonomies—are increasingly being used to tame the vast amount of information on the Internet. This course will study these systems, with their own inherent biases and limitations, and will examine the socio-cultural impact of classification systems in general.