The Racial Justice Initiative is an
interdivisional collaboration launched in response to the events of 2020. In
the spring, the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery sparked a
widespread reckoning with police violence and systemic racism. During this same
period, the rapidly unfolding COVID-19 pandemic called renewed attention to the
unequal burdens and disparities that communities of color in the United States
continue to face. Throughout months of sustained protests, Black Lives Matter
activists have demanded that these events be situated within the broader
context of systemic racial inequality, white supremacy, and injustice rooted
within the country’s foundations. The Racial Justice Initiative brings together
courses from a range of disciplinary perspectives that seek to understand how
such systems are created and maintained, and how different forms of anti-racist
resistance emerge in response. The courses will focus on historical and
contemporary racial dynamics both in the United States and beyond. Students
enrolled in Racial Justice courses will be invited to participate in shared
guest speaker events that address themes central to the initiative.
Course: |
ANTH 219 Divided Cities |
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Professor: |
Jeffrey Jurgens |
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CRN: |
90190 |
Schedule: |
Tue Thurs
10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Reem
Kayden Center 102 |
Distributional Area: |
SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice |
Class cap: |
20 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies
This class offers an introduction to modern
cities and everyday urban life, with a central focus on cities that are both
socially and spatially divided. On the one hand, we will examine how
political-economic inequalities and collective differences (organized in
relation to race, color, gender, sexuality, class, [dis]ability, and other
social categories) are expressed in geographic boundaries and other aspects of
the built environment. On the other, we will explore how state agencies, real
estate developers, activists, residents, and other social actors make and
remake city spaces in ways that reinforce, rework, challenge, and refuse the
existing terms of inequality and difference. The class will revolve around case
studies of cities around the world (e.g., Berlin, Johannesburg, Kunming, and
Rio de Janeiro) as well as cities in the US (e.g., Baltimore, Chicago, Los
Angeles, and New York City). More broadly, we will trace the history of urban
segregation from a perspective that is both transnational and committed to the
pursuit of racial justice (as well as other forms of societal transformation).
This class builds on assigned reading in anthropology and other disciplines,
critical writing and discussion, and focused film viewing. At the same time, it
provides students with an opportunity to reflect on urban theorizing through
collaborations with community partners in Kingston and other cities. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an
interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the
understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and
beyond.
Course: |
ANTH 275 Post-Apartheid Imaginaries |
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Professor: |
Yuka Suzuki |
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CRN: |
90191 |
Schedule: |
Tue Thurs
12:10 PM - 1:30 PM Olin
101 |
Distributional Area: |
SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice |
Class cap: |
18 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Africana Studies; Global & International
Studies; Human Rights
South
Africa and Zimbabwe both have been marked by one of the most
brutal systems of racial segregation ever seen in the world. Before Independence, the distinction between white and
black signaled the stark difference between a life of guaranteed comfort and
privilege on the one hand, and a life of limited access to inferior land,
education, housing, and employment on the other. Following decades-long
struggles for liberation, each country worked to reinvent itself, crafting new
national narratives of cross-racial, cross-ethnic unity. This course explores
what it means to imagine postcolonial nationhood in the context of clearly
visible, radical inequalities. We consider the politics of land redistribution
and resettlement in contexts where the vast majority of arable land remains
under white ownership after Independence. We look closely at the charismatic
authority of politicians like Jacob Zuma and Robert Mugabe, alongside the
intensification of ethnic discourses that culminated in genocide in Zimbabwe.
Other topics we explore include intersections between race and gendered
violence, the rise of witchcraft and the occult, racialized economies of
rooibos tea, and paradoxes of white African belonging. This is a
D&J-designated course because it examines the ongoing effects of apartheid
in southern Africa. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an
interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the
understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and
beyond.
Course: |
ANTH 363 Asia and America: Imperial Formations |
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Professor: |
Naoko Kumada |
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CRN: |
90556 |
Schedule: |
Thur 2:00 PM - 4:20
PM Olin 301 |
Distributional Area: |
SA Social Analysis |
Class cap: |
12 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: American Studies; Asian Studies; Global & International
Studies
The Atlanta shooting and the sharp
increase in anti-Asian violence have taken racial politics in the US to a new
level. These attacks echo the anti-China rhetoric spread by mainstream and
social media, corporations, and policymakers. Taking an anthropological
approach, this course attempts to offer historical, cultural, and geopolitical
contexts for understanding the racial tension surrounding Asian communities in
the US and abroad today. It takes into account the long-standing historical and
systemic factors in US society as well as new global challenges brought by the
pandemic and the rise of China. Seeing the US as an empire, the course explores
how its imperial formations and practices shaped, and were shaped by, Asia and
its interactions with Asia. It examines how America continued its westward
capitalist and militarist expansion, shifting its frontier as it added
territories, colonies, and military bases across the globe, in the islands in
the Pacific and Asia (Hawaii, Samoa, Marshall Islands, Okinawa, and Diego
Garcia). Moving beyond the clear-cut boundaries of sovereign nation-states, we
explore layered forms of sovereignty, nationhood, and (extra)territoriality
between Asia and America. Topics include racial and gendered forms of Asian
labor and migration (‘coolies’ and ‘prostitutes’), the practices of building
and maintaining US military bases, America’s wars on Asia (the Philippines,
Vietnam), and local responses. This course is part of the
Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among
students and faculty to further the understanding
of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond. This course is part of the Racial Justice
Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to
further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United
States and beyond.
Course: |
EUS/AS 309 Environmental Justice: Art, Science, and Radical
Cartography |
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Professor: |
Elias Dueker and Krista Caballero |
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CRN: |
90169 |
Schedule: |
Tue Thurs
12:10 PM - 1:30 PM New
Annandale House |
Distributional Area: |
SA Social Analysis |
Class cap: |
15 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: American Studies; Experimental Humanities; Human
Rights
We generally assume maps are objective, accurate representations of data
and the world around us when, in fact, they depict the knowledge, experience,
and values of the humans who draft them. As a hybrid EUS practicum +
colloquium, this course will explore ways in which ecological issues are
entangled with colonial histories of racism and supremacy, resource extraction
and expansion through mapping. Native American scholarship will ground our
exploration as we consider the impact and consequences of mapping as a tool
used historically to claim ownership and invite exploitation. We will also
investigate the evolution of radical cartography to counter these practices and
imagine alternative mapping for more just ecological futures. A series of
Indigenous scholars and activists will provide an opportunity for students to
learn from experts working at the forefront of their fields to address
environmental injustices locally, nationally, and internationally. These guest
lectures will be paired with hands-on projects that explore mapping as a tool
for environmental advocacy alongside artistic and counter-mapping approaches
that experiment with ways we might communicate scientific and humanistic
knowledge to a wider audience. In both theory and practice this team-taught
course aims to reconsider and transform ways of engaging community science and
community action through collaborative inquiry, interdisciplinary
experimentation, and meaningful cross-cultural dialogue. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an
interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the
understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and
beyond.
Course: |
EUS 321 GIS for Environmental Justice |
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Professor: |
Susan Winchell-Sweeney |
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CRN: |
90170 |
Schedule: |
Wed Fri 10:20 AM - 11:40
AM Henderson Comp. Center 101A |
Distributional Area: |
LS SA Laboratory Science Social
Analysis D+J Difference and Justice |
Class cap |
9 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Historical Studies; Human Rights
Using ESRI GIS software and associated apps, students will receive formal instruction
in the fundamentals of using spatial information, conducting spatial analysis,
and producing high-quality cartographic products. Students will learn how GIS
may be used as a tool for identifying and assessing environmental justice (EJ)
issues at the local, regional and global scale. Students will apply these GIS
skills and knowledge base to a team-based research project focused on an
environmental justice problem. The course culminates in a presentation session,
where students show their analysis and results to their peers, professors and
the greater Bard community. This course is
part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among
students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and
injustice in the United States and beyond.
Course: |
HIST 129 Urban American History |
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Professor: |
Jeannette Estruth |
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CRN: |
90147 |
Schedule: |
Tue Thurs
5:40 PM - 7:00 PM Olin
201 |
Distributional Area: |
HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: American Studies; Environmental & Urban
Studies
This class will explore the history of the urban American experience. We will
ask: what makes a city? How have people built cities, inhabited them, and lived
urban lives? What drives urban development and growth? What is the role of
cities within capitalism and within government? Together we will begin to think
of cities as sets of relationships, as well as a distinct spatial form. To that
end, this course will use cities as a lens to research the following themes in
United States history: labor and markets, wealth and inequality, ethnic
identity and race, and gender and the environment since industrialization. With
these frames of analysis, we will examine what ideas activists, architects,
planners, social scientists, literary scholars, critical theorists, and
sociologists have generated about urban America. Our tools of exploration will include
lectures, discussions, scholarly books, primary sources, articles, blogs, and
films. This course is part of the Racial Justice
Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to
further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United
States and beyond.
Course: |
HIST 160 Latin-American Histories |
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Professor: |
Miles Rodriguez |
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CRN: |
90149 |
Schedule: |
Tue Thurs
12:10 PM - 1:30 PM Olin
301 |
Distributional Area: |
HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice |
Class cap: |
15 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: American Studies; Global & International
Studies; Human Rights; Latin American/Iberian Studies
There are now nearly sixty million people of Latin American origin or
descent in the United States. Yet there is no agreement by members of this
population, nor otherwise, on how to define, speak of, or understand them, in
terms of either common or diverse experiences or histories. The very names
people have used to describe them, and how they have described themselves,
alternate, fluctuate, and vary tremendously by person, place, time, and
circumstance. Those names include, but are not limited to: Hispanic, Latin,
Latina, Latino, Latinx, and Latin-American, as well as for more specific
groups, including: Afro-Latino, Chicano, Cuban, Dominican, Guatemalan,
Honduran, Mexican, Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, Salvadoran, Xicano, and
people of Indigenous and Latin American descent in the US. This class deals
with the ways in which those of Latin American origin can be understood in
terms of culture, race, ethnicity, nationality, and identity, and the attendant
controversies inside and outside of their communities. It focuses on the
distinct, and distinctive, qualities and histories of various parts of this
population, including by far the largest group, people of Mexican descent, as
well as the next largest, of Spanish Caribbean and Central American descent.
Topics for special consideration include: ways to name, describe, and
conceptualize people of Latin American origin and descent in the US; relations
between different homelands and diasporas in Latin America and the US; race,
racism, and mestizaje, or interracial mixture, as process and ideology; popular
social movements; civil rights; women's rights; labor; migration; and relations
with other Americans of different, as well as the same or similar origins. Its
goal is to create a more complex and complete historical understanding of
people of Latin American descent in the US today. LAIS Core Course.
Historiography course. This course is
part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among
students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and
injustice in the United States and beyond.
Course: |
HIST 195 Living Black in America: Major Themes in African American History |
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Professor: |
Myra Armstead |
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CRN: |
90144 |
Schedule: |
Mon Wed 10:20 AM - 11:40
AM Olin 201 |
Distributional Area: |
HA Historical Analysis |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Africana Studies; American Studies
This course is intended to provide a foundation for understanding the African
American experience in the past, and contemporary resonances of that past. Rather than a strictly chronological
overview, this survey is thematically organized. Each theme will be approached within a periodization that moves forward
through the preindustrial, industrial, and postindustrial eras—thus
highlighting the way in which the race/class nexus will be a central
concern. Major themes will be: the
economics or wages of Blackness, social and cultural constructions of race,
violence/surveillance/criminalization, self-constructed identities (racial,
national, ethnic, gender), representations of Blackness (in art and
literature),Black cosmologies/philosophies/resistance strategies and politics,
and memory. As students of history, we
will consider continuities and discontinuities, connections and rupture—when,
how, and why these occur. While the
themes can be viewed as discreet subjects, the ways in which they overlap and
intersect will be addressed in the course as well. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an
interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the
understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and
beyond.
Course: |
HIST 2210 Africans, Empire, and the Great War |
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Professor: |
Wendy Urban-Mead |
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CRN: |
90167 |
Schedule: |
Tue 5:40 PM - 8:00
PM Olin 303 |
Distributional Area: |
HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice |
Class cap: |
8 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Africana Studies
What made the First World War a "world" war? Many
factors contributed to the conflict's designation as a world war, but the
significant role of Africa, Africans, and members of the African Diaspora in
the war is not least among them. Some Africans and members of the African
diaspora signed up in response to a call for volunteers, others were ruthlessly
coerced, and many more became involved for reasons that fell somewhere in the
uncertain middle ground between coercion and willing participation. African-Americans,
and African subjects under French, German, and British colonial rule in Africa
and the Caribbean were drawn into the war's vortex. Following DuBois' prescient
observation that "[t]he problem of the twentieth century is the problem of
the color-line," this course visits the Great War with an eye to unpacking
the experiences, choices, and impacts of Africans and members of the African
diaspora in the context of both empire and white supremacy. Gender - in
conversation with questions regarding masculinity, warfare, and race - will be
a vital course theme. Working from a wide range of primary materials and
selected theoretical and secondary works, students will have the opportunity
both to form questions in response to what they find in the readings, and
explore possible answers, using the skills of the historian. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an
interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the
understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and
beyond.
This
course is cross-listed with the MAT program.
.
Course: |
HIST 225 Migrants and Refugees in the Americas |
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Professor: |
Miles Rodriguez |
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CRN: |
90155 |
Schedule: |
Tue Thurs
10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Olin
301 |
Distributional Area: |
HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice |
Class cap: |
15 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: American Studies; Global & International
Studies; Human Rights; Latin American/Iberian Studies
Cross-listed: American Studies; Human Rights; Latin American Studies.
The Border. The Ban. The Wall. Raids. Deportations. Separation of
Families. Immigrant Rights. Sanctuary. Refugee Resettlement. These words -
usually confined to policy, enforcement, and activism related to migrants and
refugees - have recently exploded into the public view and entered into
constant use. The current political administration made migratory and refugee
enforcement, and of migration more generally, a centerpiece of its electoral
campaign and the subject of its first executive orders, generating broad public
controversy. Most migration to the US is from Latin America, by far the largest
single migrant population is from Mexico, and the rise of Central American
migration has proved enduring. Focusing on south-north migration from these
Latin American regions, this class argues that it is impossible to understand
the current political situation in the US without studying the relatively
lesser-known history of migrant and refugee human rights over the last three
decades, including massive protests, movements for sanctuary, and attempts at
reform and enforcement. The class takes into account shifting global
demographics, changing reasons for migration, rapid legal and political changes,
complex enforcement policies and
practices, and powerful community movements for reform, which are often
forgotten with the opening and closing
of a given news cycle. The class also argues that migrant and refugee voices
matter and are critical to understanding migration as an historical and current
problem. The course includes migrant, refugee, and activist narratives, and an
array of historical, legal, political, and other primary sources. Its goal is
to create a more complete historical understanding of Latin American-origin
migration in the contemporary US context. This course is part of the
Liberal Arts Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education
initiative. This course is
part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among
students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and
injustice in the United States and beyond.
Course: |
HIST 331 Latin America: Race, Religion and Revolution |
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Professor: |
Miles Rodriguez |
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CRN: |
90161 |
Schedule: |
Wed 9:20 AM - 11:40
AM Olin 303 |
Distributional Area: |
HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice |
Class cap: |
15 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: American Studies; Global & International
Studies; Human Rights; Latin American/Iberian Studies; Study of Religions
This research seminar will study the violent interactions between race,
religion, and revolution in Latin America from the early twentieth-century to
the present, to understand how these interactions have mattered to the region's
history and how they explain some of its most violent current conflicts. The
very name "Latin America" derived from and became associated with
specific racial, religious, and revolutionary meanings through a history of
violence. The seminar will begin by studying how racial concepts formed and
became fixed ideas through distinct revolutionary-inspired intellectual debates
on interracial mixture and indigenous rights. Based in Mexico and Peru, the
formation of concepts like global mestizaje, a "cosmic race," and
indigenismo involved rival valuations of each nation's indigenous and colonial
histories and cultures, with lasting effects. The seminar will then explore the
simultaneous rise of wars and conflicts over radically different religious
meanings and faiths, within and outside of Catholicism, including native
religions and the rise of Evangelical Protestant Christianity. The latter part
of the seminar will focus on Guatemala, which dramatically combined extreme
violence over race, religion, and revolution, and focused global attention on
indigenous rights and human rights. These histories will allow for a deeper
understanding of the rise of different forms of violence in Central America
today, and therefore of the current human rights, migrant, and refugee crisis
centered there and involving other parts of Latin America and the US. This
seminar emphasizes the narratives, interpretations, and voices of participants
in the history, and critical engagement with these primary sources in the
writing of the history. This course is
part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among
students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and
injustice in the United States and beyond.
Course: |
PS 392 The Political Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois |
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Professor: |
Mie Inouye |
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CRN: |
90572 |
Schedule: |
Thurs 10:20 AM - 12:40 PM Hegeman 201 |
Distributional Area: |
MBV Meaning, Being,
Value |
Class cap: |
12 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Africana
Studies; American Studies
This
seminar explores the political thought of the sociologist, organizer, and
political theorist William Edward Burghardt Du Bois.
We will trace the development of Du Bois’s political
thought on the themes of organization, race, class, leadership, democracy, and
freedom over the course of his long career. Throughout, we’ll consider the
relationship between Du Bois’s experiences of
political organizing in the Niagara Movement, the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, and the Socialist Party and major developments
in his political thought. Finally, we will consider the relevance of Du Bois’s political thought to today’s black freedom struggle.