Author: ifreeman

How do we understand the concept of “culture”? What factors contribute to cultural difference, what does that mean in the world, and why is it important?  This course approaches culture as a set of evolving and overlapping processes, rather than as something that is fixed in time and place. It will explore the power relations that are part of cultural, and affect people based on who they are (or who they are told that they are) and where they are.  Cultural Geography gives us tools to examine the ways culture is produced and practiced in different communities, societies, and scales.  The class will draw upon a wide range of readings and experiences, and students will engage in dialogue about the worlds they live in, the cultures they are part of, and the ways that they interact with power and place.

This class will focus on forms of social control in the United States, with a primary focus on race and urban policing. We will consider developments such as community policing and big data policing in cities like New York and Chicago and the history of policing in Baltimore and Los Angeles. We will also look at the role of policing internationally, at the U.S. border, and in colonial spaces like Puerto Rico. Of particular interest will be the relationships between policing agencies and communities of color. This course has a seminar format, relying on student-centered discussion with minimal use of lectures by the professor.

It satisfies an upper-division ES elective requirement for Ethnic Studies majors and minors; General Social Science major with a focus in Crime, Law, and Society; campus partner elective for the Legal Studies minor; and UO’s core education requirements as a US: Difference, Inequality, Agency course.

This class explores the autobiography as a form of both personal and political expression. The class begins by complicating, questioning and demystifying the divide between the personal and political by linking students’ personal stories and histories with narratives of broader social structures, such as capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, and colonialism.

We will read autobiographies from diverse sources, including diaries, quasi-fictionalized autobiographies, poetry, and autobiographies of political activists. We will also engage with theories of social structure and agency in order to interrogate the interface between personal experience and political agency. Finally, we delve into trans-generational narratives in order to think about social structure and agency across time and space.

Students will produce a significant body of writing in class and in homework assignments in order to create their own (political) autobiographies. Authors that we will read in the class include the following: Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Weldon Johnson, Gloria Anzaldua, Anne Frank, Hannah Arendt, Iris Young, Walter Benjamin, Nellie Wong, Kitty Tsui, Aime Cesaire, and Nelson Mandela.

How are environmental issues — and particularly water issues related to climate change — experienced, understood, studied, and managed in different ways depending on race, class, and gender? How are environmental impacts unevenly distributed? Who produces the knowledge to grapple with climate change and water stresses — and who doesn’t? Who gets to decide (and who is left out) of the solutions to climate change and water security? And what can we learn more broadly about issues of race, class, and gender when we study climate and water in particular? These are the kinds of questions this course will tackle. At the broadest level, it is a course in environmental justice and specifically climate justice. We will focus on water-related topics, and water in many different forms — from urban water contamination and sea level rise to glacier floods and water for farming and food. We will address these issues in the United States and internationally. While the course will examine theoretical and technical aspects of climate and water, the justice focus asks us to think also about ethics, morality, fairness and equity, and how inequality plays out within particular societies, globally, historically, and for future generations. Ultimately, this helps us reflect more profoundly on how we — and others — interact with and influence not only our planet but also each other.

This course is only open to Honors College students.

Join us for an exploration of the American Juvenile Justice system from its beginnings in the early 19th century, to its contemporary form today. We will examine the social, political, economic, gender and racial perspectives that have influenced juvenile justice policy throughout its history, and continue to shape policy today. The concept of “parens patriae” (the state as parent) was the fundamental ideology that guided the origins of the juvenile justice system, but recent Supreme Court cases, as well as contemporary brain research are challenging old norms. Researchers and Think Tank progressives are suggesting the juvenile justice system should be drastically changed in order to improve the outcomes for youth involved in the system, and we will end the course by looking at current reform efforts.

In this course, we will consider the intersections of race, gender and class and how they are experienced in, and how they shape institutions, such as the labor market, social welfare system, schools, and the criminal justice system, for example. We will read ethnographies to examine the politics of race, class and gender in the United States.
The class will be entirely discussion-based. We will conclude by employing the concepts from the course to examine our own lives through the lens of the institutional structures studied (work/economy, education, family and friendship networks, criminal justice system). This will constitute the core of the final essay for the course.

This course explores social change and conflict resolution through the lens of autobiography by incarcerated individuals whose stories and experiences influenced social movements and conflict situations. We will focus on three case studies: the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the US during the Civil Rights era and today.

All interested students must complete an application and an interview with the instructor. Classes are held at the Oregon State Correctional Institution with an equal number of UO and incarcerated students. Students must agree to abide by the rules and policies of the Department of Corrections and the rules of Inside-Out and the UO’s Prison Education Program. These rules will be discussed at length in a pre-class meeting. Holding classes in a prison offers unique opportunities for depth of discussion and diversity of experiences, and also is a complex emotional space.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is one of the greatest and most influential masters of the novel. The Russian literary classics of the nineteenth century, including the novels of Tolstoy, made a profound impression on Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), perhaps the greatest modern philosopher of the centrality of ethical obligation to what it means to be human. We will carefully read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, paying special attention to what the novel has to say about ethics understood in Levinas’s sense: my inescapable responsibility for a unique and irreplaceable other. We will read Ethics and Infinity, a reasonably accessible and brief series of interviews with Levinas, and we will look for connections between Tolstoy’s fiction and Levinas’s thought. We will consider how Anna’s otherness is sacrificed, in Tolstoy’s novel, to a notion of religion that is divorced from ethics, a notion of religion that Emmanuel Levinas labels as “primitive”: “Everything that cannot be reduced to an interhuman relation,” Levinas writes in Totality and Infinity (79), “represents not the superior, but rather the forever primitive, form of religion.” Anna’s husband Karenin’s dogmatic – and, perhaps paradoxically, at the same time “primitive” – understanding of Christianity makes it impossible for him to hear Anna’s voice, to see her face, to register her otherness, her alterity. Tolstoy’s critique of conventional religion as a silencing of lost voices is sounded again and again throughout the remainder of his career as a writer and thinker.

This is an Inside-Out class: half the students (“inside” students) will be those who live inside OSCI and the other half (“outside” students) will be from UO’s main campus.