Previous Courses

This class explores the autobiography as a form of both personal and political expression.  We begin by complicating, questioning and demystifying the divide between the personal and political by linking 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 letters, quasi-fictionalized autobiographies, poetry, and autobiographies of political activists.  We will also engage with theories of social structure and agency in order to theorize the interface between personal experience and political agency.

In this course, we will view the autobiography as a vehicle for making personal experience something that is politically significant.  The autobiography, one could say, births political agency, hence our course title, “Autobiography as Political Agency.”  Therefore, we are reading autobiographies to think about how the autobiography as a form creates possibilities for both individual and collective agency.

Application: Spring-2023-Application-Inside-Out-CHC-431H-Autobiography-as-Political-Agency-1

Cultural Geography provides a lens for studying popular culture in all its guises, and can be a key tool for understanding the cleavages in society that are referred to as “culture wars”.  Culture, as a human construction, is always dynamic, and always contested.  In this course we will develop the approaches and determine the questions that help us to understand where culture comes from, where it’s going, and how it is determined, shaped, represented, and challenged, from place to place, people to people, time to time.  Culture is power, culture is politics; how can we understand it, and influence it, as it unfolds around us? As we work through the course we are going to explore layers relating to place, space, landscape, identity, and power.  What are these things/processes, how do they work?

In addition to course readings, we will draw upon the world “out there”; landscapes, buildings, magazines, literature, music, dance, film, television, discourse, and so on, to bring many cultural geographies into view.  Your primary task is to read and participate in discussions, to respond in writing to the prompts that I will give you, and to be looking for illustrations of our themes in the world around you.

Application: Spring-Application-Inside-Out-Spring-GEOG-444-Cultural-Geography

We will read Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad, the recently (2019) translated “prequel” to Life and Fate, and Is it Righteous to Be?, a series of interviews with the 20^th-century’s greatest philosopher of ethics, Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995). Life and Fate, a panoramic novel modeled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, was a work of literature that Levinas often referred to in his writings of the last fifteen years of his life. “The essential thing in this book is simply what the character Ikonnikov says – ‘There is neither God nor the Good, but there is goodness’ – which is also my thesis.” Grossman (1905-1964), like Levinas, is careful to distinguish ethics from politics and he, like Levinas, insists that, even in the wake of the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, goodness is still possible.

We will discuss Grossman’s novel in the context of Vladimir Putin’s current and brutal invasion of Ukraine, and we will note the moral and tactical significance of the fact that, in Grossman’s Stalingrad, Russia (or, more precisely, the Soviet Union) is being invaded by Nazi Germany, in contrast to the current war, in which Russia is the invader.

Application: Spring-2023-Application-Inside-Out-CHC-421H-Ethics-and-Literature

This country was founded on principles of inequality, despite aspirations otherwise stated in the Constitution. In the generations since, the fundamental inequalities based on race, gender and class, as well as other bases of difference and identity, remain foundational to our society. While the way social inequality is exercised and enforced has changed, the fact of our society being built on a bedrock of inequality has persisted, and class inequality is greater now than at any time in the history of this nation. In this course, we will examine the experience of social inequality through the lens of different genres: qualitative social science, fiction, and the personal narrative of memoir. We will read different kinds of texts to explore both the impact and experience of poverty, racism and other forms of inequality, and consider how the texts can teach us about the social structure of inequality in America.

In the modern age, religions, moral codes, and cultural systems come into question. The individual human being finds itself alone and uncertain, in search of value and meaning. Anxiety first becomes an important theme in this period. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this situation gives rise—especially after World War II–to existentialism, a movement in thought that turns around the felt need and desire to discover new ways of orienting oneself ethically and aesthetically in the world. We read and discuss novels, short stories, and philosophical essays that explore the dissolution of old values, and the possibilities for the creation of new ones. All of these texts focus on radical freedom and radical self-responsibility. We examine central works by German, French and Antillais authors from the late 1800s and the 1900s, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Franz Fanon.

Philosophers and legal scholars generally define the rule of law as a state of affairs in which law, rather than the whim of individuals, is “in charge” in a society. The first part of the class will delve into what the rule of law is, whether/why it is valuable, and what conditions are needed to maintain the rule of law. The second part of the class will focus on investigating various philosophical accounts of mercy, beginning with Seneca and continuing through contemporary work on the subject. Students will examine competing definitions of mercy, distinguish mercy from related concepts like forgiveness, and identify how mercy may be valuable. The third part of the course delves into an apparent tension between mercy and the rule of law. Mercy is often understood as giving a person less punishment than is required by law. On this understanding, a judge who grants mercy to an individual will be derogating from what the law requires. In doing so, the judge is not upholding the rule of law – rather than faithfully applying the law, the judge is taking charge and ruling according to her own will. Is respect for the rule of law inconsistent with a practice of mercy? If a society values both mercy and the rule of law, how (if at all) should mercy be incorporated into a legal system?

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.