Upcoming Courses

Applications are closed for Spring 2025 courses. Please check back before Fall 2025 to apply for future Inside-Out courses.

SPRING 2025 / DIVIDED SOCIETIES / GEOG410 / SHAUL COHEN

This course runs Mondays from approximately 4-10pm. Attendance is mandatory.

Established political systems often maintain the fiction of community when in fact they are holding power over disparate and oppositional groups.  Whether at the state or local level, the myth of unity is a powerful tool in the ordering of social, ethnic, or economic constituencies.  In this course we will examine places that are composed of different groups that have distinct identities, but are bound up in – or competing for – particular geographical spaces.  We will briefly explore some of the obvious examples, such as Northern Ireland, Jammu/Kashmir, and Israel/Palestine, but we will spend more time on domestic cases, such as Eugene/Springfield, the Hatfields and McCoys (think Ducks and Beavers, but armed), or the Harleys and anything else on two wheels.  Our focus will be on the nexus of identity and power as they are expressed in geographical and territorial terms, as we try to understand why and how we live in such a fractured world.  The course will be held under the auspices of the Inside Out Program in the Oregon State Penitentiary.  The format of the course is discussion based, and will include regular essay writing and a final group project. 

 

SPRING 2025 / AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS POLITICAL AGENCY / HC431H / ANITA CHARI

This course runs Tuesdays from approximately 4-10pm. Attendance is mandatory.

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.