Global studies

This reveals how the British encounter with racial difference in the India both validated and subverted the project of empire-building. We begin by examining clashes within London scholarly societies over the question of racial differentiation in the nineteenth century. We then determine how the British deployed these "scientific" theories of race in the colonies: Did they inform relations between colonized and settler populations, or did the local states innovate novel race-based policies to undergird their rule? Key topics include acts of resistance to prejudicial racialization, post-Emancipation labor systems, miscegenation, colonial classification schemes, public health controls, and fears of European degeneration in tropical climates. We will use primary sources (anthropological public speeches, fictional works) to critique the British narrative of a "civilizing mission" and to investigate how an array of actors used race as an instrument to accomplish specific objectives. and in what does and belonging? follows the history race and national formation in the region, from the wake of the independence movements of the early nineteenth century to the present. It draws on historical, anthropological, sociological, artistic, and literary approaches to identifying, analyzing, and interpreting the varied meanings of race and nation throughout the region. We will discuss changing notions of race over time and their relationship to contemporaneous social theories; we will analyze notions of citizenship, equality, and race both in ideas and in practice; and we will examine the intersection of racial formation and gender and sexual politics. some of the key concerns at the intersection of gender studies and urban studies. In this course, we will take gender relations and sexuality as our primary concern and as a constitutive aspect of social relations that vitally shape cities and urban life. We will examine how gender is inscribed in city landscapes, how it is lived and embodied in relation to race, class, and sexuality, and how it is (re)produced through violence, inequality, and resistance. Over the course of the quarter, we will draw on an interdisciplinary scholarship that approaches the central question of how and why thinking about urban life in relation to gender and sex matters. on the (North) West of the planet? What happens with the old presumed categories of "West" and "East" when the world is lived and conceived from other locations and perspectives? What remains of when America is apprehended from the "Pacific Rim"? Drawing on close observations and analysis of representative cultural productions, this course seeks to map the importance and diversity of these transpacific cultural itineraries and to explore alternative ways of thinking about "Latin America" as a central agent of our connected modernities. enhancing your knowledge of Latin American cultural history, this course is designed to help you improve your close reading and critical thinking skills, as well as continue building on your linguistic competence in Spanish. its is shaped by histories of collective displacement and loss, as well as invention and heritage. The discourse of diaspora remains foundational for several interdisciplinary fields, including Black studies, Asian American studies, Indigenous studies, Latinx studies, and more. Within these intellectual orientations, diasporic identities are notably expansive and unfixed. As observed by the late cultural theorist Stuart Hall, "diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference," bridging old and new traditions of worldmaking, resistance, and solidarities within and across distinct diasporic sensibilities." Students in this class will work with scholarly, literary, sonic, and visual materials demonstrating how use of diaspora alternately mobilizes and roots people, in ways that claim pasts and futures at once. the a forms interrelated and cover Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas. We will study how Palestinian real estate developers, Cherokee small business owners, Mayan coffee cooperatives, Navajo coal workers, Lauje cultivators, and others use economic practices to defend territory, claim rights, and build communities. We will ask how these experiences contribute to critiques of inequality and dispossession, and how they clarify what is at stake in struggles over autonomy, sustainability, and sovereignty. Chernobyl disaster, the world grew concerned about the scale of risks and hazards surrounding us in our everyday lives. Modern societies seem to be constantly on the brink of environmental disasters, militaristic aggressions, and economic crises. Security has become a fixation for states and parents alike, and risk is endemic to financial markets where returns to investments are the greatest when they are the most uncertain. Even reality TV shows like the Bachelor frame "falling in love" in risk-related terms. This course examines the constitutive role of risk in the political, medical, financial, and environmental arenas. We first discuss various conceptualizations of "risk" and how to distinguish it from uncertainty and insecurity. Then, we investigate the meaning of risk in this socio-political era through the writings of theorists like Beck, Giddens, Douglas, and Bauman. We will review research on how risk and uncertainty are processed organizationally, affectively, and discursively. For instance, we will read about how states create surveillance systems and contingency plans to control future security threats, how risk perceptions shape medical assistance-seeking, and how experts in finance and weather forecasting develop sophisticated methods to render futures predictable. medical and their religious, spiritual, cultural intersections. Students will gain an understanding of the history of medicine in the Middle East, India, China, and the West, including the metaphysical systems that inform those traditions. Within the frameworks of Medicine, i.e. "prophetic medicine" and Sufi healing practices, Avicenna and the Galenic tradition, we Ritual healing, faith and prayer, divine healers and medical authority, etiology and pathology, religious pharmacology and drugs, mental health, spiritual states and possession, and near death experiences, among others. conduct research on a particular modality in conversation with recent trends in health in modern allopathy while evaluating efficacy, scope and place of traditional modalities. Ethnographic Methods in Chicago. 100 Units. What can the neighborhoods and communities of Chicago teach us about the wider forces shaping our society-globalization, mass mediation, immigration, and nationalism? This class prepares students to conduct ethnographic fieldwork through practical experience at field sites around our campus and city. Our course readings and discussions will equip students with the anthropological theory and methodological tools necessary for successful fieldwork. Students will apply these concepts and methods by visiting a field site of their choosing in Chicago, for example, an RSO, an NGO, a religious community, a park, or a diner. The course culminates with student presentations of their ethnographic data-field notes, maps, interviews, photos-and their analysis of how the minutia of everyday life helps us understand Chicago's global society. No prior knowledge of anthropological theory or experience with ethnographic fieldwork is required. and perspectives we our we news, and we our Stories are central to interpreting human experiences: they us order them into meaningful episodes and communicate these understandings to one another. This seminar explores how social and historical sciences use empiric evidence in the narrative form. Given the variety of narrative genres (fictional/non-fictional, written/oral), any discussion on narrative analysis has to be selective. This course focuses on first-person accounts of personal experiences and how they can inform sociocultural studies. At the beginning of the semester, we will delineate the terminology and explore common elements in narratives. We will also examine different analytical approaches like thematic and structural analysis and what kind of insights these approaches bring about. We will then investigate empirical examples of narrative analysis from sociological, historical, and feminist research to understand how personal accounts can expand our understanding of various social phenomena. The course will have a practical component where students will gain hands-on experience designing and carrying out an interview-based research project that uses the interpretive methods we study. foundational for critical contradictions of how intersecting tools of by along critical Asad. this we examine how the concepts of race and key components of the political, philosophical and ethical projects of these authors. No prerequisite knowledge of critical theory, this historical period, expected. great deal about how we view the world and history generally. This course introduces answers to this question by previous scholars and challenges students to assess how these answers relate to their own education and intellectual interests at the University of Chicago. We will touch on major approaches and trends in the growing field of world history, including civilizational studies, the "great divergence" or "rise of the West," world- systems theory, environmental history, "big history," and the study of specific people, places, and objects in the context of world history. Students will leave with a solid grounding in one of the most vibrant and contentious fields of history today and a better understanding of the diversity of ways to situate historical narratives and current events into a global perspective.