5 courses with the subject AMST GU, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
AMST GU4110THE WEALTH OF NATIVES4.00
Indigenous people are often imagined in the distant past, or as living anachronisms in relation to contemporary life. Working against these assumptions, this course examines how Native peoples have survived colonialism, focusing on economic aspects of colonialism in North America, while looking to Australia and Hawai‘i. We will look at the long history of Native land struggles, and links between colonial economies and ecological destruction. Themes guiding our inquiry include: the development of wage labor, property law and economic production on Native lands, histories of political and economic dependency, "development" as defined and practiced over Native communities, and Native people's own economic choices. Our inquiry will be oriented towards deepening our ability to critically analyze the colonial situation we live in, and to see Indigenous survivals despite ongoing assaults against life and territory
This seminar engages the life and work of W.E.B. Du Bois, widely understood to be the greatest intellectual in U.S. history. Students will read and discuss Du Bois’s autobiography, and major works across his long and prolific career. Major themes include pan-Africanism, socialism, and peace
Latina/o/x populations constitute over 19％ of the U.S. population as of 2020, one of the fastest growing groups in the U.S. with a long and rich history in the U.S while maintaining transnational ties. In this course students are invited to critically analyze the social histories of and contemporary experiences of a diverse range of Latino/a/x populations from across the Americas. Over the course of the semester, we will discuss how Latino/a/x populations come to reside in and transform New York City, how Latina/o/x populations contend with everyday life and, how they shape and reshape the communities they resettle in. Although the focus is on New York City, we will also examine the movement of peoples from the Caribbean and Latin America. Topics include histories of migration, labor recruitment, citizenship, coloniality and racialization, neoliberalism and the rise of financialization in NYC, environmental racism, community formation and Latino/a/x political activism. We will critically examine a variety of text and genres ranging from anthropological, historical, poetry, documentary, films, media, and art to shift away from homogeneous categorization of Latino/a/x populations to understanding populations as dynamic and complex. Students are invited to bring their stories to class as this is a collaborative learning environment
AMST GU4400Crime, Sex, Race and the Politics of Purity4.00
The politics of what and who counts as worthy, good, or pure mediates possibilities for political and legal life. This course takes as its central question: how do certain ideas around purity and innocence come to appear natural? By considering a wide range of topics including carceral studies, immigration, race-making, settler colonialism, gender and sexuality and cultural studies, we will uncover the ways that cultural objects circulate and do political work. How are notions of race, crime, and purity produced, policed, and lived? And finally, how might we live otherwise—against innocence?
For almost two hundred years, people around the world have sought to perfect society through scientifically directed breeding. Though often described as a thing of the past, contemporary life is suffused with fears over declining birth rates and dreams of producing perfect “designer babies.” In this class we will explore the long history of attempts to remake reproduction and regulate population across U.S. History (with some excursions into India and Germany), through a study of a range of interdisciplinary scholarship. Together, we will ask: why have panics around population emerged under specific circumstances, and who pushed them? How and why did eugenics explode into popularity at the turn of the century, and how was it adopted into and by various social movements? What, exactly, is (and was) eugenics? What is the relationship between it and earlier efforts to scientifically categorize and remake society? What role did it play in the development of twentieth-century politics? Why did states engage in campaigns of mass sterilization across the first half of the twentieth century? Why did they stop? How have different groups sought to remake reproduction since?
