CENTER FOR NATIVE AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS RESEARCH

Popular culture is an arena in which Latin Americans make cultural offerings their own through creativity and reappropriation, and functions as a resource in the practices of everyday life. Pop culture forms can be key sites for the formation of identities, for the ways in which people make sense of the world, and understand their location within it. This course looks at a variety of pop culture forms from Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, including music, dance, sport, television and film, social media, art, beauty, and consumer products. Taking an anthropological approach to this subject, we will interrogate the ways that pop culture draws from, comments upon, and at times resists political issues, notions of authenticity, social problems, and inequalities. In the context of Latin America, race, gender, and class are important conceptual frameworks from which to begin. In this course we will ask the following questions: How do understandings of gender, class, and race shape the ways they are represented and experienced in popular culture forms? Why are gender and race such frequent themes in popular culture? and How does comparison between different contexts enrich our understanding of the key concepts of this course? We will read both theoretical discussions of pop culture as well as ethnographic and historical examples, following these readings with careful discussion. Students will explore these relationships by way of individual research projects, culminating in both an academic paper as well as a creative project that translates the student's conclusions for an audience of non-academics. Students will leave the course with an increased understanding of the concepts of spectacle, popular politics, race/ethnicity, and gender/sexuality that exceed “normative” definitions, and the ways in which they articulate with discussions of popular culture representations and identifications.

This class involves the intersection of religion, law, cultural preservation, land management, and ethnoecology. We will focus on Native American sacred sites and cultural landscapes and their relationship to land, ceremony, history, and tribal/ethnic identity. Central to the class will be a focus on the sacred aspects of tribal identity and the role that landscape plays in the creation and maintenance of these identities. The class will cover laws pertaining to religious freedoms and how they are applied to Native and non-Native contexts throughout U.S. history, along with the histories and philosophies that have, and still influences these policies. 

The class will cover both Federal and Tribal management of sacred sites, ceremonial sites, and religious/spiritual traditions. Important to this discuss, will be the role of oral history in the preservation of culture and relationships to landscapes and how it has/is being utilized the U.S. legal system pertaining to Native American Tribes. The role of treaties and the conflicts that arise between Tribal/U.S. government to government relations and responsibilities will also be covered.

This course introduces students to the social determinants of health influencing the broader health status and access to health care for Native American populations in the United States. Students will engage in a reading-intensive, discussion-based seminar, drawing upon research and scholarship from a variety of disciplines including public health, Native American and Indigenous Studies, anthropology, sociology, history, nursing, and medicine. Seminar topics will include infectious diseases and the Columbian Exchange, federal obligations to Native American people, community-based participatory research, and Indigenous health globally.

Note: applications and registration for this course have closed

 Since the so-called Age of Discovery, the Pacific has been conceptualized as a crossroads between the East and the West. By the twentieth century, places like Hawaiʻi came to be idealized as a harmonious multicultural society. This class examines how race and indigeneity are constructed within the Pacific using an interdisciplinary approach. Drawing from works within indigenous studies, ethnic studies, and critical race studies, students will address themes of sovereignty, settler colonialism, diaspora, and migration in order to interrogate and problematize the concept of the multicultural ‘melting pot’ across time. We focus on the impacts of U.S. plantation economies, militarism, and tourism in shaping the triangulation of indigenous, Black, and Asian groups in Hawai‘i and across the Pacific.

Environmental problems like deforestation, biodiversity loss, climate change, and ocean and marine resource degradation have emerged as some of the most intractable problems that society faces. They transcend international borders, are scientifically complex, and generally involve large sets of diverse actors and power dynamics from global to local scales. In this first year seminar we will examine how policies, actions, and behaviors impact the environment and how these politics of the environment play out on a global scale. This collaborative seminar will introduce students to the diverse ways in which different social science disciplines, epistemologies, and methodologies shape the ways in which we understand global environmental problems and solutions. While our primary assigned reading materials approach the topics through a political science lens, through individual research assignments and integrated peer assessments, students will be exposed to variety of approaches that will help us think about other ways of understanding a problem. By the end of the course, students will have a broad understanding of the nature of global environmental politics as well as specific knowledge related to a topic of their choosing.

TBA.