| Icon Key: | ||||
 Video |
 Video Transcription |
 Instructor Picture |
 Instructor Bio |
 Course Syllabus |
[Visual users only Expand All] | [Visual users only Collapse All]
Grading basis/credits:
Description: Asian Americans are the fastest-growing minority population in the United States. Their histories, cultures, and experiences have become increasingly crucial to understanding contemporary American citizenship, identity, and values. We will look at past and present aspects of the diverse and multifaceted vision of "Asian America," using histories, films, memoirs, and other texts as illustrations. We will also study how the history of immigration, exclusion, and naturalization laws has visibly shaped existing Asian American communities and identities, and, how "Asian America" is central to a more general understanding of American popular culture and public life. This course satisfies LE Requirements for Cultural Diversity and Citizenship and Public Ethics. Readings include memoirs, historical and contemporary documents. We will view short documentaries and use other media. Class time will involve discussion and small group projects. Assignments will include short essays and a final project.
Work Load: 12-15 pages writing per term, 6 papers. Group curriculum project presentation oral and written
Grade: 20% attendance, 80% other evaluation. 6 short essays, 2-3 pages (60%) Group curriculum project - presentation oral and written (20%)
Instructor: Lee,Erika
Grading basis/credits:
Description: Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
Instructor: Onishi,Yuichiro
Grading basis/credits:
Prereq: Fr
Description: While the Asian American population is one of the fastest growing in the United States, it remains largely misrepresented or ignored in American culture and politics. This seminar will examine the place of Asian Americans in U.S. race relations through law, history, sociology, and popular culture. We will begin by asking the questions: Where do Asian Americans fit into the larger multiracial context of the U.S. and theories of race relations? What does it mean when Asian Americans are described as ?perpetual foreigners,? the ?yellow peril,? ?potential terrorists,? ?honorary whites,? or ?model minorities?? How have Asian Americans experienced racism and discrimination? What are some contemporary race issues affecting Asian Americans, and what are they doing about them? What is the importance of race in the ?age of Obama??
Instructor: Lee,Erika
Grading basis/credits:
Description: Where are Asian Americans located locally, regionally, nationally, and globally? Does geographic location make a difference in how Asian Americans understand and experience their identities and communities? How do different places and the politics in these places (for example, Asia, U.S. west coast, U.S. Midwest, New York, Hawaii, Caribbean) affect Asian/Asian American experiences, identities and communities? This course focuses on different sites in Asian America to better understand the complexity, beauty, and problems of Asian America. Key questions for the course include: How do Asians/Asian Americans in diverse geographic locations experience, historicize, politicize, visualize, and/or imagine themselves and their communities in the context of the U.S., Asian America, and beyond? Who, what, where, when, and how is Asian America? What are the cultural politics of space, place, and movement in Asian America? How do these issues play out in Minnesota/Twin Cities? Participants in this course will seriously explore and engage these questions and themes by reading theory, literature, film, and art and working on a group research project about an Asian American space, place, or movement in the Twin Cities.
Class Time: 30% Lecture, 30% Film/Video, 40% Discussion.
Work Load: 75-100 pages reading per week, 10-15 pages writing per term. final project or paper (in the form of a documentary photography project, video or research paper of 12 pages
Grade: 40% reports/papers, 40% class participation, 20% other evaluation. Final Project
Instructor: Fajardo,Kale Bantigue
Grading basis/credits:
Prereq: Soc majors/minors must register A-F
Description: This course will explore the ways in which race, class and gender organize and impact social life for individuals and society as a whole. We will begin with a brief introduction to the general conceptual challenges that race, class and gender pose for typical, commonsense understandings of American society. We will then examine class, gender and race on their own terms and as they intersect with one another, attending to the ways they are constructed, experienced, and connected with social stratification and inequalities in power, status and privilege. We will explore how race, class, and gender shape and are shaped by social institutions, including work, education, family, and social policy, and will conclude by discussing implications for politics and social change. The class will focus primarily on the United States. This class is writing intensive and student will choose to write a paper based on a community service learning experience or complete a research paper.
Class Time: 45% Lecture, 20% Film/Video, 35% Discussion.
Work Load: 3 exams, 5 papers. 40-75 pages of reading per week
Grade: 25% mid exam, 60% reports/papers, 15% class participation.
Instructor:
Swartz,Teresa Toguchi
(Arthur Motley Exemplary Tch Aw)
Grading basis/credits:
Prereq: instr consent
Description: This Service Learning course is designed to provide academic, social and cultural support to the new Hmong refugee students from Wat Tham Krabok. This course will give the new Hmong refugee students the opportunity to learn English and exchange cultural experience with University of Minnesota students. The main focus of this course is to promote literacy by focusing on English readings. While assisting with the English learning, university students and elementary students may also work on cultural exchange and/or other subject matters. Students that are interest in working with other Asian American communities can also be arranged.
Class Time: 30% Lecture, 70% Discussion.
Work Load: 10 pages reading per week, 18 pages writing per term, 0 exams, 6 papers.
Grade: 40% reports/papers, 30% class participation, 30% other evaluation. volunteer
Exam Format: no exam
Instructor: Lee,Juavah
Grading basis/credits:
Description: Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
Instructor: Isler,Hilal Nakiboglu
Grading basis/credits:
Prereq: Jr or sr
Description: This introductory course will focus on the ways immigrant communities have transformed the foundations of American life. We will tackle three particular themes that have a significant presence within public discourse surrounding immigrants and immigration: new racial transformations, the immigrant narrative, and social citizenship. In doing this, we will discuss the impact of immigrants on the ideologies and institutions that structure our communities and society. Required texts include: Whiteness of a Different Color, by Matthew Frye Jacobson Domestica, by Pierrette Hongdagneu-Sotelo Homebound, by Yen Espiritu Black Identities, by Mary Waters The Latehomecomer, by Kao Kalia Yang Entry Denied, by Eithne Luibheid
Instructor: Park,Lisa Sun-Hee
Grading basis/credits:
Description: This course focuses on the literary and theatrical contributions of American artists of Asian descent. Through these novels, memoirs, poetry, stories, and plays, we can understand the particular connections between literary form, expression, and production and the social formations of race, ethnicity, nationalism, class, gender, and sexuality. Asian Americans come from a diverse range of national and cultural backgrounds; likewise their literature and drama presents many different perspectives and experiences. This course will not attempt a survey of these works; rather our readings and discussions will reflect particular preoccupations that regularly surface in these works. These include migration (and its accompanying states of disorientation and acts of reinvention), racism and stereotypes, the "road trip," and redefining home. We'll pay special attention to Asian American experiences in Minnesota and other parts of the Midwest. This course satisfies the core requirement for the Asian American Studies minor as well as elective requirements for the English major and minor.
Instructor:
Lee,Josephine D
(Morse Alumni Award; Grad and Profl Teaching Award)
Grading basis/credits:
Description: Our very notions of native citizen was forged against "aliens ineligible for citizenship," our ideas of cultural appropriateness were formulated in relation to groups deemed to have "excessive culture" on the one hand and "no culture" in the other, and the designation of some groups as "model minorities" was intended to discipline "not-so-model minorities." We thus believe that a serious engagement with the heterogeneous and trans-national histories and relationships among communities such as African Americans, Euro-Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans is necessary for contemporary scholarship of race in general, as well as of any particular community or identity. Even research projects that are not explicitly comparative must think through the various subtexts, shadows, and other categories through which or against which their particular foci was constructed. We believe that by interrogating comparative racial formations both across "minority" groups as well as between majority and minority groups, this seminar will strengthen a wide-array of interdisciplinary research that engage with questions of race, privilege, power, identity, intersectionality, citizenship, American culture and history, and diaspora. Within this context, the course will also explore how racial formations are inflected and must be understood as articulated through and mutually constituted by other forms of social difference such as class, ethnicity, citizenship, gender, and sexuality. This class is designed for those who have passed their prelim exams. Creating a supportive and rigorous environment in which graduate students learn to both expand their conceptual paradigms and assemble the building blocks of writing a dissertation is a central goal of the course. The design of the course is thus two-fold: it will combine both interdisciplinary readings and discussion in comparative race and ethnic studies and peer feedback workshops. A central theme of the class, then, will be to think through the process and methodology of writing, to develop our writing " both process and the product " in conversation with each other. First, by building an interdisciplinary peer writing community, the seminar will require students to present their research topics and questions in a manner that is understandable to those in other disciplines while learning to make explicit the possibilities and limitations of their own scholarship. Second, we will acknowledge and discuss explicitly the very particular process and form of writing a dissertation, and in doing so, we hope to create an enriched learning experience that seeks to demystify the steps of completing a PhD. We realize that the writing process can be painful, isolating, invigorating, frustrating, and inspiring. Through peer workshops and faculty feedback, the hope is that this class will establish an intellectually engaging environment and tackle the specificities of the dissertation format.
Co-Instructor:
Desai,Jigna
(Arthur Motley Exemplary Tch Aw)
Co-Instructor: Ho,Karen Z