GRAD > CECS
Critical Ethnic and Community Studies Courses
CECS 600 CECS Professional Seminar A +
Description:
This class is intended to fit a variety of advanced academic and professional writing contexts. Professional Seminar A will be offered for both MS and PhD students in their first semester and will consist of a series of workshops focused on several key skills areas. Students will learn how to write for advanced academic study or for professional purposes. In addition, students will be able to locate and use journals, databases, and other resources that are relevant to their field. Other areas to be addressed in this entry-level seminar are: Writing a Literature Review and Using Library Databases. More Info
Offered in:CECS 610 Foundations of Transnational, Cultural, and Community Studies +
Description:
Foundations of TCCS is the introductory theory course for the graduate program in TCCS. This seminar provides an introduction to critical terms, concepts, and issues in TCCS. The processes that lead to the formation of personal and collective identities, real, imagined, or emotional, have historical, material, structural and cultural lineages that must be excavated separately but analyzed holistically through transdisciplinary approaches. This course centers communities of color in the U.S. and the historical and contemporary forces through which they have developed transnational and diasporic relationships individually, structurally, collectively, and culturally. We will explore and analyze debates and approaches to colonialism and empire, development, globalization, migration transnationalism and diaspora, nationalism and nativism, community formation, intersectionality and layered identities, the politics of cultural representation, critical race theory and racial formation, race relations, and political resistance, advocacy, and activism. Finally, we engage with these concepts in the context of power relationships from a humanistic framework grounded in empathy and individual transformation. More Info
Offered in:CECS 611 Migration and Diaspora +
Description:
This course will explore the most recent scholarship and most recent scholarship and most dominant theories in the field of migration and diaspora studies. New technologies, climate change, economic crises as well as contemporary iterations of terrorism and warfare have all intensified the global movements of people, goods, ideas, cultures, and money. This has reinvigorated the study of migration in earlier periods, with many arguing that related phenomena have been endemic to the human population since our beginning. New frameworks that emphasize networks and relationality, and bring into the foreground interculturalism, borders and borderlands, and hybridic formations have begun to reorder ways of reading human cultures and civilizations. The course brings together theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches from both the humanities and social sciences (e.g. anthropology, literary studies, performance studies, psychology, ethnomusicology, sociolinguistics, history, and sociology) with various forms of cultural expression (e.g., poetry, film, music, literature). The course places the different theories/strategies in dialogue to empower students of transdisciplinarity with tools for shaping their own unique studies of migration and diaspora in ways that exceed the boundaries of particular disciplines. Themes explored will include: the contexts for the newly invigorated field; the multiple meanings and models of diaspora and migration; the relation of migration and diaspora to conquest, colonialism, post colonialism, refugeeism, political exile, etc.; the heterogeneity of diasporic groups; the problems and potentials of assimilation, acculturation and transculturation; nativism and the hostility of hostlands; generational conflicts and continuities in the (re)production of culture; the role of language and other cultural practices in migratory experiences; the significance of memory for the production of what Salman Rushdie calls ''imaginary homelands''; and t More Info
Offered in:- TBA
CECS 612 Community Formation and Development +
Description:
Generally ''community'' has positive connotations, as communities provide identity, companionship, support, yet communities can also be constricting, parochial, exclusionary. Communities are not static: They come into being, evolve and may dissolve. Living in Liquid Times (Bauman 2007) the certainty of modernity ''evaporates'' and uncertainty permeates our daily lives destabilizing our sense of ''belonging.'' Community has also become a principal arena of organized collective action to change or preserve the status quo. Communities are thus complex, dynamic, contested, and contradictory. This course explores these issues in theory and practice, from the academic literature to its use society at large. The idea of community is contested: its definition is not clear lacking a consistent body of knowledge with theories about its origins, functions, and use in contemporary society. Scholarship in post-colonial and transnational studies has redrawn conceptual maps: The course also explores decolonizing traditional understanding(s) of community. More Info
Offered in:CECS 622 Transdisciplinary Research in Practice B +
Description:
Transdisciplinary Research in Practice B enables students to apply research methods and strategies that they learn in their core methods courses (including Research in Transnational Cultural and Community Studies, Transdisciplinary Research Methods, and Transdisciplinary Research in Practice A) in real practice settings and directly experience how transdisciplinary research projects addressing complex issues or problems in transnational cultural community contexts are being planned, implemented, and managed. More Info
Offered in:CECS 623 Transdisciplinary Research Methods +
Description:
Transdisciplinary research ''transcends disciplinary borders and open[s] up totally new research pathways and prioritizes[s] the problem at the center of research over discipline-specific concerns'' (Leavy 2011). This course provides a transdisciplinary, problem-centered spin on conventional research methods training. Through this course, students will develop advanced research skills in transdisciplinary methods and approaches, to understand transdisciplinarity as a research principle, and to examine in-depth the development and application of transdisciplinary research methods in the arts, humanities, and sciences. This course offers students hands-on experience in transdisciplinary research, which emphasis on developing methodological versatility across multiple levels of inquiry: 1) self/identity; 2) community/relationships; and 3) global/transnational. This course accompanies TRIP 2 in the second semester of the MA/PhD programs. The research approaches, data collection, and data analysis methods will synergize to the extent possible with topics and activities of TRIP 2. As such, the course content is meant to complement and support students' work on their community-centered projects. More Info
Offered in:CECS 650 Community Health and Equity +
Description:
This course will introduce students to trans/disciplinary U.S. and global perspectives on community health/mental health making connections between personal health, multi-systemic resources creating societal conditions for ''wellness as fairness'', and community mobilization for equity. Students will learn comparative critical/intersectional perspectives on addressing social determinants of health/mental health in specific US & international settings, using a wide variety of research methods promoting community engagement and a vision of research as a Human Right (Appadurai, 2006) including auto-ethnography, arts-based and Community Based Participatory Action Research. Drawing on a continuum of health promotion/prevention/treatment interventions, we will explore frameworks for using health and health care to activate person-centered, community-engaged, and integrative health interventions within health care and other community settings, using cultural and intergenerational life-course perspectives on the timing and settings best promoting health and healing. We will explore examples of transformational action research, policy and social movements practice through partnerships with communities and links to local and transnational social movements addressing specific health and social justice issues. Students will bring to the course their specific areas of research, practice, or policy interest in community health/mental health, and explore how their work can be informed by relevant research, public policy initiatives, community partnerships, collaborative leadership, and social movements promoting health equity. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
CECS 696 Independent Study +
CECS 697 Special Topics +
CECS 698 TCCS Master's Capstone +
Description:
The ''capstone project'' is designed to integrate student learning from the content and process of the overall TCCS curriculum in relation to a real issue or challenge facing the student. The project will include an analysis of relevant, critical literature along with the development of an appropriate, meaningful intervention to address the issue. This intervention may involve, for example, an organizing initiative, the planning of a program, the design of a training curriculum or the proposal for a research project. Students participate in a weekly Capstone Seminar led by a faculty member, and will also be mentored by a capstone advisor. Those students seeking to go on to a PhD program will be advised to pursue a research-based capstone project. In addition, the Capstone Seminar provides participants with an opportunity to review and reflect on their work in the TCCS Master's program and its impact on their current and future professional and personal lives. In sharing their process and products with each other throughout the semester, students will be able to demonstrate knowledge and integration of skills, process, and strategies of transdisciplinary thinking and grounded, local/global, reflective practice. Capstone projects will be presented by and for seminar participants, together with public audiences, as appropriate, during the final third of the semester. More Info
Offered in:CECS 719 Queer of Color Critique +
Description:
This course examines the emergent theoretical field of queer of color critique, a mode of analysis grounded in the struggles and world-making of LGBTQ people of color. Activists, artists, and theorists have mobilized queer of color critique to interrogate the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, and diaspora as a response to the inherent whiteness of mainstream queer theory and persistent heterosexism in ethnic studies. Students will gain an understanding of queer of color critique as a aumanistic method of inquiry that includes the analysis and interpretation of ideas and symbolic expression. We will examine the development of queer of color critique (primarily in the United States) through both academic and activist domains; consider what queer theory has to say about empire, citizenship, prisons, welfare, neoliberalism, and terrorism; and articulate the role of queer of color analysis in a vision for racial, gender, sexual, and economic justice. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
CECS 796 Independent Study +
CECS 797 Special Topics +
Description:
This course offers study of selected topic within this subject. Course content and credits vary according to topic and are announced prior to the registration period. More Info
Offered in:- TBA