2024-2025 Catalog

RDIN 10600. Power and Resistance in the Black Atlantic. 100 Units.

Beginning with the arrival of European explorers on the West African coast in the fifteenth century and culminating with the stunning success of radical abolitionist movements across the Americas in the nineteenth century, the formation of the Black Atlantic irrevocably reshaped the modern world. This class will examine large-scale historical processes, including the transatlantic slave trade, the development of plantation economies, and the birth of liberal democracy. Next, we will explore the lives of individual Africans and their American descendants, the communities they built, and the cultures they created. We will consider the diversity of the Black Atlantic by examining the lives of a broad array of individuals, including black intellectuals, statesmen, soldiers, religious leaders, healers, and rebels. We will examine African diasporic subjects as creative rather than reactive historical agents and their unique contributions to Atlantic cultures, societies, and ideas. Within this geographically and temporally expansive history students will explore a key set of animating questions: What is the Black Atlantic? How can we understand both the commonalities and diversity of the experiences of Africans in the Diaspora? What kinds of communities, affinities, and identities did Africans create after being uprooted by the slave trade? What methods do scholars use to understand this history? And finally, what is the historical and political legacy of the Black Atlantic?

Instructor(s): M. Hicks     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Assignments: short and long papers.
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 10600, DEMS 10600, LACS 10600

RDIN 12100. Racial Formations. 100 Units.

Race is arguably the most significant social category shaping the fabric and trajectory of American life-and yet, it is also one of the most poorly understood and eagerly avoided topics in our public consciousness. In this course, we will examine paradigms for understanding race in both academic and popular contexts. Using theoretical constructs, historical case studies, contemporary topics in politics and culture, and empirical research on racial attitudes and disparities, this course explores questions such as: what are the racial boundaries that shape our lives? Where did they come from, how have they changed over time, and how are they continuing to evolve? Whose interests do they serve? We will also draw on news and current events to observe and analyze the ways that racial boundaries and the social meaning of race impact public policy and public debate.

Instructor(s): Cathy Cohen     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): None
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 12600

RDIN 12200. Diaspora(s) 100 Units.

This class will orient students to the practices, frameworks, and geographies of diasporic communities from the early modern period to the present. The term's initial origins in Jewish experiences of forced dispersal and migration underscores how its meaning 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.

Instructor(s): Adom Getachew     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): PLSC 22200, CRES 12700, GLST 22700, HIST 12706

RDIN 12300. Formations of Indigeneity. 100 Units.

Whose land are we on? What does it mean to be Indigenous, for generations past and in the twenty-first century? From debates over claims of Indigenous ancestry by political actors to the struggles of sacred lands protection against natural resource extraction, understanding the stakes of these concerns for Indigenous peoples and nations is more relevant than ever. This seminar-part of the sequence for majors in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity-introduces students to core texts and concepts in the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS). Topics will include sovereignty and governance, settler colonialism, citizenship and nationhood, blood quantum and racialization, diasporas and urban indigeneity, and relationships to land and environment. Course activities may include engagement with Indigenous films, dialogues with visiting Indigenous scholars, and field trips to Chicago-area cultural institutions.

Instructor(s): Teresa Montoya and Matthew Kruer     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 12800, CHST 12300, HIST 17800, CRES 12800

RDIN 13580. Introduction to Asian American Literatures. 100 Units.

This is a survey course that introduces students to the complex and uneven history of Asians in American from within a transnational context. As a class, we will look at Asian American texts and films while working together to create a lexicon of multilingual, immigrant realities. Through theoretical works that will help us define keywords in the field and a wide range of genres (novels, films, plays, and graphic novels), we will examine how Asia and Asians have been represented in the literatures and popular medias of America. Some of the assigned authors include, but are not limited to, Carlos Bulosan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, Fae Myenne Ng, Nora Okja Keller, Cathy Park Hong, Ted Chiang, and Yoko Tawada.

Instructor(s): Mee-Ju Ro     Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 13580, ENGL 13580

RDIN 16100. Introduction to Latin American Civilization I. 100 Units.

Autumn Quarter examines the origins of civilizations in Latin America with a focus on the political, social, and cultural features of the major pre-Columbian civilizations of the Maya, Inca, and Aztec. The quarter concludes with an analysis of the Spanish and Portuguese conquest, and the construction of colonial societies in Latin America. The courses in this sequence may be taken in any order.

Instructor(s): Kourí; Newman; Borges; Brittenham     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 16101, ANTH 23101, LACS 16100, SOSC 26100, HIST 36101, CRES 16101, LACS 34600

RDIN 16200. Introduction to Latin American Civilization II. 100 Units.

Winter Quarter addresses the evolution of colonial societies, the wars of independence, and the emergence of Latin American nation-states in the changing international context of the nineteenth century.

Instructor(s): Winter: Hicks; Schwartz-Francisco; Tenorio Autumn: Borges     Terms Offered: Autumn Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 16102, PPHA 39770, LACS 34700, HIST 16102, ANTH 23102, HIST 36102, SOSC 26200, LACS 16200

RDIN 17908. African-American History to 1865. 100 Units.

This introductory undergraduate lecture course examines histories of people of African descent in continental North America from the colonial period to the US Civil War. relationship between slavery and republicanism in the early United States. With an interdisciplinary approach and transnational perspective, it considers the contested role of chattel slavery in the creation of US political systems, market relations, social hierarchies, and cultural productions. We will use primary sources and secondary literature to consider the possibilities and limits of archival research; contingent histories of race-making; the relationship between slavery and capitalism; the workings of domination, agency, and resistance; and black "freedom dreams" in the antebellum United States.

Instructor(s): R. Johnson     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): DEMS 17908, HIST 17908

RDIN 18405. Histories of Native America. 100 Units.

Modern Americans often think of their history beginning with the European discovery of the "New World." But those Europeans did not "discover" anything. In the Americas, they encountered an Old World filled with diverse Indigenous peoples, cultures, and polities; a world alive with its own dynamic histories. This courses explores the world of Native North America from the evolution of complex city-states in the centuries before European invasion to the seismic changes that Indigenous peoples have navigated in the era of colonization (1492-present). Topics include Native struggles to create a shared world with settlers in the seventeenth century; movements to maintain independence from European empires and the new United States; nineteenth-century experiences of conquest, removal, confinement to reservations, and coercive assimilation; twentieth-century resurgence, battles in the courts, and "Red Power" activism; and twenty-first century struggles for sovereignty, self-determination, and environmental justice. Students will engage with a variety of primary and secondary sources, focusing on texts produced by Native people and centering Native points of view.

Instructor(s): M. Kruer     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 18405

RDIN 18702. Race, Politics, and Sports in the United States. 100 Units.

This lecture-discussion course explores how racial identity has been experienced, represented, and contested throughout American history.  We will examine the major historical transformations that have shaped the development and understanding of racial identity, by engaging historical, legal, literary, and filmic texts.  A diverse set of primary sources will be read against historical works.  Moving along both chronological and thematic axes, themes of ambiguous, hidden, and hybrid identity will be critical to investigate the problems of racial mixture, mixed-race identity, racial passing, and racial performance across historical periods.  The interplay of the problems of class and gender in the construction of racial identity will also be explored.

Instructor(s): M. Briones     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): History in the World courses use history as a valuable tool to help students critically exam our society, culture, and politics. Preference given to 1st- and 2nd-yr students.
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 18702

RDIN 20007. Africa in the Middle East and the Middle East in Africa. 100 Units.

From Mansa Musa's Hajj in 1324 to the contemporary Afrobeats scene in Dubai, African and Middle Eastern societies share long histories of interconnection. This course examines these interconnections from the early modern to the contemporary era through a series of case studies ranging from traditions of exchange on the Swahili Coast, to the Ottoman Scramble for Africa, to the creation of a long-standing Lebanese diaspora in West Africa and a more recent Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel. Students will examine debates that animate this field of scholarship including conversations about race; histories of slavery and its legacies; conceptions of indigeneity, nativism, and settler colonialism; religious encounters; gender and society; shared and divergent experiences of European colonialism and struggles for independence; and transnational collective-building projects such as Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism. In addition to scholarship based on textual analysis, students will develop skills to investigate cultural sources such as music, photography, film, fashion, literature, and sports. No prior coursework in Middle Eastern or African studies is required. However, a background in African Civ, Islamic History and Society Civ, or Islamic Thought and Literature Civ is recommended.

Instructor(s): K. Hickerson     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Assignments: Short papers; long paper; in-class presentation
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 20007, HIST 20007

RDIN 20100. Afrofuturism(s) 100 Units.

Despite its explosion in popularity as a term of art in the last ten years, "Afrofuturism" remains a contested term and set of concepts-from debates about its engagement with Black diasporic identities, to the question of how essential notions of the "future" are to Afrofuturism. This course will explore Afrofuturism as a set of ideas still in flux, with repercussions across politics, aesthetics, theory, and artistic interventions, using texts from a wide array of disciplines and media, including sociology, cinema, visual art, critical theory, and literature. This course will be an RDI Community Engaged Course, meaning half of the students will be University of Chicago undergraduates and half will be members of our broader community. To be considered for enrollment in the course, please fill out the form linked below and request instructor consent. https://bit.ly/afrofuturisms2024

Instructor(s): Eve L. Ewing     Terms Offered: Winter

RDIN 20140. Qualitative Field Methods. 100 Units.

This course introduces techniques of, and approaches to, ethnographic field research. We emphasize quality of attention and awareness of perspective as foundational aspects of the craft. Students conduct research at a site, compose and share field notes, and produce a final paper distilling sociological insight from the fieldwork.

Instructor(s): O. McRoberts     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): SOCI 20140, CHDV 20140

RDIN 20233. Race in Contemporary American Society. 100 Units.

This survey course in the sociology of race offers a socio-historical investigation of race in American society. We will examine issues of race, ethnic and immigrant settlement in the United States. Also, we shall explore the classic and contemporary literature on race and inter-group dynamics. Our investigative tools will include an analysis of primary and secondary sources, multimedia materials, photographic images, and journaling. While our survey will be broad, we will treat Chicago and its environs as a case study to comprehend the racial, ethnic, and political challenges in the growth and development of a city.

Instructor(s): S. Hicks-Bartlett     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring. Autumn quarter offered at the Undergraduate level only and Spring offered at the Graduate level only
Equivalent Course(s): SOCI 30233, MAPS 30233, SOCI 20233

RDIN 20305. Inequality in Urban Spaces. 100 Units.

The problems confronting urban schools are bound to the social, economic, and political conditions of the urban environments in which schools reside. Thus, this course will explore social, economic, and political issues, with an emphasis on issues of race and class as they have affected the distribution of equal educational opportunities in urban schools. We will focus on the ways in which family, school, and neighborhood characteristics intersect to shape the divergent outcomes of low- and middle-income children residing with any given neighborhood. Students will tackle an important issue affecting the residents and schools in one Chicago neighborhood. This course is part of the College Course Cluster: Urban Design.

Instructor(s): M. Keels     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): CHDV Distribution: B; 2*
Equivalent Course(s): CHDV 30315, CHDV 20305, EDSO 40315, PBPL 20305

RDIN 20400. Black Girlhood. 100 Units.

First popularized on social media in 2013, the phrase "Black Girl Magic" has expanded far beyond its initial use as a twitter hashtag. It can be seen on (a bunch of different objects and the cover of many children's books and poetry anthologies). However, the visibility of the phrase did not come without controversy. Some critics argued that rather than being an uplifting rallying cry for positive depictions of black girlhood, it instead reinforced dehumanizing stereotypes of the "strong black woman". This debate leads us to question: How do black girls tend to be depicted both popular media and in literature? How might these depictions differ depending on author, type of media, or social context? What do they say about the ways that black girls experience childhood, gender, and friendship? To engage with these questions, this course will explore literary works including The Bluest Eye, Betsey Brown, and Abeng, along with television shows such as Lovecraft Country to examine 20th and 21st century depictions of black girlhood. We will also think with theoretical works of black feminism and black girlhood studies.

Instructor(s): Danielle Jones     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 20422, RDIN 30400, ENGL 30422, GNSE 33167, GNSE 23167

RDIN 20408. Trans Genres. 100 Units.

This course explores genres of writing and cultural production concerned with transgender life and politics. Students will engage genre's relationship to gender, as they will read across memoir, fiction, poetry, and criticism. (Theory).

Instructor(s): C. Riley Snorton     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 22408, GNSE 20133

RDIN 20410. Ekspresyon ekri: Kreyòl lakay soti Ayiti rive nan dyaspora a. 100 Units.

This course will provide opportunities to promote deeper knowledge of the Haitian culture while emphasizing the development of writing skills in the Kreyòl language through the use of a variety of authentic texts and cultural experiences. Topics covered in the course will include the Haitian revolution, cuisine, and audio-visual and performing arts. Moreover, students will participate in different cultural exploration outings in the city of Chicago, which will provide additional opportunities to interpret cultural artifacts and reflect on the Haitian culture and its influence on the representation and daily lives of Haitians in the diaspora, particularly in Chicago. In this course, we will: 1) analyze different cultural artifacts in the Haitian cultures through primary and secondary texts, 2) examine the influences of these cultural phenomena on the representation of Haitians and the creation of Haitian identity in the diaspora, and 3) and reflect on the importance of cultural identity in a migration context. Those who will take the course for Kreyòl credits will also develop additional syntactic knowledge in the language through creation of diverse essays. This course will be conducted in two weekly sessions: a common lecture session in English and an additional weekly discussion session in English or Kreyòl.

Instructor(s): Gerdine Ulysse
Prerequisite(s): For those seeking credit in Kreyòl, this course is open to students who have taken KREY 12300 (Kreyòl for Speakers of French II), KREY 12301 (Kreyòl for Speakers of Romance Languages II), or instructor consent. Heritage learners are also welcome.
Note(s): Course not offered in 24-25
Equivalent Course(s): KREY 20400, LACS 20401, CHST 20400

RDIN 20606. New Topics in Asian American Studies. 100 Units.

This course offers an introduction to new critical works of Asian American studies covering critical themes in an interdisciplinary fields including research from anthropology, cultural studies, gender and women studies, history, political science, psychology and sociology. This course will focus on new works published in recent years that showcase recent theoretical innovations and literary styles that will sharpen our analysis of both Asian and Asian American experiences in the United States and globally. We will cover topics as they relate to migration, war and empire, violence, race/class/gender/sexuality, and immigration integration in educational institutions and the labor market.

Instructor(s): K. Hoang     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): SOCI 20606

RDIN 20700. Global Health, Environment, and Indigenous Futures. 100 Units.

The global coronavirus pandemic has made evident the significance of ecological (im)balances for the well-being of societies. The relationship between structural inequalities, changing environments and health, especially for historically and socio-economically marginalized communities, is now well established. At the same time, a growing body of literature links the material conditions of marginalized communities-for instance, spaces of dwelling and conditions of labor-to health status, globally. Based on a set of interdisciplinary literature arranged through anthropological theories, this course will critically engage with notions of health and well-being for indigenous communities, tracing injustices that stem histories of racial, caste- and ethnicity-based, and environmental exclusions. The readings are organized around one central question: What does it mean to be indigenous in a changing planet where social, political, and economic systems are marked by enduring legacies of systemic violence? This graduate and undergraduate level course will introduce contexts within which structural exclusions lead to ill-health and loss of well-being among indigenous communities across the globe. The aim is to develop critical thinking on the political economy and political ecologies of indigenous health as imbricated with issues of social, economic, and environmental justice.

Instructor(s): Sanghamitra Das
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 30700, CEGU 30700, SALC 26501, ANTH 20700, CEGU 20700, CHDV 30750, SALC 32704, CHDV 20700, ANTH 30700

RDIN 20900. Violence: Vigilantism, Community Defense, and Armed Resistance. 100 Units.

This course explores extralegal violence primarily in the US, from decolonial struggles to white mobs to self and community defense by marginalized peoples. How do we understand different forms of violence, defense, and resistance in relation to the violence of the state? What role does violence play in struggles for justice and freedom? This seminar surveys a range of social science approaches to these questions. In addition to reading the work of anthropologists, historians, and philosophers, we will also take up these themes as they appear in popular media and current events.

Instructor(s): Maya Singhal     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 30900, CRES 22900, ANTH 32547, HIST 27907, ANTH 22547

RDIN 21000. Race & American Public Schools. 100 Units.

This course explores the fundamental role that race and racism have played in the structure, stratification, and social functioning of American public schools, and how schools in turn shape our collective ideas about race in the United States. Working from both a historical perspective and an analysis of contemporary policy, we will use theoretical and empirical texts to explore questions of identity, otherness, and ethics, such as: what can the histories of schooling for Black and Native students reveal about the educational project of the nation? How does the notion of whiteness as property shape public presumptions about what makes a "good" school? How are taken-for-granted ideas about other vectors of identity such as class, disability, and language informed by racialized school policies? Most fundamentally, can schools contribute to creating a more just world, and if so, how?

Instructor(s): Eve L. Ewing
Equivalent Course(s): EDSO 21000, EDSO 31000, HMRT 21000, RDIN 31000

RDIN 21150. Psychology of Race and Racism. 100 Units.

This upper-level seminar will focus on the psychology of race and racism. We will discuss both structural and individual level factors that create and maintain racism in the U.S. context. While this course will focus on social psychology, we will also draw from other areas of psychology. We will discuss social structures and institutions that perpetuate racism, policies that shape societal attitudes and behaviors, and psychological frameworks for understanding racism. We will begin the course with a discussion of the origins of race and racism. We will then transition to contemporary expressions of racism. The goals of this course are to analyze structural contexts influencing racist attitudes and behaviors, evaluate the impact of racism on racially minoritized groups, and to examine strategies and interventions to address racism.

Instructor(s): K. Henderson     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 31150, PSYC 21150, PSYC 31150

RDIN 21200. African-American History: 1900-2000. 100 Units.

The Black experience in America is one that encompasses a wide variety of walks of life. Within this introductory undergraduate course, we will explore the 20th century experience of African Americans in Jim Crow segregation, migration, labor, medicine, world wars, civil rights, and black power. This course considers racial barriers in the built environment, with a particular emphasis on the city. We will use primary and secondary sources to construct conceptions of political struggle, economic rights, resistance, and freedom in African American life.

Instructor(s): Caine Jordan     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 37420, HIST 27420, RDIN 31200

RDIN 21300. Aftermath: Literature of Reparation, Redress, Refusal, and Change. 100 Units.

What does it mean to address oneself to, or attempt to repair, legacies of violence and harm? What theories, resources, and models of personal, psychoanalytic, legal, political repair are available, and what kinds of possibilities do they enable? Is repair even a possibility, or a useful framework, for change? This course tracks the question of repair through contemporary conversations and historical case studies. Reading works by Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Eve Ensler, Saidiya Hartman, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, we will track how the concept of repair and reparation has motivated political action, activism, economic decision-making, artistic creativity and interpersonal ritual. We will read poems, engage performances, and consider other rituals of repair, breaking, and re-making. In addition, we will read literary and activist material pertinent to historical movements for reparations, including works from the Redress Movement for Japanese Internment in Canada and the United States and ongoing projects of the repatriation of Indigenous archival and cultural materials.

Instructor(s): Bellamy Mitchell     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 21302, ENGL 31302, RDIN 31300

RDIN 21315. Narratives of American Religious History. 100 Units.

How do we tell the story of religion in America? Is it a story of Protestant dominance? Of religious diversity? Of transnational connections? Of secularization? This course examines how historians have grappled with such questions. We will read the work of scholars who have offered narratives explaining American religious history, including figures like Sydney Ahlstrom, Albert Raboteau, Mark Noll, Ann Braude, Catherine Albanese, and Thomas Tweed. This course will introduce students to key historiographical questions in the study of American religion, as well as to classic texts which have shaped the field's development.

Instructor(s): William Schultz and Curtis Evans     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): This course meets the HS or SCSR Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): RAME 41315, KNOW 41315, HIST 27304, RDIN 41315, AMER 21315, RLST 21315, CRES 22315, HCHR 41315, AMER 41315, HIST 47304

RDIN 21500. Mourning and Struggle in African, Native American, and Palestinian Narratives. 100 Units.

This course focuses on expressions of mourning and explores how in response to catastrophic experiences and histories of colonialism, writers and filmmakers narrate loss and trauma. We will investigate how these authors renegotiate their identities, how they fashion national and political imaginaries, and how they envision alternative futures in their diverse bodies of work. Engaging with an array of literary and cinematic depictions, our aim will be to examine and compare the rich landscape of voices that animate African, Native American, and Palestinian experiences and representations. Together, we will analyze source materials related to the themes of violence, memory, gender, race, and trauma. Through our weekly assignments and discussions, we will seek to determine the tropes and aesthetic tools that ignite modes of storytelling, and to answer: how do writers and artists employ aesthetic form to portray catastrophes? How might expressions of grief also be mobilized for resistance and struggle? Our class will be organized into three modules, touching upon African, Native American, and Palestinian prose, poetry, and film alongside theoretical works in memory and trauma studies. By the end of the quarter, students will be able to develop their own complex evaluations of these narratives-and recognize how comparisons through artistic expression can be a powerful tool for amplifying a multiplicity of stories about mourning and defiance.

Instructor(s): Stephanie Kraver     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 21500, NEHC 31500, RDIN 31500

RDIN 21600. Histories of Abortion and Forced Sterilization in the United States. 100 Units.

In the United States, the politics of pregnancy and reproductive autonomy have historically been and continue to be categories of significance, meaning, and contention. In this course, we will explore a subsection of these broader categories, examining the relation between abortion and forced sterilization, the state, and women of color. The course will zero in on the experiences of Mexican American and Mexican immigrant women, African American women, Puerto Rican women, and Native American women, considering their struggles against the state and for reproductive justice.

Instructor(s): Caine Jordan     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 33181, RDIN 31600, GNSE 23181, HIST 27810

RDIN 21677. Latinxs, Labor, and the Law in the U.S. 100 Units.

Latinidad" is an ethno-racial signifier meant to encompass people of Latin American descent living in the United States. Terms like "Latina," "Hispanic," and most recently, "Latinx/e" are meant to evoke a commonality that crosses nationalities to create political power & social recognition in the United States. Like every other identity term, "Latinidad" is an ever-contested construction with uncertain contours. The history of Latinidad in the U.S. has its origins in a myriad social efforts and forces: political campaigns, immigration policies, community organizing, migrant labor programs, union campaigns, marketing strategies, artistic expressions, & many more. Rather than simplify or ignore these tensions, the purpose of this class is to confront the agonistic aspects of Latinidad head-on. In this course, students will read widely across the social sciences & humanities, delving deep into the making and remaking of "Latinidad" in the U.S. We will be playing foremost attention to the roles that U.S. economic relations & government policies have had in shaping collective understandings of Latinidad, from the making of a "brown collar" labor sector sustaining the American economy to the development of census categories to describe Latinxs. Furthermore, we will look at U.S. Latinxs not merely as objects of policy, but also as subjects of politics, delving into the past and present of U.S. Latinx political life.

Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): PLSC 22677

RDIN 21800. Social Life and Death in the City. 100 Units.

What sustains collective life in a city? What institutionalized and systemic processes disrupt life in the city? How do individuals, groups, and neighborhoods grapple with death and decay? In this course, students will be offered lenses to answer these questions through engagement with interdisciplinary and multimodal texts drawn from sociology, anthropology, history, and urban studies. The goal of the course is to offer an introduction to how urban life and death are shaped by processes such as inequality, segregation, displacement, placemaking, urban governance, infrastructure and built environment, surveillance and policing, migration, and spatial practices of death and dying. The scope of the course will include Chicago-specific readings and field trips as well as national and global perspectives on urban social life and death. The final assignment will involve a group project to produce a podcast-style recorded audio segment that engages with the social and spatial histories of Oak Woods Cemetery that straddles Chicago's Woodlawn and Greater Grand Crossing neighborhoods.

Instructor(s): Pranathi Diwakar

RDIN 21905. Latin American Literatures and Cultures: Colonial and 19th-Century. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to the writing produced in Hispanic and Portuguese America during the period marked by the early processes of European colonization in the sixteenth century through the revolutionary movements that, in the nineteenth century, led to the establishment of independent nation-states across the continent. The assigned texts relate to the first encounters between Indigenous, Black, and European populations in the region, to the emergence of distinct ("New World") notions of cultural identity (along with the invention of new racial categories), and to the disputes over the meaning of nationhood that characterized the anti-colonial struggles for independence. Issues covered in this survey include the idea of texts as spaces of cultural and political conflict; the relationships between Christianization, secularization, and practices of racialization; the transatlantic slave trade; the uses of the colonial past in early nationalist projects; and the aesthetic languages through which this production was partly articulated (such as the Barroco de Indias, or "New World baroque," Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Modernismo, among others). In addition to enhancing your knowledge of Latin American cultural history and improving your close reading and critical thinking skills, this course is designed to continue building on your linguistic competence in Spanish.

Instructor(s): Larissa Brewer-Garcia, Carlos Halaburda     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring
Prerequisite(s): SPAN 20300 or consent of instructor.
Note(s): Taught in Spanish.
Equivalent Course(s): LACS 21900, SPAN 21905

RDIN 22100. Disease, Health, and the Environment in Global Context. 100 Units.

Recent concerns about monkeypox, COVID-19, Zika virus, and Ebola have attracted renewed attention to previous disease outbreaks that have significantly shaped human political, social, economic, and environmental history. Such diseases include: smallpox during the 16th-century Columbian exchange; syphilis during the 18th-century exploration and settlement of the Pacific; bubonic plague in the late-19th-century colonization and urbanization of South and East Asia; and yellow fever during America's 20th-century imperial projects across the Caribbean. Through readings, discussions, library visits, and written assignments that culminate in a final project, students in this course will explore how natural and human-induced environmental changes have altered our past experiences with disease and future prospects for health. First, we will examine how early writers understood the relationship between geography, environment, hereditary constitution, race, gender, and human health. We will then analyze the symbiotic relationship among pathogens, human hosts, and their environments. Finally, we will explore how social factors (e.g. migration, gendered divisions of labor, poverty, and segregation) and human interventions (e.g. epidemiology, medical technology, and sanitary engineering) have influenced the distribution of infectious diseases and environmental risks.

Instructor(s): Christopher Kindell     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course counts towards the CEGU/ENST 4th year Capstone requirement. CEGU/ENST 4th years wanting to take this as their Capstone must contact instructor and BA Capstone Director Dr. Evan Carver.
Equivalent Course(s): GLST 22101, HLTH 22100, HIST 25033, CEGU 22100, HIPS 22210

RDIN 22203. Caste, Reproduction, and Citizenship in India. 100 Units.

This undergraduate and graduate level seminar will center on caste and reproduction in understanding notions of citizenship in India. The course will systematically engage with ideas of belonging to the post-colonial nation-state, particularly as experienced from following standpoints-gender, caste, indigeneity, and class. Understanding how citizenship is constituted, performed and negotiated in India, especially in relation to the biological and political reproduction of "good citizens", reveals the scopes and limits of citizenship as governance. The course is premised on the centrality of reproduction to governance in the largest democracy of the world. Drawing on a set of interdisciplinary literature, the readings are organized around feminist theorizations of the State, governance, and citizenship to locate the body within the body politic. The aim is to develop critical thinking on how the politics of reproduction is deeply imbricated with the reproduction of democratic politics; a politics that is entangled with knowledge, expertise and constructed human difference. In so doing, the course brings together reproductive governance with articulations of social justice in India.

Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 22207, RDIN 32203, ANTH 32203, SALC 35704, CHDV 32203, CHDV 22203, GNSE 32207

RDIN 22205. Latin American Literatures and Cultures: 20th and 21st Centuries. 100 Units.

This course will survey some of the main literary and cultural tendencies in Latin America from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. We will pay special attention to their aesthetic dimensions, as well as the socio-historical and political conditions that made them possible, and in which they simultaneously intervened. Questions to be studied might include the innovations of the Modernist and avant-garde movements, fantastic literature, the novel of the so-called "Boom," cultural production associated with revolutionary movements, military dictatorships, and the Cold War, as well as new currents in literary and theatrical practices. Likewise, the course will foreground some of the following concepts relevant to the study of this production: modernity and modernization; development and neoliberalism; neo-colonialism and empire; cultural autonomy and ideas of poetic and cultural renewal; the epic vs. the novel; realism and non-verisimilitude; and performativity, among others. In addition to enhancing your knowledge of Latin American cultural history and improving your close reading and critical thinking skills, this course is designed to continue building on your linguistic competence in Spanish.

Instructor(s): Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Danielle Roper     Terms Offered: Spring Winter
Prerequisite(s): SPAN 20300 or consent of instructor.
Note(s): Taught in Spanish. This course is the equivalent of SPAN 22003.
Equivalent Course(s): LACS 22005, SPAN 22005

RDIN 22311. Aspirations of Justice. 100 Units.

This class thinks through questions of what justice means, what justice promises, what justice betrays, and what possibilities for politics are opened by aspirations of justice at moments of radical rupture. It does so through a focus on critical conceptual terms that also become the frameworks for praxis and institutionalization after war/violence/trauma/revolution/colonialism/slavery/casteism: terms such as transition, transformation, restoration, reconstruction, and repair. The readings will be comparative but grounded out of South Africa's experience of transition from apartheid, a process that remains frictioned, fractured and far from finished. At the core of the class are two concerns. First: how does one think about non-retributive forms of justice, and what aporias of forgiveness lie at their core? Second, how do these imaginaries and forms of justice get constituted and instituted, out of different histories of foundational violence, different transitional processes, at different moments in time? How, in the process, do histories themselves get rewritten through a process of rewriting wrongs?

Instructor(s): Kaushik Sunder Rajan
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 36311, HIPS 26311, AASR 36311, CCCT 36311, CHSS 36311, CRES 22311

RDIN 22350. Black Game Theory. 100 Units.

This course explores games created by, for, or about the Black diaspora, though with particular emphasis on the United States. We will analyze mainstream "AAA" games, successful independent and art games, and educational games. Beyond video games, we will take a comparative media studies perspective that juxtaposes video games with novels, films, card games, board games, and tabletop roleplaying games. Readings will be drawn from writing by Frantz Fanon, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Lindsay Grace, Saidiya Hartman, Sarah Juliet Lauro, Achille Mbembe, Fred Moten, Frank B. Wilderson, and others.

Instructor(s): Patrick Jagoda and Ashlyn Sparrow     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 32352, CDIN 32350, CMST 22350, ENGL 22352, MADD 12350, CMST 32350, RDIN 32350

RDIN 22500. Seeing Islam and the Politics of Visual Culture. 100 Units.

From terrorists to "good Muslims," standards in the racial, cultural, and religious representations surrounding Islam have fluctuated across U.S. media. How do we conceptualize the nature of visual perception and reception? The history of colonialism, secular modernity, gender, patriarchy, and the blurred distinctions between religion and racialization have all contributed to a milieu of visual cultures that stage visions of and arguments about Islam. Hostility towards Muslims has not abated as we venture well into the 21st century, and many remain quick to blame an amorphous media for fomenting animosity towards the "real" Islam. We use these terms of engagement as the start of our inquiry: what is the promise of a meaningful image? What processes of secular translation are at work in its creation and consumption? Is there room for resistance, legibility, and representation in U.S. popular culture, and what does representation buy you in this age? We will pair theoretical methods for thinking about imagery, optics, perception, and perspective alongside case studies from film, stage, comedy, streaming content, and television shows, among others. Students will critically engage and analyze these theories in the contexts from which these works emerge and meld into a mobile and diasporic U.S. context. Together, we will reflect on the moral, political, and categorical commitments vested in different forms of media against historical trends of the 20th and 21st century.

Instructor(s): Samah Choudhury     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 27555, CMST 32500, ARTV 20667, ENGL 22505, ISLM 37555, ENGL 32505, CMST 22500, RDIN 32500

RDIN 22561. Justice at the Margins: Religion, Race, and Resistance Ethics. 100 Units.

How does race shape what we think about what is right and wrong, just and unjust? How about religion? Is "justice" a universal idea that stretches across social groups, or do our experiences as members of a religious and/or racial group have fundamentally affect our understanding(s) of justice? We'll begin by examining works by Aristotle, King, Rawls, and Nussbaum, asking what each theorist thinks justice entails and why. Along the way, we'll ask how stated and suppressed understandings of both "race" and "religion" inform their theories, as well as complicate and challenge them. Then we'll set these theories of justice in conversation with works by Francisco de Vitoria, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Cornel West, Traci C. West, and the Movement for Black Lives, each of which offers a protest against injustice in which "race" and "religion" play a prominent role. No previous knowledge required.

Instructor(s): Derek Buyan     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): This course counts as an elective course for the "Inequality, Social Problems, and Change" minor and as an approved course for the Democracy Studies minor.
Equivalent Course(s): HMRT 25561, CRES 22561, RLST 25561

RDIN 22600. Race, Justice, and the Assemblage of American Moralities. 100 Units.

This course explores the racial and moral imperatives that are encapsulated within concepts of "Americanness" and the theoretical notions that define the discursive, historical, and sociopolitical boundaries of American identities. How have claims to American identity relied on created religious or religiously-inflected Others? Together, we will consider how the human phenomena of religion and race have developed across our histories in concert with one another. How do racial and moral imperatives the define discursive, historical, and sociopolitical boundaries of American identities? We will examine how these formations have been deployed, defined, and bent to fit particular historical and cultural contexts while continuing to inform each other in a variety of permutations, especially in the United States. How do race and religion also intersect with gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and politics? Our theoretical grounding in migration, encounters, and transnational mobilities will provide insight into how race is imagined on and into differently minoritized people while considering what it means to be participants in the project of racecraft today. Our readings will include historical materials, literary texts, theological reflections, and examples from popular culture that meditate on these topics.

Instructor(s): Samah Choudhury     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ISLM 32600, AASR 32600, GNSE 32604, RDIN 32604, GNSE 22604, RLST 26337, RAME 32600

RDIN 22700. Diasporic Literature and Modern Islam in the Imperial Core. 100 Units.

The 19th century enslaved scholar Omar Ibn Said opens his autobiography with the words: "I cannot write my life." This seminar takes this starting point -the thick of chattel slavery, mercantile capitalism, and colonial violence - to investigate literary productions by racialized others dispersed in and by the so-called era of modernity. We will complicate what constitutes the modernity and how Islam, perhaps more than any other tradition, has been configured as its inverse. In doing so, we will read works ranging from poetry, novels, short stories, comics, and memoirs as they relate to encounters and engagements particularly with Islam as a religious tradition, colonialism, industrialization, and nationalism, even as global understandings of tradition, genre, and form are being contested and rapidly changing. In addition to these primary sources, we will theoretically situate these works within larger discussions of racecraft, oral transmission and culture, "folk" vs. "high" literature, Orientalism, politics, gender, sexuality, and identity. We will look at this is articulated in diasporic literary forms written within - and sometimes for - the imperial core. Through in-class discussions, readings, and a final paper, students will strengthen their global literacy, demonstrate knowledge of global historical trends, analyze the shifting and even contradictory interpretations of the role of religion in racial formations, all while identifying, critiquing, and assessing these ke

Instructor(s): Samah Choudhury     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 32700, ISLM 36717, RLST 26717, AASR 36717, GLST 22710

RDIN 22800. An Indigenous People's History of Hawaiʻi. 100 Units.

What you know about Hawai'i is most likely untrue. An archipelago in Oceania's sea of islands, Hawai'i has been locally constructed and globally consumed as a tropical paradise for pleasure and play, attracting tourists, settlers, corporations, and military forces to its shores. It is a fantasized paradise produced through the dispossession, elimination, appropriation, and exploitation of Indigenous people, institutions, worldviews, and practices. This course tells a truer story about Hawai'i. Because ideas and narratives crafted about the history, politics, economics, law, ecology, and society of Hawai'i are dominated and often distorted by non-Indigenous writers, we turn to Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholars to learn from their subjugated knowledge. The course examines interdisciplinary research, from the 19th century to the present, and excavates the truths advanced through it: the development of the Hawaiian Kingdom and its government, political order, economy, and society; the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian government and US military occupation and annexation of its territory; legal constructions of race and techniques of gender and sexuality in the territorial period; the creation of the State of Hawaii amid World War II and the Cold War; the birth and evolution of the modern Hawaiian sovereignty movement; and contemporary Kanaka Maoli struggles with federal recognition, militourism, and technoscientific development.

Instructor(s): Uahikea Maile     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 32800

RDIN 22900. Intro to Critical Race Theory. 100 Units.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has recently filled headlines as it has become a hotly debated topic in U.S. political, educational, and media discourse. However, the tenets and thinkers that shape CRT tend to be left out of the conversations that dominate the media. What is this theoretical framework? Who are the thinkers who shape and contribute to these theories of the construction of race? What does CRT say about the relationship between race and institutions, such as the United States' legal system or education? To address these questions, students in this course will read and engage with foundational texts of CRT by scholars including Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Cheryl Harris. In addition to learning the key tenets of this theoretical framework, students will also use it to think across disciplines, institutional structures, and forms of media.

Instructor(s): Danielle Jones     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 12900, ENGL 22930

RDIN 23001. Censorship in East Asia: The Case of Colonial Korea. 100 Units.

Looking into the intricate workings and profound impact of state publication control in the Japanese Empire during the first half of the twentieth century, this seminar examines how censorship influenced literary and other forms of publication within the Korean colony. Students analyze the manipulation of information and representation by engaging with a diverse array of primary sources, including literature, periodicals, police reports, censors' documents, posters, and postcards, among others. Not only do they seek a nuanced understanding of censorship and its impact on cultural production engaging themselves with the original materials from colonial Korea, but also do they gain a broad historical knowledge of modern Korea under Japanese rule and further East Asia under Japan's dominance and hegemony. Throughout the course, focus is placed upon manuscript ("pre-publication") censorship. [Consent Required; Proficiency in Korean or Japanese is not required.]

Instructor(s): K. Choi     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 43000, EALC 23001, MADD 16001, CRES 23001

RDIN 23002. Schooling and Identity. 100 Units.

This course examines the dynamic relations between schooling and identity. We will explore how schools both enable and constrain the identities available to students and the consequences of this for academic achievement. We will examine these relations from multiple disciplinary perspectives, applying psychological, anthropological, sociological, and critical theories to understanding how students not only construct identities for themselves within schools, but also negotiate the identities imposed on them by others. Topics will include the role of peer culture, adult expectations, school practices and enduring social structures in shaping processes of identity formation in students and how these processes influence school engagement and achievement. We will consider how these processes unfold at all levels of schooling, from preschool through college, and for students who navigate a range of social identities, from marginalized to privileged.

Instructor(s): Lisa Rosen     Terms Offered: Winter. Offered winter 2025
Prerequisite(s): Priority registration will be given to MAPSS students seeking the Education and Society certificate.
Equivalent Course(s): SOCI 20530, EDSO 23002, CHDV 23003, EDSO 33002, RDIN 33002, SOCI 30530

RDIN 23178. The Queer Enemy and the Politics of Homophobia. 100 Units.

How is the queer enemy politically constructed? And what are the uses and effects of this enemy in contemporary politics? This course investigates queer sexuality as a specific kind of threat and homophobia as a specific mode of political antagonism. Key to understanding this specificity is the examination of other kinds of political enemies. Across categories of gender, sexuality, race, religion, and empire, the course theorizes the queer enemy in a comparative perspective. Engaging scholars like Monique Wittig, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, and Jean Paul Sartre, we compare homophobia with other forms of political enmity like misogyny, anti-Black racism, and anti-Semitism. After investigating antagonism across categories of political difference, we delve into the specificities of homophobic antagonism in the second half of the course. Here, we explore how the queer threat is framed: through metaphors of civilizational destruction but also through anti-sodomy and anti-disclosure laws. We also trace how the normalization of the queer enemy has produced new enemies. Through notions of "Pinkwashing" and the "Gay International," we further examine how queer liberation is made to stand in for colonial domination. But we also read critiques of the "gay=colonialism" equation, asking how homophobia mediates anti-colonial politics. Finally, we conclude the course with Michel Foucault's seminal essay and relate the question of the queer enemy to the threat of new human relations.

Instructor(s): Omar Safadi     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors
Equivalent Course(s): HMRT 23178, GNSE 23178, PLSC 23178

RDIN 23202. Black Religious Protest in the U.S. 100 Units.

This course examines African American religious protest against the American nation for its actual history and its ideals in view of black oppression. The course begins with David Walker's Appeal (1829) and ends with debates around Jeremiah Wright's "God damn America" sermon. The course situates black religious protest amidst discussions of the American Jeremiad, a particular critique of the nation in relation to the divine, American exceptionalism, and racial injustice. We attempt to trace continuity and discontinuity, hope versus pessimism, and visions of a more perfect union in these public critiques of the nation.

Instructor(s): Curtis Evans     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This course meets the HS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): HCHR 42202, HIST 47416, HIST 27416, AMER 42202, RAME 42202, RLST 22202, AMER 22202

RDIN 23210. Urban Core in Paris. 100 Units.

This course is both an introduction to how historians think about cities and a history of cities in France and the French Empire, with a focus on Paris, from the Middle Ages through 1968. The course is chronological in organization, but each class also focuses on a different theme, such as the place of politics, industrial development, migration, culture, and commerce in the transformation of urban forms and experiences.

Instructor(s): L. Auslander     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Admission to the Paris: Social Sciences Urbanism program
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 23210, ARCH 23210, ENST 23210

RDIN 23304. Abolitionist Theologies. 100 Units.

How might religions activate the abolitionist imagination? The contemporary abolition movement is not just about dismantling prisons or the police. It is about imagining alternatives to this apparatus of fear, punishment, and scarcity-and experimenting with new modes of living together premised on mutual aid rather than state power. Many abolitionist thinkers thus see abolition as a sacred force interrupting the normalized brutalities of everyday life. This course focuses on Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologies that interrogate incarceration, capitalism, the war on terror, and the settler colonial state. We will analyze the possibilities and limits of these theologies as revolutionary resources. Our readings will include a variety of genres: scriptural interpretation, spiritual autobiography, and speculative fiction. No prior experience with academic theology or abolition required.

Instructor(s): Olivia Bustion     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 23304, GLST 23304

RDIN 23325. Indigenous Feminisms of Latin America. 100 Units.

This course examines how early modern visual and textual sources partook in the formation of gender and race differences in the Americas. We will explore colonial documents drawing on the work of contemporary Indigenous Feminist thinkers, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorena Cabnal, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Yásnaya Aguilar, among others. Reading the colonial archive while thinking about contemporary Indigenous perspectives can help us bridge the past to the present and discuss issues concerning the underrepresentation of Indigenous women in the archive, language politics, communal identities, and Indigenous epistemologies while being particularly attentive to the rhetorical strategies deployed by colonial texts. Along the way, we will have in perspective how contemporary indigenous women resist, negotiate, and denounce the state, corporate, and patriarchal establishments. In this course, students will engage with primary sources of the colonial period in Latin America as they engage in debates surrounding gender and race in our present moment. Understanding these debates and the history surrounding them is crucial to participating in informed discussion, research, and activism regarding issues of colonialism, race, and gender discrimination of today. Students will participate in class discussions, write weekly responses, lead, and moderate academic-style presentations, and produce a final research paper.

Instructor(s): Andrea Reed-Leal     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Taught in Spanish.
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 12127, LACS 23325, SPAN 23325

RDIN 23507. Power and Responsibility in the Anthropocene. 100 Units.

Humanity's immense impact on Earth's systems has led some scientists to claim that we have entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. Humans' influence on Earth's landscape, climate system, and biodiversity inspires many to ask, in turn, What should be done about humankind's planetary powers? Some scholars and religious leaders claim that people should take responsibility and influence Earth's systems for good ends, while others argue that we should radically scale down such power. Still others suggest that the Anthropocene requires us to entirely revise our ideas of power and responsibility and even develop new religious sensibilities. Through discussions and focused writing assignments, students in this class will explore and evaluate these and additional responses to the Anthropocene, paying specific attention to how Anthropocene ethical thought wrestles with the place of religion on a changing planet. The course culminates in an extended examination of how Anthropocene discourse conceals racial antagonisms and contemporary decolonial struggles.

Instructor(s): Colin Weaver     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CEGU 23507, ANTH 23507, GLST 23507, RLST 23507

RDIN 23510. The Sociology of Racism. 100 Units.

This course seeks to give students a rigorous introduction to the sociological subfield of the study of race over the last roughly 100 years - with a specific focus on how scholars have theorized racism(s). Moving chronologically, we will begin in the early to mid 20th century with ideas of race relations and race as a social construction, move to ethnic assimilation and racial formation, racial attitudes, and then to racialized social systems and colorblind racism. Alongside this trajectory, we will read critical scholarship that troubles the more mainstream scholarly understandings of racism in each period. We will end by exploring contemporary ways scholars are pushing the subfield forward.

Instructor(s): Cuddy, Maximilian     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 33510, SOCI 20603, SOCI 30603, MAPS 33510

RDIN 24000. Soundtrack for Changing the World: Mavis Staples, Chicago, & the Music of the Civil Rights Movement. 100 Units.

Mavis Staples was nine years old in 1948 when she joined her father, Roebuck "Pops' Staples and three siblings to form the Chicago gospel group The Staple Singers. Inspired by the rich musical crosscurrents of the South Side, the Staples fused gospel vocal harmonies with Delta Blues guitar to create a revolutionary form of American music. In the 1960s, the group collaborated with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and traveled the back roads of the South at great personal risk to spread his message. Their music became synonymous with the Civil Rights Movement. A lifelong South Side resident, Mavis Staples continues to blend soul, blues, folk, gospel and rock in her albums and has worked with Bob Dylan, Prince, Public Enemy's Chuck D and Wilco's Jeff Tweedy. Students in this interdisciplinary course will blend journalism, history, biography, and musicology to illuminate the pioneering path mapped out by Mavis Staples and her family. The students will explore how art and activism intertwine, and how popular music sparks democratic change. Students will create research projects grounded in the Staples' epic history by developing oral histories and drawing on recordings, photographs, manuscripts, newspapers, film, and video in archives nationwide. Students will be able to further their work by applying for Summer 2025 travel grants and research fellowships. Guest speakers in the course will include artists who were influenced by or played with Mavis Staples and The Staple Singers.

Instructor(s): Greg Kot, former Chicago Tribune music critic and host of public radio's Sound Opinions; Nora Titone     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): PARR 34000, RDIN 34000, MUSI 34200, HIST 27316

RDIN 24001. Colonizations I: Colonialism, Enslavement and Resistance in the Atlantic World. 100 Units.

This quarter examines the making of the Atlantic world in the aftermath of European colonial expansion. Focusing on the Caribbean, North and South America, and western Africa, we cover the dynamics of invasion, representation of otherness, enslavement, colonial economies and societies, as well as resistance and revolution.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Note(s): This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies. This course is offered every year. These courses can be taken in any sequence.
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 24001, ANTH 24001, HIST 18301, SOSC 24001

RDIN 24002. Colonizations II: Imperial Expansion, Anti-Imperialism, and Nation in Asia. 100 Units.

This quarter covers the histories of modern European and Japanese colonialism in South and East Asia and the Pacific. Themes examined include the logics and dynamics of imperial expansion and rule; Orientalist discourses; uprisings and anti-imperial movements; the rise of nationalisms; and paths to decolonization in the region.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Note(s): This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies. These courses can be taken in any sequence.
Equivalent Course(s): SOSC 24002, SALC 24002, HIST 18302, ANTH 24002, CRES 24002

RDIN 24003. Colonizations III: Decolonization, Revolution, Freedom. 100 Units.

The third quarter considers the processes and consequences of decolonization both in newly independent nations and former colonial powers. Through an engagement with postcolonial studies, we explore the problematics of freedom and sovereignty; anti-colonial movements, thinking and struggles; nation-making and nationalism; and the enduring legacies of colonialism.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Note(s): This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies. These courses can be taken in any sequence.
Equivalent Course(s): SOSC 24003, CRES 24003, HIST 18303, SALC 20702, ANTH 24003

RDIN 24555. Ecological Explorations of the Francophone World. 100 Units.

The environmental humanities - that is, the study of nature through humanistic disciplines such as literature and history - has long been dominated by texts and theories from privileged sections of Europe and North America. However, alternative understandings of our natural world, including the role of living beings within it, have always existed. In this course, we will explore how contemporary francophone literature can renew, expand and complicate our perceptions of the oceans, deserts, mangroves and forests that surround us. Particular attention will be paid to questions of race, gender, language and indigeneity; course material may include theoretical texts, fiction, poetry, songs, podcasts, film, graphic novels and social media material.

Instructor(s): Nikhita Obeegadoo     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): For students seeking French credit, FREN 20500 or equivalent.
Note(s): Taught in English or French, based on course composition
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 34555, FREN 24555, RDIN 34555, CEGU 24555, CEGU 34555

RDIN 24599. Historical and Contemporary Issues in U.S. Racial Health Inequality. 100 Units.

This course explores persistent health inequality in the U.S. from the 1900s to the present day. The focus will be on racial gaps in urban health inequality with some discussion of rural communities. Readings will largely cover the research on Black and White gaps in health inequality, with the understanding that most of the issues discussed extend to health inequalities across many racial and ethnic groups. Readings cover the broad range of social determinants of health (socioeconomic status, education, access to health care, homelessness) and how these social determinants are rooted in longstanding legacies of American inequality. A major component of class assignments will be identifying emerging research and innovative policies and programs that point to promising pathways to eliminating health disparities.

Instructor(s): M. Keels     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Only students with 2nd year standing or above.
Note(s): Fulfills grad requirement: 2,4 and undergrad major requirement B.
Equivalent Course(s): PBPL 24599, CHDV 24599, CHDV 44599, HLTH 24599, CHST 24599

RDIN 24601. Martin and Malcolm: Life and Belief. 100 Units.

This course examines the religious, social, cultural, political, and personal factors that went into the making of the two most prominent public leaders and public intellectuals emerging from the African American community in the 1950s and 1960s: Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. We will review their autobiographies, the domestic trends within the USA, and the larger international forces operating during their times. Their life stories provide the contexts for the sharp differences and surprising commonalities in their political thought and religious beliefs. At the end of their lives, were they still radical contrasts, sharing the same views, or had their beliefs shifted - did Malcolm become Martin and Martin become Malcolm?

Instructor(s): Dwight Hopkins     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 27209, AMER 24601, RLST 24601, FNDL 24601

RDIN 24770. Sex, Crime and Horror in Argentine Literature. 100 Units.

This course examines the historical evolution of Argentine literature, cinema, and the visual arts through the study of three thematic currents that significantly influenced Argentina's cultural and socio-political experience with nation-building, modernization, and democracy: sex, crime, and horror. The primary objective of the course is to foster a critical exploration of how foundational works of Romanticism and Realism in the Río de la Plata, the Noir genre, and the Gothic tradition accounted for decisive changes in the social fabric of the country. Students will assess the role of sexuality, crime, and horror stories in the representation of momentous events in Argentine history, spanning from the revolutionary era in the nineteenth century to the contemporary period. Topics include the Wars of Independence, gaucho literature, indigenous resistance, the great migratory flows, the rise of the middle classes, Peronismo, Youth culture, military dictatorships, human rights violations, LGBT movements, and economic precarity in neoliberal times. Works by Esteban Echeverría, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Juana Manuela Gorriti, José Hernández, Lucio V. and Eduarda Mansilla, Eugenio Cambaceres, Leopoldo Lugones, Roberto Arlt, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan José Saer, Antonio Di Benedetto, Olga Orozco, Alejandra Pizarnik, Juan Gelman, Andrés Rivera, Silvina Ocampo, Horacio Quiroga, Rodolfo Walsh, Manuel Puig, Ricardo Piglia, Mariana Enríquez, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, María Luisa Bemberg,

Instructor(s): Carlos Halaburda      Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Reading proficiency in Spanish required.
Note(s): Class discussions and reading materials in Spanish.
Equivalent Course(s): LACS 24770, GNSE 24770, SPAN 24770, SPAN 34770, RDIN 34770, LACS 34770, GNSE 34771

RDIN 24960. Creole Genesis and Genetic Linguistics. 100 Units.

In this seminar course we will review the "creole exceptionalism" tradition against the uniformitarian view, according to which creoles have emerged and evolved like other, natural and non-creole languages. We will situate creoles in the context of the plantation settlement colonies that produced them and compare their emergence specifically with that of languages such as English and the Romance languages in Europe. We will also compare these evolutions with those of new colonial varieties of European languages (such as Amish English, mainstream American English varieties, Brazilian Portuguese, and Québécois French) which emerged around the same time but are not considered creoles. Using the comparative approach (in evolutionary theory), we will assess whether the criteria used in the genetic classification of languages have been applied uniformly to creole and non-creole languages. In return, we will explore ways in which genetic creolistics can inform and improve genetic linguistics (including historical dialectology).

Instructor(s): Salikoko Mufwene
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 34960, CHDV 34960, CHDV 24960, LING 34960, LING 24960

RDIN 25002. Is Religion Bad for Women? 100 Units.

Some scholars working in the study of gender and sexuality view religion as the conservative enemy of progress, irreconcilably antagonistic to the flourishing of any non-normative gender or sexuality. At the same time, some religious practitioners view feminism as a Western or liberal invention, an imposition that attempts to manage the lives of religious subjects. Still others find feminism and religious commitment mutually reinforcing, and have developed feminist, womanist, and queer rituals and theologies. This course examines contemporary texts, ethnographies, memoirs, and films that grapple with these tensions. In so doing, the course also helps students develop familiarity with foundational categories both in religious studies and in the study of gender and sexuality. Further questions to be explored include: Does religion facilitate or oppose the flourishing of women, queers, and people of color? Is religion a guardian of tradition that resists politically progressive aims, or do religions offer resources for interrogating secular liberalism? The course primarily considers Islamic, Christian, and Jewish traditions. Prior coursework in religious studies or gender and sexuality studies is helpful but not necessary.

Instructor(s): Hannah Jones     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 24002, GNSE 12130, GLST 24002

RDIN 25119. Architecture and Colonialism in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. 100 Units.

This seminar invites students to examine the intersections of colonialism with architecture in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Throughout the semester, we will discuss the designs of architects working in the region (Le Corbusier, Fernand Pouillon, Shadrach Woods, etc.) and concepts defining colonialism as a design project (segregation, repression, primitivism, etc.). We will also pay particular attention to modes of opposition pursued by residents and their historical impact toward the region's decolonization. Moments of heightened historical consequence, such as the strategic use of selected architectural spaces by independentist guerrillas, will be thoroughly discussed. The class will progress through a chronological scope, from Orientalism as a 19th century phenomenon to the enmeshment of modernism with colonialism in the 20th century. We will conclude with the emergence of postcolonial modernities.

Instructor(s): Jacobé Huet      Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 25119, ARCH 25119, RDIN 35119, ARTH 35119

RDIN 25704. Environmental Justice in Chicago. 100 Units.

This course will examine the development of environmental justice theory and practice through social scientific and ethical literature about the subject as well as primary source accounts of environmental injustices. We will focus on environmental justice issues in Chicago including, but not limited to waste disposal, toxic air and water, the Chicago heat wave, and climate change. Particular attention will be paid to environmental racism and the often understudied role of religion in environmental justice theory and practice. Throughout the course we will explore how normative commitments are expressed in different types of literature as well as the basis for normative judgments and the types of authorities authors utilize and claim as they consider environmental justice.

Instructor(s): Sarah Fredericks     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Graduate students can enroll with permission of instructor and will have additional requirements.
Equivalent Course(s): ENST 25704, RLST 25704, PBPL 25704, CHST 25704, HMRT 25704, CEGU 25704, KNOW 25704, AMER 25704

RDIN 25800. Black Ownership of Wealth: A Theological Consideration. 100 Units.

Since Africans were brought to the Virginia Colony (August 1619), throughout slavery and segregation until today, black Americans (men and women) have always owned wealth. They have always had human agency. These black families accumulated wealth and offered a concurrent narrative and framing from the mainstream understanding of black Americans as victims. Who are these black families who remain mainly invisible from the dominant black story? What is material, financial wealth? Who has it? And how did they get it?

Instructor(s): Dwight Hopkins     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This course meets the CS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): AMER 25800, RLST 25800, AMER 45800, HIST 37419, RDIN 45800, HIST 27419, THEO 45800

RDIN 26050. Race, Ethnicity, Language, and Citizenship in the United States. 100 Units.

This course is intended to help students make sense of the current discourse on diversity and inclusion/exclusion from a historical perspective. They will be trained to read critically the evolution of political discourse on citizenship in the United States since the American Revolution. They will learn to detect the role of shifting interpretations of race and ethnicity, after that of European nationality, in determining who is (not) a (full) citizen. For instance, who counted as "American" in the early stages of the Republic? Why were Native Americans and (descendants of) forced immigrants from Africa excluded at the outset? How did English become the unofficial language of American citizenship and inclusion? What factors favored its rise and drove to extinction the competing European national languages?

Instructor(s): Salikoko Mufwene     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CHDV 36055, LING 36050, CHDV 26050, LING 26050

RDIN 26220. Dance, Identity, and Appropriation. 100 Units.

This survey course will look at the ways that dance-across genres, geographies, and histories-has negotiated, challenged, and complicated ideas of identity and authority. Grounded in histories including the 1893 World Columbian Exposition, where Swedish-American Christine Olson performed Turkish dance on the Midway, as well as modern dance pioneer Ruth St. Denis' imitation of the Indianness she encountered on a cigarette ad, we will explore case studies including American minstrel traditions, hip hop dance, the Nutcracker and other classical ballets, dance tourism like Hula and West African forms, viral K-pop dance tutorials, and more. These case studies will be used to discover how dance, and the dancing body, performs and problematizes appropriation. Part seminar/part practicum, assignments will include short written papers and performance projects including dance reconstructions.

Instructor(s): E. Leopold     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 36220, TAPS 36220, TAPS 26220

RDIN 26252. The Moment of Raisin. 100 Units.

In conjunction with the Court Theatre's production of Lorraine Hansberry's landmark 1959 play A Raisin the Sun, this course will place Hansberry's play in its literary and historical context to understand more thoroughly the play's success in its historical moment and its ongoing importance. We will also discuss subsequent theatrical and cinematic productions and adaptations. Among the other works we will consider are: James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones, Gwendolyn Brooks's The Bean Eaters, and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and Ann Petry's The Street. Students will be expected to attend the play.

Instructor(s): Kenneth Warren     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 26252

RDIN 26290. Mapping Black Social Dance: Hip Hop and House in the Community and Onstage. 100 Units.

This hybrid studio/seminar course offers an overview of the formal techniques, cultural contexts, and social trends that shape current Black social and vernacular dance practices. Modules will be built around Black social culture by looking at key histories and theories around Black dance, music and other cultural aesthetics from hip hop to house. As part of our exploration, we will cover themes such as: the Great Migration, the range of Black social dance forms from blues, jazz, disco, and dancehall that have influenced the evolution of hip hop and house on global scale; and the spectrum of social spaces from clubs to lounges and public events that have been critical to preserving Black cultural heritage and creating safe spaces for belonging and flourishing. Selected readings and viewings will supplement movement practice to give historical, cultural, and political context.

Instructor(s): M. McNeal     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 33620, MUSI 23620, CHST 26290, TAPS 36290, RDIN 36290, TAPS 26290

RDIN 26302. Bodies at Work: Art & Civic Responsibility. 100 Units.

Contemporary artists are quickly adapting their practices to be more inclusive, diverse, accessible and physically safe. In particular, the rise of intimacy design and anti-racist work in theatre, film and television has opened up a dialogue about how artists do their work responsibly. Through practice and investigation, this class will dive into the responsibility of artists in contemporary artistic processes. We will explore both how the tools and capacities of artists can transform civic practice and, conversely, how artists are grappling with the civic issues of body safety, anti-racism and accessibility in arts practice. We will explore how centering the body can create respectful engagement in the arts. We will look at the work of Enrich Chicago, Nicole Brewer, Sonya Renee Taylor, Not in Our House and Intimacy Directors & Coordinators among others.

Instructor(s): D. Serna     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CHST 26302, GNSE 26303, TAPS 26302, MADD 20302

RDIN 26312. Race, Crime, and Justice in the City. 100 Units.

The size and growth of the U.S. jail and prison census, and its deleterious consequences for the poor, and especially for poor black people who reside in the nation's most disadvantaged communities, has been well documented. This course examines some of this work but goes further in addressing how the targets of mass incarceration experience crime control policy, how criminal legal expansion shapes urban, and, in recent years, suburban and rural sociality, and how criminalized people work to bring about change in the laws and policies that regulate their lives.

Equivalent Course(s): SSAD 26312, SSAD 46312, RDIN 46312

RDIN 26380. Indigenous Politics in Latin America. 100 Units.

This course examines the history of Indigenous policies and politics in Latin America from the first encounters with European empires through the 21st Century. Course readings and discussions will consider several key historical moments across the region: European encounters/colonization; the rise of liberalism and capitalist expansion in the 19th century; 20th-century integration policies; and pan-Indigenous and transnational social movements in recent decades. Students will engage with primary and secondary texts that offer interpretations and perspectives both within and across imperial and national boundaries.

Instructor(s): Diana Schwartz Francisco     Terms Offered: Course not offered in 24-25
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 36380, LACS 26380, HIPS 26380, ANTH 23077, HIST 26318, LACS 36380, GLST 26380, CRES 26380

RDIN 26384. Art and the Archive in Greater Latin America. 100 Units.

How and why do artists engage records of the past in their work? What are the politics of both creating archives and culling from them to visually render or represent the past? Focusing on artists, art-making, and archives in Greater Latin America (including the United States), this course will consider the process of collecting and creating in artistic production from the perspectives of both theory and practice. Students in the course will work directly with archival materials in Chicago and collaborate on contemporary artistic projects that consider issues of relevance to people and places of the Western Hemisphere.

Instructor(s): Diana Schwartz-Francisco     Terms Offered: Course not offered in 24-25
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 20017, ARTH 26384, HIST 26319, CHST 26384, LACS 26384

RDIN 26386. Greater Latin America. 100 Units.

What is "Latin America," who are "Latin Americans" and what is the relationship among and between places and people of the region we call Latin America, on the one hand, and the greater Latinx diaspora in the US on the other? This course explores the history of Latin America as an idea, and the cultural, social, political and economic connections among peoples on both sides of the southern and eastern borders of the United States. Students will engage multiple disciplinary perspectives in course readings and assignments and will explore Chicago as a crucial node in the geography of Greater Latin America. Some topics we will consider are: the origin of the concept of "Latin" America, Inter-Americanism and Pan-Americanism, transnational social movements and intellectual exchanges, migration, and racial and ethnic politics.

Instructor(s): Diana Schwartz Francisco     Terms Offered: Course not offered in 24-25
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 26321, RDIN 36386, ANTH 23003, LACS 26386, CRES 26386, LACS 36386, SPAN 26386, SPAN 36386

RDIN 26600. Black Women Work: The labor of Black women in communities, families, and institutions. 100 Units.

This multidisciplinary course will explore the labor of Black women in three distinct arenas-communities, families, and institutions. Students will explore these areas through engaging with historical and contemporary narratives, research, and popular media, heavily drawing in a U.S. context, but not exclusively. Through an engagement of Black women in the U.S. labor force, this course will explore three questions. How has the labor of Black women contributed to the sustainability of communities, families, and institutions? What are the choices Black women make to engage and sustain their work? What is the future of the labor of Black women? Is the future one that is liberatory or not? Students will leave this course with an understanding of the ways intersectional experiences of oppression contribute to complex conditions and decision-making, that shape the labor of Black women, the function of certain labor decisions as sites of resistance, as well as the generative resources that support the professional success and well-being of Black women.

Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 20127, SSAD 69600, SSAD 29600

RDIN 26605. Testimonial Montage: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Holocaust Testimony. 100 Units.

The Fortunoff Archive at Yale, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Shoah Foundation, and Yad Vashem are just a few of the repositories of audiovisual Holocaust testimonies throughout the world. As these testimonies come to be all that remains of the generations of Holocaust survivors to tell their stories, how are researchers approaching them? In this class we will explore four distinct discourses and their approaches to testimony: Historical, Literary, Cinematic, and Photographic. Our final projects will be an analysis of a testimony from one of the above-named archives that incorporates all four perspectives.

Instructor(s): Sheila Jelen     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This course meets the LMCS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students. This course fulfills the general literature course requirement for Creative Writing (CRWR) majors/minors.
Equivalent Course(s): JWSC 26605, RDIN 46605, RLST 26605, GRMN 46605, RLVC 46605, HIJD 46605, GRMN 26605

RDIN 26635. Liberatory Violence. 100 Units.

From 18th century slave rebellions in the Americas to 20th and 21st century anticolonial revolutions, oppressed peoples' struggles for liberation have often incorporated violent tactics, even against non-combatants. This course examines anticolonial violence in light of the work of the Martiniquan revolutionary Frantz Fanon and some of his interlocutors. We study specific freedom movements: Nat Turner's slave rebellion, the Haitian and Algerian revolutions against French colonialism, Malcolm X and the Black Panthers' mobilization against white supremacy and police violence, and the ongoing Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. Throughout, we will pay attention to how revolutionaries evaluated the place of violence in their own movements, including religious criteria for justifiable and unjustifiable use of force.

Instructor(s): Alireza Doostdar     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Graduate student enrollment by permission only. Please send one or two paragraphs explaining your interest and prior preparation.
Note(s): This course meets the SCSR Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 26635, AASR 46635, RDIN 46635, GLST 26635, ANTH 36635, ANTH 26636, SSAD 26635

RDIN 26674. The Global Black Panther Party. 100 Units.

In America, the Black Panther Party and its leaders, like Fred Hampton in Chicago, are famous for their revolutionary fight against white supremacy and their violent suppression by US government forces. But what does a Global Studies approach teach us about the Black Panthers? This seminar explores how the Black Panther Party's worldwide networks impacted global understandings of politics, race, and religion. Our readings examine a series of comparative case studies, including the Dalit Panther Party in India, the Mizrahi Black Panther Party in Israel, and the Polynesian Panthers in New Zealand. We analyze primary sources, such as the various Panther Parties' publications, their mainstream press coverage, and their pop cultural representations, like Ta-Nehisi Coates' Black Panther graphic novel and the film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. In this course, students learn the global Black Panther Parties' roles in reshaping worldwide conceptions of race, caste, and religion through their encounters with the Nation of Islam, Hindu Nationalism, Zionism, and Indigenous rights. No prior knowledge or coursework is required.

Instructor(s): Andrew Kunze     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 26674, ANTH 20537, GLST 26674

RDIN 26770. Stories of Oceans and Archipelagos. 100 Units.

According to Fijian-Tongan writer Epeli Hau'ofa, "There is a world of difference between viewing the Pacific as 'islands in a far sea' and as 'a sea of islands.'" In this course, we will delve into the "world of difference" that exists between viewing islands as remote and insignificant, and considering them as crucial nodes in an ever-expanding planetary network. Simultaneously, we will consider the stakes of moving away from traditional representations of the ocean as a blank canvas for human movement, to instead consider it as a vibrant material and multispecies space. This course will encourage students to formulate their own approaches to cutting-edge debates in archipelagic theory and critical ocean studies, and to situate those debates within the broader fields of environmental humanities and postcolonial studies. Readings will be drawn from the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean (including the Caribbean Sea), and the Indian Ocean.

Instructor(s): Nikhita Obeegadoo     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): For students seeking French credit, FREN 20500 or equivalent.
Note(s): Taught in French.
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 26771, FREN 26770, CEGU 26770

RDIN 26780. Caribbean Music, Performance, and Popular Culture in the Age of Precarity: 1990 to the Present. 100 Units.

This course explores the concept of precarity and its influence on artistic and cultural expressions within contemporary Caribbean popular culture, primarily from the 1990s to the present day. Precarity is broadly defined as the feeling or experience of instability resulting from various social, economic, political, and environmental factors, including structural adjustments, climate change (such as hurricanes and earthquakes), and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, among others. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of art in shaping popular responses to precarity, including significant events like mass protests, the Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protests, uprisings against the deportation of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, as well as interrelated international movements like #LifeinLeggings and #Metoo. The course delves into how Caribbean performance and popular music have engaged with these issues, with a focus on music genres like dancehall, wylers, soca, reggaetón, and the individual artistic works of Caribbean artists such as LaVaughn Belle, Helen Ceballos, Joiri Minaya, and others. These artists use their work to explore themes of precarity and to envision potential alternatives to the contemporary challenges of insecurity, touching on issues related to gender, sexuality, and race.

Instructor(s): Jessica Baker and Danielle Roper     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 26780, SPAN 36780, RDIN 36780, MUSI 36780, SPAN 26780

RDIN 26922. Structuring Refuge: U.S. Refugee Policy and Resettlement Practice. 100 Units.

The UN estimates that there are 100 million forcibly displaced people around the world (UNHCR, 2022), with over 27 million refugees among them, but in 2022 only 57,500 refugees were resettled to third countries. Historically the U.S. has been the largest resettlement country, and in the U.S. refugees are entitled to federal, state, and local supports that other immigrants do without. At the same time, refugees in the U.S. are arguably subject to greater scrutiny and social control than most other un-incarcerated domestic populations. This course asks the central questions: How is refugee status politically constructed and experienced by individuals; what are the interrelationships between institutional actors and refugee policies, with what implications for service delivery; what does research tell us about the resettlement outcomes. and what drives these outcomes; and finally, what are the points of intervention for social workers in the resettlement process? We will address these questions by: 1. detangling the web of international and domestic policies that relate to the refugees' political identity, 2. focusing on U.S. resettlement, 3. analyzing resettlement policies and exploring the implications for social work practice targeted at integration, employment, and mental health, and 4. holding the inherent tension that can result from a dual focus on macro issues of scale and policy and micro issues related to the lived experience of human beings.

Equivalent Course(s): CRES 26922, SSAD 46922, SSAD 26922, HMRT 46922, CHST 26922

RDIN 26994. Anticolonial Worlding: Literature, Film, Thought. 100 Units.

This course explores anticolonial worldbuilding through literature, film, art, and philosophy. It focuses on the role of the cultural Cold War in shaping anticolonial aesthetics and politics during the twentieth century as well as its impact on our current political moment. The mid-century was characterized by an expansion of anticolonial festivals, exchanges, and congresses and marked by political crises and coalitional solidarity across Vietnam, Palestine, Cuba, Soviet and US imperial expansion, and the May 1968 student protests. We will explore how Pan-Arab, Pan-African, Non-Aligned/Global South, Marxist-Leninist, indigenous land rights, and racial justice movements mobilized class, gender, and language politics. Exploring anticolonial literature, film, and art across a multilingual and transnational archive we will ask how socialist and speculative realisms, engaged literature, third cinema, agitprop, and other aesthetic movements generated powerful internationalist imaginations and networks of resistance.

Instructor(s): Leah Feldman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 26994, REES 26994, CMLT 36994, CMLT 26994, HMRT 26994, ENGL 26994, GNSE 26994, GNSE 36994, RDIN 36994

RDIN 27543. Black and/or Human: On Humanism and Racialized Being. 100 Units.

What is it to be human and why does it matter? This course invites students to engage the question within the relation between theories of humanism and the histories of dehumanization as pertains to the racialization of Black people. Specific theories of the human have served as foundations of practices of dehumanization, and yet experiences of dehumanization have led to the development of new forms of humanism. In light of histories of enslavement and colonization and the related hierarchies of the human, what is the conceptual basis of the hierarchization within or exclusion from the category of the human? What does it feel like to be dehumanized and how does one adequately respond to such an experience? Some thinkers reject the concept while others reclaim it to inspire new existential outlooks on the world or political struggles. This course will explore the wide literature on these questions, supplementing written texts with other media such as film and music. We will focus on the implications of theories of humanism for the particularly human form of being, the pursuit of the good, and the organization of social life. Engagement in this course will be based on discussion, personal reflection, and the relation of course material to contemporary issues.

Instructor(s): Kevin Irakoze     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Prior coursework on Critical Race Theory or consent of instructor.
Equivalent Course(s): PHIL 27543

RDIN 27544. African Philosophy. 100 Units.

This course is a general survey of African philosophy. We will read a selection of writings from African philosophers, spanning geographical space and historical periods. The tendency for the study of African philosophy is to focus solely on post-colonial writings with texts originally written in French or English. Against this tendency, the course will introduce students to a wider chronology of African philosophy that traverses various historical eras and with an attention to the diversity of the original languages of primary texts (including Ge'ez, Arabic, German, and Latin). In addition to often-studied figures such as Paulin Hountondji and Kwame Gyekye, we will engage with such thinkers as Ahmad Bābā al-Timbukti, Augustine of Hippo, Zara Yaqob, James Africanus Beale Horton, and Anton Wilhelm Amo. Instruction will emphasize the close reading of primary texts within relevant historical contexts. Students will be encouraged to engage African philosophy on its own terms and in conversation with other philosophical traditions.

Instructor(s): Kévin Irakóze     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): This course is introductory and does not require any prior coursework in philosophy.
Equivalent Course(s): PHIL 27544

RDIN 27600. Cinema in Africa. 100 Units.

This course examines Africa in film as well as films produced in Africa. It places cinema in Sub Saharan Africa in its social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts ranging from neocolonial to postcolonial, Western to Southern Africa, documentary to fiction, art cinema to TV, and includes films that reflect on the impact of global trends in Africa and local responses, as well as changing racial and gender identifications. We will begin with La Noire de... (1966), by the "father" of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene, contrasted w/ a South African film, African Jim (1960) that more closely resembles African American musical film, and anti-colonial and anti-apartheid films from Lionel Rogosin's Come Back Africa (1959) to Sarah Maldoror's Sambizanga, Sembene's Camp de Thiaroye (1984), and Jean Marie Teno's Afrique, Je te Plumerai (1995). The rest of the course will examine 20th and 21st century films such as I am a not a Witch and The wound (both 2017), which show tensions between urban and rural, traditional and modern life, and the implications of these tensions for women and men, Western and Southern Africa, in fiction, documentary and fiction film. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Loren Kruger     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): One or more of the following: Intro to Film/ International Cinema AND/OR Intro to African Studies or equivalent
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 24201, CMLT 22900, RDIN 37600, GNSE 28602, CMLT 42900, ENGL 47600, ENGL 27600, CMST 34201, GNSE 48602

RDIN 27685. History Colloquium: Asian/Pacific Islander American History, 1850-2021. 100 Units.

Looking through a broad interdisciplinary lens, this course will examine the trajectory of Asians and Pacific Islanders in America. How did nineteenth- and early twentieth-century "sojourners" become "citizens"? What constituted the public's shift in perception of Asians from unassimilable alien to ostensible "model minority"? We will interrogate not only what it means to have been and to be an Asian in America but also what role APIAs have played in striving for a multiracial democracy. The history of anti-Asian violence will be traced from the mid-nineteenth century to the most recent hate crimes in the age of COVID. Conscious of the tendency to homogenize all Asians in the historical imagination, the course will be explicitly comparative, incorporating the diverse and disparate experiences of East, Southeast, and South Asians, as well as Pacific Islanders in America over time. We will, also, at times, investigate the histories of other ethnic/racial groups and compare their experiences to the Asian American experience.

Instructor(s): M. Briones     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Priority registration is given to History majors.
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 29685

RDIN 27708. Feeling Brown, Feeling Down. 100 Units.

Taking its cue from José Esteban Muñoz's 2006 essay in Signs, this course interrogates negative affective categories as they are expressed in US ethnic literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. As Muñoz argues, "depression has become one of the dominant affective positions addressed within the cultural field of contemporary global capitalism"; this course explores orientations such as depression, shame, sickness, and melancholy to think critically about racial formations amidst capital and how these are posed alongside literary questions. Primary texts may include Larsen, Ozeki, Morrison, and Okada; secondary texts may include Ahmed, Freud, Muñoz, Cheng, and Spillers.

Instructor(s): Megan Tusler     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 27708, RDIN 47708, ENGL 47708, MAPH 47708, AMER 47708, AMER 27708

RDIN 28055. Queerness in the Shadow of Empire: Sexualities in the Modern Middle East. 100 Units.

Critics, from both the Right and the Left, claim that liberal sexual regimes are Western, imperial impositions onto Muslim and Middle Eastern societies. On the other hand, LGBTQ+ advocates claim that the restriction of sexuality is itself a colonial legacy. This class will delve into this debate by examining cutting edge empirical and theoretical work on Queer lives in the modern Middle East.

Instructor(s): E. Abelhadi     Terms Offered: Autumn. Distribution: C;3
Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent
Note(s): Distribution: C;3
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 20141, CHDV 38055, CHDV 28055, RDIN 38055, GNSE 30141

RDIN 28300. Poéticas Afrocaribeñas. 100 Units.

En este curso haremos una revisión panorámica de la producción poética afrocaribeña desde sus primeras expresiones conocidas en el siglo XIX hasta el presente. ¿Qué condiciones culturales y políticas han dado cuenta de su surgimiento y desarrollo? ¿Qué sistemas tropológicos y repertorios temáticos la han caracterizado? ¿En qué medida esta poesía ha sido vehículo para pensar las identidades raciales de la zona e instrumento de resistencia en coyunturas de violencia extrema y cuáles han sido sus disidencias? Entre los materiales a estudiar se encuentra la obra de sujetos esclavizados y de afrodescendientes libres victimizados por el colonialismo esclavista (entre ellos Juan Francisco Manzano y Plácido); las experimentaciones vanguardistas de Nicolás Guillén y Luis Palés Matos y de sus seguidores Emilio Ballagas y Manuel del Cabral; y las reformulaciones feministas de esta tradición avanzadas por poetas contemporáneas tales como la cubana Nancy Morejón y la puertorriqueña Mayra Santos Febres.

Instructor(s): Agnes Lugo-Ortiz     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Taught in Spanish.
Equivalent Course(s): SPAN 28300, LACS 28300

RDIN 29000. Cinema and the Speculative Archive: Theory & Practice Seminar. 100 Units.

Recent years have seen the flourishing of work by experimental filmmakers that imaginatively engages with absences in the historical record, especially around the visual history of African Americans. How might scholarship adapt methodologies from these creative practices? How can scholarly methods, in turn, inform art making (as the formation of another kind of history)? Engaging theory and practice, this course investigates these questions through-and against-African American media history's precarious archival condition. Students interested in enrolling should contact Professor Field at anfield@uchicago.edu.

Instructor(s): Allyson Nadia Field & Christopher Harris     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Not offered in 2024-25.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 39000, CHST 29000, RDIN 39000, CMST 29000, CCCT 39000

RDIN 29030. Islam, Race and Decoloniality. 100 Units.

This course explores western perspectives, attitudes and representations of Muslims and Islam from medieval European thought, through liberal colonial encounters to contemporary media and political discourses. Students will examine the intersection of race and religion as it applies to the construction of Muslim identity and alterity in the Western imagination. We will explore the remarkable consistency across centuries of the threatening, menacing, barbaric and uncivilized Muslim "Other". The course centers around these Orientalist constructions and will explore the power structures, colonial modalities, epistemological frameworks, and ideological assumptions that perpetuate the racialization of Islam and Muslims within the United States and abroad. This course ultimately aims to uncover potentials for resistance, recovery and renewal through the politics and praxis of decoloniality. Students will gain familiarity with decolonial theory and practices, as well as the important project of 'epistemic delinking' as it is framed by contemporary scholars intent on challenging, possibly undoing and remapping the Muslim experience within global liberal political modernity.

Instructor(s): Maliha Chishti     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This course meets the SCSR Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 39030, NEHC 29030, RLST 29030, ISLM 39030, KNOW 39030, RDIN 39030, ANTH 29030, ANTH 39030

RDIN 29108. Atlantic Empires. 100 Units.

This course explores classic and emerging scholarship on European empires and colonies in the early modern Atlantic world (c. 1400s-1800s). We will examine the rise and consolidation of empires and colonies through comparative, trans, and circum-Atlantic approaches. Additionally, the course will pay particular attention to the perspectives of colonized peoples (such as enslaved and freed people of African descent, Creole populations, and Indigenous peoples). Geographically, the course will span the Atlantic World, including regions such as the Caribbean, West Africa, Latin America, and North America. Topics we will cover include the formation of empires and colonial systems; Atlantic slavery; the emergence of Atlantic ideologies of race; gender, and kinship; knowledge formation, environment, and disease; anti-slavery struggles, and the "Age of Revolution."

Instructor(s): Lyons, Deirdre     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 39108, HIST 29108, ANTH 39208, MAPS 39108, HIST 39108

RDIN 29109. Sex, Gender, and Kinship: Colonial Perspectives. 100 Units.

This course analyzes the contested relationships between gender, sexuality, kinship, and western colonialism from the early modern period through the twentieth century. Drawing on historical case studies, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies, this course will cover a broad range of empires and colonies to explore the mutually constitutive relationship between colonization and ideologies and practices of gender, sex, and kinship. Analyzing case studies predominately from the Atlantic World (with attention to colonies elsewhere), we will explore topics such as the emergence of colonial gender ideologies, gender and colonial governance, family life and kinship strategies, the intersectionality of gender and sexuality with race and class, queerness and queer lives, the politics of sex work and reproduction, and gendered migrations across empires.

Instructor(s): Lyons, Deirdre     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MAPS 39109, GNSE 39109, RDIN 39109, HIST 29109, GNSE 23174, HIST 39109

RDIN 29117. Theater and Performance in Latin America. 100 Units.

What is performance? How has it been used in Latin America and the Caribbean? This course is an introduction to theatre and performance in Latin America and the Caribbean that will examine the intersection of performance and social life. While we will place particular emphasis on performance art, we will examine some theatrical works. We ask: how have embodied practice, theatre and visual art been used to negotiate ideologies of race, gender and sexuality? What is the role of performance in relation to systems of power? How has it negotiated dictatorship, military rule, and social memory? Ultimately, the aim of this course is to give students an overview of Latin American performance including blackface performance, indigenous performance, as well as performance and activism.

Instructor(s): Danielle Roper     Terms Offered: Course not offered in 24-25.
Prerequisite(s): Undergraduates must be in their third or fourth year.
Note(s): Taught in English.
Equivalent Course(s): LACS 29117, TAPS 28479, SPAN 29117, SPAN 39117, GNSE 29117, RDIN 39117, LACS 39117, GNSE 39117, TAPS 38479

RDIN 29427. Fashion, Empire, Capitalism. 100 Units.

Clothing, famously termed the "social skin", mediates the space between individuals and societies. Whether articulating personal taste or reflecting a collective identity, dress can be a powerful symbol-both historically and in the contemporary world. Worn against the skin, clothing is both intimate and connects us to a global, multi-billion-dollar system that employs roughly one in every ten people worldwide. This course addresses the multivalent history of dress from early modern imperial encounters in the Atlantic World, to anti-colonial movements in South Asia, to the nineteen-forties American Zoot Suit Riots-demonstrating the ways that clothes are connected to gendered and racial categories, political projects, and the shape of global capitalism. Students will analyze case studies from Malabar to Manchester, colonial Lima to revolutionary France, nineteenth-century Zanzibar to nineteen-eighties New York. Examining the history of dress and its global interconnections necessitates an interdisciplinary approach; therefore, students will combine historical scholarship with theoretical frameworks from the anthropology of dress and methodologies from material culture studies to analyze sources ranging from museum objects to films, haute couture fashion to flip-flops. Finally, this course sheds light on historic interconnections and the development of fashion systems, asks what ways these continue to animate our contemporary world, and imagines new possibilities for the future.

Instructor(s): K. Hickerson     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Assignments: material analyses, essays, and an original research project.
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 29427, GNSE 29427

RDIN 29634. African Cities and Urbanism. 100 Units.

This course looks at urbanism and urbanization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through a focus on selected cities in East, Southern, and West Africa. Beginning with existing trade routes and economic centers onto which some colonial cities were mapped, the course explores waves of migration over different historical periods, infrastructural imaginaries and the policies that shaped them, informal and formal economies, and cultural expressions and representations of life and living in the city. We will draw from a diversity of sources including fiction, non-fiction, architecture, town planning, photography, and the arts to examine political, social, economic, and topographical features and forces that drove the growth and development of each city studied, and also to reflect on commonalities that emerged between cities across different regions of the continent.

Instructor(s): T. Thipe     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 29634, CEGU 29634

RDIN 29661. Colloquium: Digital Humanities/Digital History. 100 Units.

The modern era has been punctuated by episodes, some lasting centuries, of exploitation, expropriation, and genocide. This course will address how people and institutions have sought to grapple with the legacies of the extreme violence that polities, societies, and individuals have inflicted on each other through the collection and display of the material, documentary, and testimonial fragments left behind. Focusing on the archives and museums dedicated to the genocide of Indigenous peoples, slavery, and the Holocaust, we will discuss the following questions: What is an object of trauma? What makes its way to a depository of traumatic events, what does not, and why? What do archivists and curators hope to accomplish?  What stories can be told, given that so many of the voices of victims are irretrievable? What happens to a remnant of trauma once it is in the custody of a museum or an archive? What is the relationship between archives of trauma and their exhibition? We will consider the traumatic remains that have been deposited both in specialized and in general archives and museums. This seminar-style class will involve intensive discussion of primary sources and interdisciplinary scholarship.  We will also be going on study trips to archives and museums around Chicago, such as the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, the DuSable Black History Museum & Education Center, and The Mitchell Museum of the American Indian.

Instructor(s): L. Auslander & T. Goldsmith     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 29661, JWSC 29661

RDIN 29700. Readings in Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. 100 Units.

This is a general reading and research course for independent study not related to the BA thesis/capstone project. To register, students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form. May be taken for P/F grading with consent of instructor. With prior approval, students who are majoring/minoring in RDI may use this course to satisfy program requirements.

Instructor(s): staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter

RDIN 29800. BA Thesis/Capstone Seminar. 100.00 Units.

This course is designed to introduce students to a range of research methods and to help determine which method(s) would fit a research thesis or capstone project focusing on topics related to race, diaspora, and/or indigeneity. The seminar functions as a research workshop in which students identify a research topic, develop a research question and explore a range of methods for their research thesis or capstone project. Class of 2024: Students will attend this seminar both in Autumn and Winter quarters of their fourth-year. In Autumn quarter the seminar meets weekly. In Winter quarter the seminar meets every other week. Class of 2025 and beyond: Students will attend this seminar in Spring of their third-year and Autumn of their fourth-year. In Spring quarter, the seminar meets weekly. In Autumn quarter the seminar meets every other week. In both cases, the seminar spans two quarters, and students may enroll in the course the quarter of their choosing.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor.
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 29800

RDIN 29900. BA Essay / Capstone Project. 100 Units.

Students may register for RDIN 29900 during any quarter of their fourth year. Use the College Reading and Research Course Form to register. Must be taken for a quality grade.

Instructor(s): staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter

RDIN 29943. Exhibiting the Art of the Ancient Americas. 100 Units.

This course will consider the history of exhibiting the art of the ancient Americas from the colonial period until the present. From the European Wunderkammer to the development of the modern museum, we will consider how colonial institutions and categories shaped the reception of visually elaborated objects from past Indigenous cultures. Paying close attention to the choice of objects presented in exhibitions as well as to the museographical decisions that shaped their presentation-to the extent that they can be reconstructed from archival materials-we will explore how exhibitions both reflected and shaped changing understandings of the ancient American past.

Instructor(s): C. Brittenham     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Consent Only
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 39943, ARTH 29943, ARTH 39943