Courses

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

This course is designed to develop the knowledge and skills necessary for students to begin understanding of the practice of social work. The course provides an overview of general practice and theory. Students are introduced to the value, philosophy and knowledge base considerations of social work practice. Generalist social work practice is presented as a process of planned change with various clients and systems as well as the application of ethical and technical principles of practice. Specific emphasis will be given in this course to the integration of material from the student’s knowledge of human behavior, social policy, research, life experience, and professional skills. Lessons and exercises are offered to emphasize understanding and relating to persons of diverse backgrounds including oppressed groups, populations-at risk and racial or ethnic minorities.

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

Examines ways to address the needs of diverse student populations. Issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and language are explored. Historic and ongoing issues of equity, particularly in school settings, are considered. The focus is on providing an education of high quality to all students.

*This course is associated with the The 1959 Project project site.

This course covers the cultural history of the Middle East from the rise of Islam through several political transformations to 1800. We will examine the Middle East as the contested center of caliphal empires, as a home to increasingly diverse ethnic and religious groups, as a region within an expanding Islamic world, and as the domain of the three so-called “gunpowder empires” (the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal dynasties). To achieve this more inclusive narrative, we will examine a diverse array of primary sources and review key studies of gender, class and cultural diversity in the Middle East.

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

This course introduces students to the multiple and varied roles student activists have played on college campuses, and the often-complicated ways that university administrators have responded to their demands for–in today’s language–diversity, equity, and inclusion. Together we will ask: What specific demands have student activists made, and to what success? What has been the relationship between student activism, civil rights, and global freedom struggles? And what new things can we learn about U-M’s own history when we place the voices of marginalized student activists at our center? Our classroom will be a space not only to engage how scholars have written about student movement histories, but also a space to practice building community and sustainable activist communities at U-M.

The Literature, Science, and the Arts Course Guide linked below requires University of Michigan login credentials.

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

This course will examine the long and often overlooked history of Asian Americans in Michigan with particular attention to activist efforts both at the University and off campus. With an emphasis on developing our own public history projects, this course will allow students to explore hands-on learning, and developing skills in the areas of library and web-based research, learning from community-driven research projects, and the ethical questions that such projects raise. In addition to working in campus libraries, the course will feature a number of guest speakers who have led their own community-based efforts to record their histories.

The Literature, Science, and the Arts Course Guide linked below requires University of Michigan login credentials.

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

This course explores the history of Arabs in the United States from the 1880s to the present. The class covers the features of and differences between three major periods of migration (before 1924, after 1965, and more recent migration) as well as thematic topics (such as gender and sexuality, labor organizing, transnationalism, political activism, government repression, and religious life). The course asks and answers the question: how have Arab Americans have experienced race and racism across time? We identify (1) the legal policies that have shaped how Arabs have been categorized racially in the U.S., (2) the impact of racism on Arab Americans and Arab American communities, and (3) the varied experiences of racialization and racism for Arab Americans that are impacted by differences in skin color, phenotype, gender, religion, and more.

In this class, you will also learn about the history of Arab Americans in Michigan and at the University of Michigan. We will visit the Bentley Historical Library and the Arab American National Museum and learn how to do archival research. Using archival materials, primarily from the Bentley, we will create a class public history exhibit related to Arab Americans in Michigan. 

The Literature, Science, and the Arts Course Guide linked below requires University of Michigan login credentials.

*This course is associated with the History of Jews at the University of Michigan project site.

In the 1920s, elite colleges across the northeast introduced quotas restricting the percentage of Jewish students on their campuses. As a result, many children from east coast immigrant families looked west to the University of Michigan — establishing a long tradition of a robust national Jewish student presence in Ann Arbor. U-M has thus served as an important locus for Americanization and the development of American Jewish culture. As outsiders and eventually as insiders, the experience of Jews at UM captures the long history of tension regarding inclusion and exclusion in American higher education.  

This course is offered as part of U-M’s Inclusive History Project, a presidential initiative meant to enrich our understanding of the under-studied diversity that has defined U-M history. This seminar thus provides an opportunity to both learn about and contribute to a developing narrative of Jewish experience at Michigan.

Class readings and discussions will focus on the history of Jews in American higher education, the history of the University, and the research and presentation tools necessary to gather and share the stories of Jews at the University. Possible research themes include radical student culture and campus activism; fraternity/sorority life, Jewish student organizations, close examination of faculty and student experience, antisemitism, tensions around Zionism, and many other subjects. Research projects will be developed in cooperation with the staff and draw upon the resources of the Bentley Historical Library.

The Literature, Science, and the Arts Course Guide linked below requires University of Michigan login credentials.

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

At the University of Michigan, Asian/Pacific Islander American student participation in co-curricular cultural performance is showcased in at least two ways: 1) ethnic culture night shows produced by Asian American student organizations; and 2) dedicated performing groups, some of which enter intercollegiate competitions. How does knowledge and analysis of these activities contribute to scholarship on student identity and the functions of these activities in the context of student life in higher education?

We will document campus A/PIA shows and performing groups, and the student communities who produce them, through attendance at scheduled events, compiling collections of relevant memorabilia, and reaching out to past and present participants. We will combine discussions on performances with insights from assigned readings on Asian American students in higher education.

This course is cross-listed as ASIANPAM 352, Section 001.

The Literature, Science, and the Arts Course Guide linked below requires University of Michigan login credentials.

SEAS, which holds the longest standing academic environmental justice program in the nation, has a vital role to play in educating future leaders about its history. We need to make this history of both struggle and initial transformation available to people without a degree and to leave a foundation for future SEAS leaders to build a more just and equitable school, university, and sustainability sector.

The work of this course is to collaboratively collect, identify and daylight a rich collection of historical sources. Existing documents and narratives may include Gala case studies, the Black Body student letter (8/31/20) and Dean Overpeck’s response, SEAS DEI climate surveys, plans, and forums, Andrew Herscher’s forthcoming Under the Campus, the Land: Native Futuring, Colonial Non-Memory, and the Origin of the University of Michigan, and land acknowledgements of the University, including the Biological Station and the Burt Lake Burnout.

Collectively, we will generate materials for our annual student orientation at the U of M BioStation, and in partnership with community and Indigenous leaders where appropriate, deepen understanding of the evolution of SEAS impacts and initiatives. Participants will build concrete skills in cultural and historical research, inclusive design and authentic evaluation of tools for organizational change. Ultimately, we hope this work informs and motivates how the SEAS community understands our history and engage in the world.

The School for Environment and Sustainability course listing linked below requires University of Michigan login credentials.

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

“Under the Campus, the Land: Native and Settler Histories of the University of Michigan” will explore the conjoined but conflicting Native and settler colonial histories of the university by historicizing the land that the university has owned and occupied. The course will include four guest lectures from Eric Hemenway (Anishinaabe/Odawa), Director of Repatriation, Archives, and Records for the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians of Waganakising, in order to center Anishinaabe perspectives in our pedagogy.

Focusing on the university’s past and ongoing participation in the colonial settlement of Anishinaabewaki, the homelands of the Anishinaabe people, the course will introduce students to Native and settler colonial histories around the Great Lakes. Student coursework will be focused on a semester-long research project in which students will study sites owned by the University of Michigan in the past and present. Students will work on sites that are documented in collections of archival material at the Bentley Historical Library, offering students first-hand experience with research on primary sources. Framing this work in the context of reparative justice, we will also explore the possibilities and limits of engaged research.

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

This 16-week course will introduce students to the history of race and racism in the United States. Using a Critical Race Theory framework focused on discussions of historical systemic disenfranchisement, the course begins with an introduction to the social construction of race in the 1600s and its perpetuation through today. Students will survey the ideas and history of race and racism. Students will consider the implications of race and systemic racism by exploring the major forms of discrimination. Course materials include journal articles, book chapters, podcasts, and the arts to demonstrate racism’s impact on policy, finance, education, culture, science, and medicine.

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

Introduction to forensic linguistics examining the relationship between law and language. Topics include legal language, courtroom discourse, language policies, rights of minoritized language speakers, legal interpreting, the role of the linguist as expert witness, and language variation in legal settings.

*This course is associated with the U-M athletics project site.

Sports at the University of Michigan are intertwined with U-M’s broader institutional history in interesting and often unexpected ways. This course sees U-M athletics as providing a window into larger phenomena and asks students to explore its deeper origins, including an assessment of the entanglements between athletics and medical science, the impact of race and gender on opportunity, and the authority of governance structures like the NCAA and the Big Ten. What can understand when we consider athletics as an object of intellectual inquiry? What do sports tell us about U-M’s past and how might sports help us develop better futures?

To answer those questions, we will be developing a podcast series connected to the Inclusive History Project, a presidential initiative that seeks to evaluate U-M’s institutional past with an eye to equity, with the goal of learning how to present historical research to public audiences. This course is open to advanced undergraduates who have an interest in conducting historical research.

The Literature, Science, and the Arts Course Guide linked below requires University of Michigan login credentials.

*This course is associated with the 1817 Project project site.

Over the past two decades, the rubric of “inclusive history” has achieved a common currency in the United States, both within the discipline of History and across much of U.S. higher education. Today, you can find books, articles, conferences, websites, and university programs dedicated to its practice, including a large and ambitious Inclusive History Project (IHP) right here at UM. Less clear is what this term has come to signify over time. What values, methods, policies, and deliverables bind this groundswell together? And what would a transformative “inclusive history” look like across our three University of Michigan campuses? This collaborative, graduate-level research practicum will address these questions via the foundational project site of the IHP: the “1817 Project.” This emerging project involves an historical examination of the foundational land transfer by the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Bodewadami nations in the 1817 Treaty at the Foot of the Rapids/Fort Meigs that was part of our university’s origins in Detroit (1817) and subsequent relocation to Ann Arbor (1837).

Our hope is to better understand this complex process and its longer term consequences in relation to broader histories of Native American and Indigenous land dispossession in the Great Lakes Region and across North America. Work on the 1817 project site will include deep, collaborative research into the early history of the university and Michigan territory, but also how this history has been represented, occluded, contested, and addressed through more recent legal challenges, Native student activism, and statewide forms of legislation since the 1970s (e.g., the Michigan Indian Tuition Waiver). At the center of this story are policies of dispossession—policies the historian Michael Witgen has argued began to crystallize at the state and federal levels right here in SE Michigan. How did an emerging “political economy of plunder” developed by figures such as Lewis Cass (the first Governor of the Michigan territory and the first Chair of the UM Board of Regents) shape our university, state, and nation? How might we situate this local story in relation to broader debates over “land grab” universities and recent forms of “land back” activism?

The Literature, Science, and the Arts Course Guide linked below requires University of Michigan login credentials.