Courses

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

The mission of SEAS has expanded dramatically from its roots as a school serving primarily white male foresters and field scientists to a broad understanding of social, behavioral, political and economic elements of sustainability. We must continually ask ourselves: “What does it mean to do sustainability in times of wrenching social crises?”

Historically SEAS has not reflected diversity or inclusivity in the demographics of faculty, staff, and the student body. 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 of DEI. 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 School for Environment and Sustainability course catalog 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.

*This course is associated with the Hill Auditorium project site.

A concert hall brings together the art of architecture and the science of acoustics, yet even a so- called “perfect” space like U-M’s Hill Auditorium is nothing unless animated by a community, both on stage and in the audience. Dedicated in 1913 and named in honor of its benefactor, U-M regent Arthur Hill, it is the largest venue on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan. This archive-based, research class has the collective goal of drafting a comprehensive social history of Hill Auditorium, tracing events connected to the hall since its opening.

Our goal is to explore but go beyond the better-known sanctioned and typical events, many of which are concerts presented by the School of Music, Theatre & Dance and the University Musical Society. We will also explore the lectures, community events, and protests (both onstage and on the steps outside) that trace the social temperature of the U-M campus. This is not a passive lecture course, but an engaged learning course chock full of interesting speakers, venue tours, and original research, both online and in the campus archives. If you bring your curiosity, creativity, interpretive imagination, and passion for history to this course, you’ll have fun.

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 research seminar 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 diversity, equity, and inclusion. Together we will ask: What demands have student activists made, and to what success? What is the relationship between student activism, civil rights, and global freedom struggles? And what do 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.

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

HHS 309: Theories and Practice of Social Work is a required course for the University of Michigan-Dearborn’s (UMD) Human Services major. In this class, students are introduced to social work history and taught how to synthesize interpersonal and research skills to impact policy and practice. In light of much social work and social welfare history excluding Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) contributions to the field, this course redesign launches a new inclusive social welfare history module and the creation of a student-led “Hidden Histories” StoryMap archive focused on UMD’s untold social justice stories.

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

This course “Asian American Histories at Michigan” aims to further develop a public history project that documents the histories of Asian Americans at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Drawing on materials from the ongoing student-led digital archive “Activism, Organizing, and Leadership within U-M Asian American + Pacific Islander Communities and Spaces” as well as the exhibit “Asian Americans at Michigan” created by students from the F22 course AMCULT 301, this redesigned course will further develop the latter site. This will include editing, fact-checking, and augmenting existing stories for accuracy; developing new materials (including oral histories); and designing new “stories” to include in the project.

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

This assignment redesign aims to conduct an in-depth study to thoroughly examine the multi-identity and STEM contributions of Cornelius Langston Henderson, an often-overlooked Black historical figure whose impact on Michigan history, Detroit history, University of Michigan history, Black history, American history, and Canadian history warrants closer examination. Henderson, the second African American to graduate from the engineering department at the University of Michigan in 1911 and one of the chief design engineers for two of the Great Lakes Region’s most important transportation systems, the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, spanned a crucial period in the histories referenced, providing a unique lens through which to explore the intersections of race, education, social change, and multicultural identity development.

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

“We Remember: Arab American History” is an undergraduate course that will introduce students to the history of Arabs in the United States from 1880 to 2000 and will also give students the opportunity to engage in original historical research. The final third of the course will focus on “Arab Americans in/at Michigan.” Students will visit the Arab American National Museum and the Bentley Historical Library and create an online exhibit, focused on Arab Americans at the University of Michigan. Students will learn how the Arab American relationship to the University of Michigan has historically been dynamic, fluctuating, and ambivalent.

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

Leveraging experience in developing a successful cancer biology capstone class for UM-Dearborn undergraduates, Professor Kondapalli will create a new module to explore the Rogel Cancer Center’s efforts to enhance diversity. This revamped capstone task will engage undergraduates in analyzing these initiatives across major cancer centers in the USA with a focus on historical shifts and future implications. Through a combination of guest lectures, a capstone research project, and an interactive poster session, students will examine the evolution of DEI initiatives and their impact on the cancer ecosystem. This underscores the critical importance of integrating diversity awareness at the undergraduate level, particularly on predominantly minority-serving campuses like UM-Dearborn.

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

The unique and even precedent-setting levels of organizational effort, cultural content, and financial resources invested in Asian American student-organized culture night shows, showcases, and specialized competitive dance teams are the focus of the course AMCULT & ASIANPAM 352, “Asian American Cultural Performance” taught since 2013. This project has three stages: 1) collecting memorabilia through concentrated outreach to alumni and community members; 2) consolidating and reorganizing website access to archival resources, and 3) creating thematic modules for use in small-group classroom activities and assignments.