Courses

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

This course explores the changing cultural and social value of food in American life through a range of different sources, disciplines, and case studies. We will be guided by how convenience, responsibility, and identity shape our relationship to a dynamic American food industry, while paying attention to how immigration, trauma, and appropriation constitute the industry itself. By doing so, this course seeks to help students connect the food histories, policies, and myths that converge to define American belonging.

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 provides an interdisciplinary introduction to the field of African American Studies through careful attention to the social, cultural, political, economic and historical realities of Black life in the U.S. In addition to providing a foundation in African American Studies as a disciplinary field, we will examine how Black communities have affected, and been affected by, the development and growth of the United States as a democratic, social, and cultural project.

Initially brought to North America as enslaved persons, Africans and their descendants have affected every facet of U.S. politics, culture and society. There has never been a time that Black people, whether as descendants of enslaved persons, or as recent immigrants from Africa and its diaspora, have not had an outsized influence on the political imagination and cultural practices that we understand as “American.” Yet, there remain significant myths and misconceptions about Black communities, Black history, and Black life, as well as long-standing forms of racial power that contribute to significant inequalities in Black lived experience. In this course, we will gain an understanding of the historical, sociological, political, economic and cultural realities that shape Black experience in the United States, and develop rigorous critical tools for understanding how race, gender, sexuality and class shape possibilities and power in the present day.

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

*This course is supported through the IHP Teaching Fund.

Examination of community-based and theoretical frameworks within arts and nonprofit organizations. Considers how organizations build a sense of community belonging within their institutions. Engagement in original research to better understand how practices in cultivating diverse, equitable, and inclusive communities have changed over time.

*This course is supported through the IHP Teaching Fund.

In this community-engaged course, students explore the network of practitioners, institutions, and audiences that shape the local music scene in Washtenaw County. Students study key systems, attend and review concerts, and also connect with local music practitioners through interviews and guest visits.

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

*This course is supported through the IHP Teaching Fund.

This course will acquaint students with pluralistic approaches to philosophical research, writing, and practice. Students will explore concepts such as worldbuilding, objectivity, place, embodiment, evidence, and audience, while experimenting with a variety of methods and mediums, including archival research, creative writing, interview, letters, dialogue, and personal narrative. The perspectives explored in the course are multidisciplinary and culturally diverse, extending beyond those traditionally included in the analytic curriculum. Throughout the course, students will engage in a series of in-class, scaffolded writing assignments which will support their final, independent philosophical projects. The course culminates in a class workshop, where students will present their work. The course is designed to equip students with the philosophical skills needed to advance their own creative and critical inquiries into areas of social and personal significance.

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

*This course is supported through the IHP Teaching Fund.

This class will focus on the theories and approaches for community change, with emphasis on the relationships between theory and skills (‘praxis’). It will familiarize students to a range of critical change theories and core concepts and help students to develop their own understanding of frameworks for community change. Students will engage with transdisciplinary theories in examining community change, which may include critical intersectionality, critical race, empowerment and liberation, social movement, and feminist theories, as examples.

It will also look to historical and contemporary examples of community and social change movements to explore theory and skills including US and global community change movements, and the work of organic intellectuals and social change leaders (e.g. Grace Lee Boggs, Ella Baker, Myles Horton, ACT-UP, Black Lives Matter, #metoo, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Zapatistas, #GirlsLikeUs, World Social Forum, Climate Change).

Throughout the class, students will also use these examples to examine and understand the major range of models and skills for engaging in community change, for example: community organizing, community development, community-based policy advocacy, and popular education, and be able to assess the differences, purposes, and theoretical basis for the practices.

*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 we 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 and an oral history database 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 undergraduates, both majors and non-majors, who have an interest in conducting historical research. It satisfies History’s Junior/Senior Colloquium requirement.

This semester, we’ll be focusing on the experiences of the first generation of athletes to experience Title IX.

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