Courses

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

Issues and problems in Africana Studies.

*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.

How have Arabs found home and created communities over time in the United States? This course explores the rich and diverse history of Arab Americans from the 1880s to the present from multiple scholarly perspectives. We will learn about 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, environmental and health justice, government repression, and religious life.

The course will address core questions about community formation, belonging, and justice: (1) How have legal policies and political events shaped the ways Arab Americans are categorized racially and perceived by others in the U.S.? (2)How do differences in religion, gender, skin tone, class, and regional or national origin shape distinct Arab American experiences? (3) How have Arab Americans navigated labor organizing, political activism, government surveillance, and media representations across generations?

Rather than looking at the Arab American past through just one lens, we will read the work of historians, cultural studies scholars, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and public health experts, among others, to gain an understanding of how different scholarly traditions have studied this community and its history. Through these varied perspectives, we will see why we need more than one scholarly perspective to be able to adequately understand this community’s history.

Local History and Archival Research: A core component of the course will be to learn about the history of Arab Americans in Michigan and at the University of Michigan. Over the course of the semester, we will visit the Bentley Historical Library, the University of Michigan’s Special Collections, and the Arab American National Museum (the only one of its kind in the world!). During these visits, we will learn how to do historical research using archival materials. You will put these skills to use across the semester’s assignments, culminating in a public history group project.

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 experiential and participatory 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. 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? Whether we are learning about the struggle for ethnic studies, calls to end discriminatory policies, or demands to increase campus safety and student life, we will work together to transform our classroom into a space not only to read and critique how scholars have written about student movement histories, but also into a space to practice building sustainable activist communities at Michigan.

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.

The course examines the evolving relationship between for-profit endeavors and society, covering competing views of the purpose of business — Friedman’s shareholder primacy to Freeman’s stakeholder theory. Students encounter primary texts in Business Ethics and develop a rich understanding of Southeast Michigan’s business history. The course culminates with students presenting stakeholder narratives from Detroit’s business past and exploring their own personal purpose. Throughout the course, students are facilitated in developing the ability to think critically about and articulate values in professional contexts.

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

Cancer is a disease of anti-social cell behavior. This course educates students on the genetics, molecular and cellular changes that normal cells undergo to become cancer cell. Major emphasis is on providing a mechanistic insight into fundamental questions in cancer cell biology. The course also discusses currently available therapeutic treatments and emerging issues in cancer therapy research. Fulfills capstone requirement for biology majors. Three hours lecture.

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

Who gets remembered in the story of Michigan Athletics, and who has been left out? In this undergraduate course, students become historians who recover and document the experiences of minoritized athletes at the University of Michigan. Grounded in ethnic studies’ commitment to social change, the course asks how intersecting identities of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, class, and ability shaped who could participate in sport and whose participations and achievements entered history. Working directly with primary archival data at the Bentley Historical Library and guided by a research-based timeline, students will investigate “archival silences” by examining not only what the archive contains but what it omits, and why. Through hands-on, collaborative research, students will combine archival evidence with digital storytelling to build a living digital archive that expands Michigan’s institutional history to include voices long left unacknowledged. Along the way, students will engage with the theory and practice of public history and develop professional skills in archival research, historical interpretation, and digital media production.

*This course is funded through the IHP Teaching Fund.

SW 505 is a required foundational course that explores diversity, power, oppression, human rights, and social and economic justice through the Grand Challenge of Social Work Practice. In this class, students focus on the Grand Challenge of homelessness, examining how historic policies – including redlining, racially restrictive covenants, and exclusionary zoning – have shaped today’s housing affordability crisis and the structural conditions that produce homelessness. They explore why marginalized populations are disproportionately represented among people experiencing homelessness and examine the changing demographics of this population. Through community engagement, students learn about the local housing response network, from homelessness prevention and emergency shelter to supportive services and permanent housing. The course emphasizes housing as a social determinant of health, examining how housing stability and instability shape health, education, employment, safety, and other dimensions of quality of life. Historical analysis, personal reflection, and storytelling connect policy decisions to lived experiences and help students recognize homelessness prevention as essential to social work practice and advancing social justice across settings.

*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.