“The Resistance Mix-Tape: Music and Social Justice,” UWS-64B, Fall 2022 — Spring 2023
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Lens Essay Sequence
Research Essay Sequence
Course Description: This course considers music as a radical political tool for social justice. Guided by different genres of music and different social justice issues, we will listen to politically resonant songs in order to explore how music not only actively participates in and shapes our culture, but also offers modes of resistance to regimes of power. From the pro-labor and anti-war politics of folk music, the anti-establishment and anti-normative bents of punk, and the racial and social justice orientations of hip-hop, students will examine how music fights power, encourages activism, and effects social change. This course is designed in such a way that students may participate fully regardless of the level of their prior musical knowledge or experience. All of the music we will be examining involves texts that are linguistic, sonic, and occasionally, in the case of music videos, visual. Our study of these musical texts will be enhanced through various critical and theoretical approaches to the intersections of race, gender, and class. For final research papers, students will be encouraged to develop a research topic about music and social justice issues that are meaningful to them.
“Everyday Apocalypse; or Living Through the Long Emergency,” UWS-65A, Fall 2022 — Spring 2023
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Grading Contract
Lens Essay Sequence
Research Essay Sequence
Course Description: Our contemporary moment has been marked by various catastrophes and crises: the pandemic, the climate emergency, the refugee crisis, widening economic disparities, rising nationalist extremism, and racial inequalities and police violence. These crises have combined to create a present moment of profound uncertainty and growing unrest, and daily life has become undergirded by a rising tide of anxiety. Using contemporary events and recent cultural texts as sites of inquiry about the global tumult of our present, students will consider how the convergence of the everyday and the catastrophic frame our “new normal,” as well as how distinctions between normalcy and emergency are connected to media narratives, corporate agendas, and political rhetoric and policy. Altogether, the course invites students to examine our experience of the contemporary world from multiple lenses and encourages students to research, learn, write about, and potentially reimagine the social, economic, and environmental challenges of our time.