Comparative Studies 5240 Race and Public Policy in the US
MW 11:10-12:30PM | Denney Hall 206 | Judson Jeffries
This course explores Race and Public Policy in the United States from Reconstruction to the present. In particular, the class is designed to look at the long list of "hot topics" in the current policy landscape, including policing, housing, wealth gap, immigration, voting, political representation, and others. Crossslisted in AAAS and PUBAFFAIRS.
Comparative Studies 5691 Topics in Comparative Studies, Be the Street: Community-Engaged Arts Partnerships Fall 2019
M 2:15-5:00PM | Hagerty Hall 359 | Moriah Flagler
In association with the “Be the Street” community-engaged performance project, this graduate level special topics course offers students hands on experience building and sustaining community arts partnerships while actively examining theories, practices, pedagogies, and politics associated with creative community development. Students will practice ethnography by facilitating story circles, conducting interviews, and engaging with community leaders in the Hilltop area of Columbus. There will be opportunities for writing, both for our website and for academic audiences (if students are interested). This course requires time for fieldwork in the Hilltop outside of class. Students must have access to reliable transportation or discuss this with the instructor.
Students interested in enrolling should contact the instructor, Moriah Flagler, with any questions: flagler.4@osu.edu.
Comparative Studies 5957.01 Comparative Folklore
Th 2:15-5:00PM | TBA | Katherine Borland
Comparative study of folklore. Topics vary, e.g., folklore and gender politics; theories of myth; folklore, memory, and history. Prereq: English 2270 (270) or equiv. Repeatable to a maximum of 6 cr hrs.
Comparative Studies 5957.02 Folklore in Circulation
TBA | TBA | Staff
Study of transmission of culture. Topics vary, e.g., tourists, travelers, tricksters; cultures of waste and recycling; orality and literacy. Prereq: English 2270 (270). Repeatable to a maximum of 6 cr hrs.
Comparative Studies 6390 Intro to Comparative Cultural Studies I
W 2:15-5:00PM | Hagerty Hall 451| Noah Tamarkin
A graduate introduction to social thought and critical theory, this course offers a survey of key interpretive theories that have guided social and cultural analysis of modernity in all its diverse colonial and postcolonial locations. We will read core sociological, anthropological, and philosophical works including writings by Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Roland Barthes, and Ruth Benedict, in order to explore the workings of culture, history, and difference in the present. In addition to introducing social thought and social-science methodologies of comparative cultural and civilizational analysis, we will study critical epistemologies including psychoanalysis, ethnography, and feminism. The course concludes with the post-structuralist turn to the cultural analysis of power. This is the first course in a two-semester introduction to critical and cultural theory, while also offering a stand-alone introduction to key concepts for formulating interdisciplinary and critical research projects, with a particular emphasis on anthropological approaches to culture. Primarily designed for graduate students in the Department of Comparative Studies, this course is also open to graduate students from across the university
Comparative Studies 7301 Theorizing Literature
Tu 2:15-5:00PM | TBA | Ashley Perez
This graduate course will provide an accelerated yet accessible introduction to literary theory and criticism, including a survey of significant developments in modern and contemporary literary and cultural studies. We will examine a wide range of critical and theoretical texts with an eye to how they might inform or reading and analysis of cultural products from a variety of languages and time periods. We will consider formal elements of literature as well as theories such as deconstruction, reader response theory, and post-colonial theory. Our approach to the material in seminar discussions and written assignments will center on the following questions: How does a particular critical or theoretical text change how we read literature and cultural texts? How do these texts change how we read theory? What does it mean to “think” literature with theory? Course experiences include a variety of discussion structures, responses to readings, a presentation, and a final paper or related alternative product.
Comparative Studies 7360 Theorizing Culture
Fr 9:10AM-12:00PM | Hagerty Hall 451| Morgan Liu
What is “culture” and is the concept useful to understanding what people do, say, and think? Is it to be located in ideas, in materiality, in discourse, or in practice/performance? We will think about how the cultural dimensions of human existence are variously involved with tactics of power; with conflations of race, nation, and territoriality; with shaping agency and articulating voice; with universalistic claims and particular politics.
Readings are centered on ethnographies that plumb specific cases and simultaneously theorize subjectivity, knowledge, representation, gender, identity, embodiment, space, networks, colonialism, complexity, the state, the global, etc. We will consider these case studies with respect to perspectives from cultural anthropology, human geography, linguistic anthropology, urban studies, cultural studies, science studies, history, political science, and sociology. Students from all disciplines are very welcome in this course. The central position of the class is your semester-long essay on a topic of your choice (perhaps a piece for your future thesis) in light of perspectives of the course.
The course’s seminar/lecture format involves close engagement among students and with me. There will be a mini-conference where students present their own work to the class for feedback.Prereq: Grad standing or permission of instructor. Not open to students with credit for 716.
Comparative Studies 8890 Colloquium, Workshops, and Departmental Seminars
Th 10:15AM-12:15PM | TBA | Maurice Stevens