Graduate Classes
5691 Ethnography, Film, Festival: for Maymester trip to Nicaragua
5864 Modernity and Postmodernity: Concepts and Theories
5871 The Japanese Religious Tradition
6425 Introduction to Latino Studies
6391 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies II
6750.02 Intro to Graduate Study in Folklore II: Fieldwork and Ethnography of Communication
7350.03 Theorizing Folklore III: Differentiation, Identification, and the Folk
7380 Theorizing America
8888 Seminar: Transgender & Queer Bio/Cultural Politics in the 21st Century
8888 Seminar: Multitude, Anarchism, Occupy
CS 5691 Topics in Comparative Studies: Ethnography, Film, Festival
Instructor: Katherine Borland
TR 11:10am-12:30pm
Class# Grad 13894; UG 13890
This class is a prerequisite for participation in the Maymester term Fieldschool in Bluefields, Nicaragua. (See OIA description.)
This undergrad/grad course combines ethnographic content with practical skill building. We will critically examine available ethnographies of Nicaragua (concentrating on the Creole Atlantic Coast but including Managua, Masaya and Miskito community studies). We will review and practice ethnographic method, and we will study folkloric, documentary and ethnographic filmmaking, reviewing exemplary projects and employing selected techniques. Finally, we will learn effective ways to catalog, store and archive footage and other data, so that our collected materials are accessible to diverse communities.
The course will culminate in a month-long Maymester immersion experience in Bluefields, where we will be working with students at the Bluefields Indian and Caribbean University (BICU) Tourism program to document on film the interaction of tourism and cultural preservation in the annual Palo de Mayo (Maypole) Festival. We will live with local residents, interview festival organizers and performers, audiences and tourists, and experience the festival ourselves. As we document ourselves in the festival, we will regularly reflect on our own position vis-à-vis our community partners in the production of cultural meaning and cultural exchange. Palo de Mayo is an Afro-Caribbean carnivalesque celebration that features distinctive local music and dance (check it out on YouTube). Bluefields is an English-speaking area of Nicaragua, but some ability to communicate in Spanish will be very helpful. This course (and the Maymester trip to Nicaragua) is ideal for those adventurous spirits who are looking for hands-on experience in ethnographic documentation in a team setting.
Contact instructor at borland.19@osu.edufor more information.
CS 5864 Modernity and Postmodernity: Conecpts and Theories
Instructor: Leo Coleman
T 2:20-5:15pm
Class # Grad 13352; UG 13418
Modernity has been understood as both an aesthetic and a political phenomenon, and this course aims to explore both aspects, to identify their intersections in theory and practice, and to ask how distinctively modern and post-modern experiences are produced. We will particularly explore theories of politics and culture that emphasize transition and transformation, and that are concerned with the passage from then to now and with what distinguishes one era from another. What is development, and where and how does it happen? What is left of nature after industrialization and urbanization? Is nature returning as a value and a source of inspiration in postmodern biotechnological economies? Where did modernity happen first, and what powers and energies fueled it?
Course topics will include the modern city in both metropolitan and colonial locations; the structures of political belonging in modern and global eras; and the energies which fuel imaginative projects in both modernity and postmodernity, whether the creativity of the urban mass or the power of biotechnological manipulation to reshape life and subjectivity. Core concepts and theories of modernity and transformation will be set alongside influential accounts of modern life and subjectivity, in ethnography, literature, and film, and the course as a whole aims to provide a foundation for further critical and creative work that engages with contemporary cultural production.
Prereq: Not open to students with credit for 660.
Contact instructor at coleman.514@osu.edu for more information.
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CS 5871 The Japanese Religious Tradition
Instructor: Thomas Kasulis
WF 12:45-2:05pm
Class # Grad 13895; UG 13089
A survey of the Japanese tradition, including Shinto, Buddhism, Taoism, New-Confucianism, and folk religion from the 6th century B.C.E. to the present.
Prereq: Not open to students with credit for 641 or Japanse 5271 (641). Cross-listed in Japanse 5271.
Contact instructor a kasulis.1@osu.edu for more information.
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CS 6391 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies II
Instructor: Nina Berman
W 2:20-5:15pm
Class# 13353
The writing of history requires numerous sources and much varied knowledge. . . . If [the historian] trusts historical information in its plain transmitted forms and has no clear knowledge of the principles resulting from custom, the fundamental facts of politics, the nature of civilization, or the conditions governing human social organization, and if, furthermore, he does not evaluate remote or ancient material through comparison with near or contemporary material, he often cannot avoid stumbling and slipping and deviating from the path of truth. ----Ibn Khaldun
This course introduces students to a range of reflections upon theories and methods of cultural analysis and comparison. We will read texts by authors from diverse historical and geopolitical contexts and engage with their commentary upon the interpretation of culture. Keywords that will structure our discussion are questions of power and ideology; empire, race, and nation; modernity and modernities; gender and sexuality; globalization; and humanitarianism. Among the critics we will read are Al-Biruni, Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Battuta, Clifford Geertz, José Martí, Rabindranath Tagore, E.W. Blyden, Rosa Luxemburg, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Ashis Nandy, Qasim Amin, writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Takeuchi Yoshimi, Enrique Dussel, Amartya Sen, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Dambisa Moyo, and Linda Polman.
Requirements: Participation (20%); weekly response papers (20%); preparation of one reading (20%); course proposal (as final project; 40%). This is the second 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 in cultural studies. Primarily designed for graduate students in the Department of Comparative Studies, this course is also open to graduate students from across the university.
Prereq: Grad standing or permission of instructor. Not open to students with credit for 711.Contact instructor at berman.58@osu.edu for more information.
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CS 6425 Introduction to Latino Studies
Instructor: Frederick Aldama (English)
R 5:30-8:15pm
Crosslisted with Spanish 6705
Comp St Class# 26933; Spanish Class# 9767
This is the gateway course for the Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Latino Studies. Introduction to Latino Studies is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Mexican-American/Chicano, Brazilian, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, Caribbean, and Central/South American communities within the United States as well as how their histories and cultures interface with those in the Americas generally. We will explore social, historical, and political commonalities as well as differences between these Latino communities.
Themes we will explore include: 1) Pros and cons of Latino identity markers; 2) immigration, migration, and community formation histories; 3) conceptions of gender and sexuality; 4) race and racial constructions; 5) labor markets; 6) educational experiences; 7) cultural phenomena produced and consumed by and about Latinos. Other topics to be explored include demographic trends, citizenship, political participation, mass movements, relations to histories and events in Latin American origin communities, and media representation.
This course will be made up of a series of faculty-led discussions of the assigned readings and cultural analyses (film, theatre, television, for instance). The goal is to provide you with a range of methods and approaches to understanding the presence (historical, social, political) of Latinos in the U.S. and the Americas generally. As you determine the track that you would like to follow (history, culture, social, educational, for instance) a Latino Studies faculty of your choice will guide you in the writing of your research paper.
Contact instructor at aldama.1@osu.edu for more information.
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CS 6750.02 Intro to Graduate Study in Folklore II: Fieldwork and Ethnography of Communication
Instructor: Ray Cashman (English)
F 9:10am-12:25pm
Class# 12287
Crosslisted with English 6751.02
This course will be run as a seminar/workshop that explores a range of methodological, theoretical, and ethical issues in fieldwork as practiced in folklore and allied fields of ethnographic research.
Qualitative methods covered include participant observation, interviewing, photography, transcription, and organizing and using field notes. Issues raised by these qualitative methods include ethics and the politics of representation, collaboration and working relationships in the field, and how best to negotiate Institutional Review Boards for research with human subjects. Topics of inquiry include the power of performance, the nature of verbal art, the workings of genre, and the poetics of place and identity. Major theoretical inspiration comes from performance studies as developed by folklorists; linguistic, cultural, and visual anthropology; and sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication.
Class periods will alternate between discussion of readings and collectively reviewing and critiquing students’ fieldwork documentation and written reflections. Students will apply perspectives, methods, and strategies from readings and discussion, in a series of exercises that offer students hands-on field experience, culminating in a final ethnography of a culturally significant performative act.
This course is one of two “research tools” classes required for the graduate curriculum and GIS in folklore studies.
Prereq: Grad standing, or permission of instructor. Not open to students with credit for 770.02, 770.03, English 6751.02 (770.02 and 770.03), or 6751.22. Cross-listed in English 6751.02 and 6751.22.
Contact instructor at cashman.10@osu.edu for more information
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CS 7350.03 Theorizing Folklore III: Differentiation, Identification, and the Folk
Instructor: Amy Shuman (English)
WF 12:40-3:55pm
Class# 12288
This seminar explores the emergence of notions of tradition and modernity globally and in Eurocentric epistemologies. We will consider the implications of these concepts for differentiations among high and low, local and global, oral and written, sacred and secular, etc. Readings will include Vico, Herder, Bauman and Briggs, DeCerteau, Bourdieu, Canclini, Chakrabarty, Clifford, Derrida, Foucault, Latour, Mignolo, Stewart, and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, among others. We will critically reread foundational works published between the 17th century (especially German Romanticists) and the present along with texts with which they are in dialogue. In addition to these academic classifications, we will observe how groups use the category of folk in their understandings of themselves, whether in terms of heritage culture, ethnic customs, or subcultures. No prior familiarity with folklore is necessary.
Prereq: Grad standing, or permission of instructor. Not open to students with credit for 792 or English 870. Cross-listed in English.
Contact instructor at shuman.1@osu.edu for more information.
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CS 7380 Theorizing America
Instructor: Theresa Delgadillo
R 2:20-5:15pm
Class# 13099
In this seminar we will explore varied cultural, political and theoretical constructions of “America,” examining what it is, has been and promises to be. Our work will critically engage with readings that address the terms through which “America” takes shape, such as citizenship, nationalism, sexuality, race, ethnicity, consumer, class. We will also critically compare the theoretical and material “America” with its hemispheric counterpart, “the Americas,” so that we might better apprehend each as well as concepts such as diaspora, globalization and empire. Our study will require us to read across disciplines and in doing so, to attend to the means by which knowledge is produced in disciplinary and trans-disciplinary contexts. This course will be of interest to students of American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies, Sexuality Studies. Requirements include active seminar participation, hosting seminar discussions, regular critical writing and a substantial and original final research project.
Prereq: Grad standing or permission of instructor. Not open to students with credit for 715.
Contact instructor at delgadillo.3@osu.edu for more information.
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CS 8888 Interdepartmental Seminar: NEW MATTER. Transgender & Queer Bio/Cultural Politics in the 21st Century
Instructor: Jian Chen (English)
R 9:10am-12:25pm
Class# 12317
Transgender and queer communities and subcultures have become visible in locations across national, regional, and transnational networks since the beginning of the 1990s. This graduate seminar explores recent shifts in queer and transgender practices of social identification and coalition, cultural production, and political activism, as signaled by new uses of critical frameworks that focus on biopolitics, affect, transnationalism, networks, mediation, nanotechnologies, risk, the phenomenological, the spectral, and the speculative. Through contemporary theories, media art, political organizing, social media, and literature, we will investigate the infrastructural transitions that have activated new re-imaginings of transgender and queer cultural politics and social identity.
The seminar’s approaches to transgender and queer practices will presume that gender and sexual identity and expression always materialize in relationship to living histories of racialization, migration, and economic stratification. So we will emphasize materials and critical strategies that include racial, diasporic, neo/post-colonial, and class analyses and histories. The course’s broad focus on “new” 21st century critical frameworks (along with their related infrastructural conditions) through the lens of transgender and queer practices should be in sync with graduate students interested in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer studies, comparative race studies, sexuality and gender studies, transnational and diaspora studies, social and cultural theories, poststructuralism, postmodernism, neo/post-Marxism, phenomenology, Third World and transnational feminisms, visual studies, and/or film, media, and communications.
Seminar materials may include work by Sandy Stone, Jasbir Puar, Juana María Rodríguez, Roderick A. Ferguson, Susan Stryker, Gayatri Gopinath, Dean Spade, Kale Bangtigue Fajardo, Micha Cárdenas, Mel Y. Chen, Gayle Salamon, Martin Joseph Ponce, Eric Stanley & Nat Smith, Kara Keeling, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Sara Ahmed, Judith Jack Halberstam, Judith Butler, Saskia Sassen, Arjun Appadurai, Achille Mbembe, Cedric Robinson, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Fredric Jameson, Fred Moten, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Rey Chow, and/or Donna Haraway.
Seminar requirements may include an in-class presentation, weekly responses through course blog, research proposal with bibliography in progress, and final research project.
Contact instructor at chen.82@osu.edu for more information.
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CS 8888 Seminar in Critical Theory: Multitude, Anarchism, Occupy
Instructor: Eugene Holland and Brian Rotman
M 4:30-7:15pm
Class# 13334
This seminar will explore the intersections and overlap among these three terms, particularly in light of recent theoretical and political developments around the globe.
Although its derivation goes back to Spinoza, the term "multitude" has in recent Franco-Italian political theory distinguished itself from allied terms such as the masses, the people, the crowd, and so forth. Selected readings from and about the work of Paulo Virno, Toni Negri, Deleuze & Guattari, and Hardt & Negri will enable us to take the measure of the term in its current historical context as well as contrast it (briefly) with earlier treatments of "the crowd" by Gustave LeBon and Elias Canetti. The core question will be what are the components—affective, proprioceptive, cognitive, material, and (if any) representational—that make a group of individuals a multitude?
We will focus on the opposition between the multitude and the people; and given that a group of individuals has been at least since Hobbes understood to become a "people" by the existence and actions of a State, we will examine the relations among anarchism, theories of the multitude, and the Occupy movement. David Graeber's work—his Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, and selections from Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value and/or Revolutions in Reverse, and his important occasional pieces on Occupy—will provide a counterweight to mainstream knowledge and experience of the State as a mode of social organization, but will also be compared with the contemporary egalitarian political program of Jacques Rancière (selections from Dissensus), which represents yet another alternative model of a ‘mass’ of individuals becoming an effective group.
Essays by political theorists Benjamin Arditi and Slavoj Žižek will refocus questions of group-constitution on the Occupy movement itself as an alternative to State organization—but here we will count on the seminar group as a whole to propose and select the best additional perspectives on Occupy to complete the materials for the course.
Contact instructors at rotman.3@osu.edu or holland.1@osu.edufor more information.
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