Courses
Introduction to Critical Diaspora Studies will explore the transnational, relational, and comparative approach to racism, migration, and colonialism at the heart of this major. It will introduce students to cutting-edge literature in the major’s four tracks: Migration and Borders; Global Indigeneities; Empires, Wars, and Carceralities; and Solidarities, Social Movements, and Citizenship. Topics covered will include diasporic and indigenous cultures and politics from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as the United States. Students should expect to learn the value of interdisciplinary and transnational approaches to questions of social belonging, activism, justice, and politics. This course will also be useful to students in all humanities and social science majors who are interested in questions of racism, migration, and colonialism. This course may entail travel over fall break.
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
This course introduces students to a selection of optimal methods for researching the dynamics of racism, colonialism, and mass migration. It focuses on power and resistance, and it explores academic treatments of both from interdisciplinary, comparative, and transnational perspectives. It provides practical foundations for students interested in pursuing research in Critical Diaspora Studies and other fields.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Examines the history of Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Feminist Studies, among other interdisciplines. How did these movements transform the university? What were their political-economic aspirations beyond the academy?
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
How is the so-called “AI Revolution” altering the landscape of work? This course takes up this question through the lens of underemployment, migratory labor, and diasporic communities. We will read a variety of key works on migration and imagined communities, precarity and alienation, labor, automation, and empire—as well as texts produced in the margins of globalization. In conversation with these texts, we will investigate the dynamics of diasporic communities, migration, and solidarity vis-a-vis the future of work in a global society increasingly automated by AI models such as DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and Qwen 2.5, and the entities that own them. Through a variety of writing assignments and presentations, students engage issues such as race, class, gender, the border, citizenship, and community as they exist for diasporic and migratory workers. This course explores themes relevant to students of Critical Diaspora Studies, as well as the history of science and technology, political science and political economy, international studies, literature, film, and sociology. Readings may include works by Ruha Benjamin, Audre Lorde, Harry Braverman, Benedict Anderson, David Harvey, Edward Said, Mary L. Gray, Octavia Butler, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course examines how theories of internal colonialism help us understand the recent global migration trends and dynamics within and among ethnic communities. The course has three main objectives. First, it will discuss how the legacy of colonial and postcolonial relations of unequal exchange and domination explain the recent migration patterns from the global south. Second, it discusses how internal colonialism helps us understand how political, economic, and cultural mechanisms reproduce inequalities within and among communities of color. Lastly, how different resistance strategies manifest themselves in marginalized communities would be considered. The course surveys diverse views and perspectives including the work of Gonzalez Casanova, Du Bois, Bonilla-Silva, Blauner, Hechter, and Allen.
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
Maryland had the largest pre-Civil War population of free African Americans who were intent on creating the educational means necessary to maintain their own freedom and uplift. Education and land ownership was tantamount to securing standing in society and to forging an early, even if fraught, sense of social citizenship and its benefits. In this course, students will support the research efforts of a local Maryland school house museum to develop immersive, experiential learning and engagement tools. Drawing on material and documents specific to the museum such as objects, curricular texts, original letters, newspaper accounts, experiences of the first teachers, and contemporaneous accounts of teaching in Freedmen’s schools, students will engage in a speculative history that will serve as the foundation for creative reenactment of freedom education in early 1800s Maryland.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
This Humanities Research Lab will examine the Black Panther Party, placing this much-discussed radical organization in context. It will focus on how the Party developed an analysis and critique of colonialism, and how anti-colonial movements around the globe adopted perspectives of the Panthers. The course will entail original research projects by students using JHU’s collection of original Black Panther Party newspapers and other materials.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive