AS.305 (Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, & Colonialism)

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.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

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.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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?

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with 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.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

How do displaced people turn their experiences into stories? What can narratives of displacement teach us about the formation of individual and collective memory, the construction of personhood, and the placeness of diaspora, at once real and imagined? In this seminar, we examine the facts, fables, and fictions of displacement to and from the United States as constructed in literature, film, visual art, popular media, and personal accounts. Our investigations may include Chinese labor on the transcontinental railroad; Germans fleeing fascism in Los Angeles; Black Americans’ self-exile; forced displacement after Hurricane Katrina; Latin American immigration; and migration patterns in Silicon Valley. Working though these events, we will map differences and commonalities in modes of displacement and analyze the structure and quality of their narratives. Theoretical texts will orient and deepen our investigations; these may include works by Homi Bhabha, Richard Wright, Mike Davis, Cherríe Moraga, Fred Moten, Louise Pratt, Theodor Adorno. Student assignments will present opportunities for informal and formal writing and small group collaborations.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This community-based learning course is in partnership with Baltimore Green Justice Workers Cooperative and the African School of Storytelling in Arusha, Tanzania. In centering African perspectives on human-environment interaction, students are challenged to reimagine how we can live, work and play in beautiful places. Through partnerships with Baltimore farmers and environmental justice advocates and Tanzanian filmmakers and research artists, students come together with local and global communities to advance solutions to conserve the natural beauty all around us. Through a focus on water, food, and education, students will be able to connect the increasing climate challenges to everyday public health impacts on communities. Indigenous communities across Africa have grappled with changing climatic environments for centuries and have built adaptive cultural strategies to sustain the health of their communities. Students will explore the affective and sensorial dimensions of planetary health through topics including: water conservation, food as medicine, and land rights.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course surveys the stories and storytellers of key moments of resistance or revolution, such as the 1848 Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution, the 1968 Student Movement, Occupy, Arab Spring, and Women Life Freedom. We will critically examine how such moments are, or become, narratives and how, as such, they may or may not acquire afterlives. To this end we will investigate a variety of materials, produced from a variety of points of view: the press, participants, observers, commentators, instigators, theorists, and those reconstructing the events after the fact as histories or fictions. Key themes include notions of personhood, citizenship, solidarity, equality, and futurity, as well as the aesthetics of how social uprisings are represented in a variety of media. Readings might include texts by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Alejo Carpentier, C.L.R James, Peter Weiss, Manuel Puig, Carlos Fuentes, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Audre Lorde, Joshua Clover, and others.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with 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.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

The term “counterinsurgency” is typically associated with the disastrous US wars in Vietnam or Iraq. But is counterinsurgency always doomed to fail and insurgency guaranteed to succeed? This course will give students an overview of key literature in counterinsurgency and internal security, as well as representative literature produced by and for insurgents, revolutionaries, and guerrillas/terrorists. A central task will be to define these vexed terms and track their shifting meaning over time, including the importance of cultural, racial, and gendered significations to those definitions. The course will also include a large-scale simulation of an insurgency and efforts to control or extinguish it, comprising the student assignments and requiring active participation of every student in the course. Each student will be assigned roles that will require specific creative actions.

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This seminar offers students an opportunity to combine historical research skills and community engagement for real-world, public impact. Through collaborative research and partnering with an immigrant justice organization, students in the seminar will gain a deeper understanding of immigration history, gather and analyze research for community stakeholders, and transform scholarly discussions into applicable resources for use in immigrant rights and justice cases today. Students who wish to take this course should have previously enrolled in at least one course covering immigration, but that is not a formal prerequisite.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Undergraduate independent research under a faculty mentor.

Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)