AFAM

Police, Race, and Society examines the role of law enforcement within American society, emphasizing history, theoretical tools of analyses, public perceptions, administration, organizational culture, ethics, and police deviance. This course uses historical and contemporary documents related to policing, alongside media, academic texts, and experiential narratives, to analyze the systems of policing and its impact on communities with emphasis on Black Americans.

Advanced seminars are intended for African American Studies majors and minors with junior or senior standing and are designed to facilitate in-depth examination of a specific topic on a focused experience of Black people in the Americas and/or in diasporas beyond. Course topics and emphases for advanced seminars are determined by the instructor.

In this course students employ the range of methods and understandings gained through AFAM 101 and further studies in the major to complete an independent research project/paper.

This course takes as its central object the idea of race. Race is understood as a social construct that designates relations of structural difference and disparity. How race is treated is a crucial issue in this course. It is in this question of 'the how' that the term narrative becomes salient. The term narrative intentionally focuses attention on the material practices through which we have come to define race as a social construct.

The 1619 Project is a signal development in the social, political, and intellectual life of the United States. This New York Times Magazine special project, a brainchild of The New York Times staff writer Nikole Hannah-Jones has sparked widespread conversations, reconsiderations, and controversies concerning the national narrative about the founding and development of the United States of America. This course addresses The 1619 Project, its subjects, and impact and as such is a study of racial inequalities, racism, and antiracism.

This is the African American Studies Program course in public scholarship. It provides students the opportunity to connect their coursework with the Race and Pedagogy Institute. One of the tenets of African American studies is the production of scholarship and public programs that effects change and impacts lives especially for communities historically underserved by official state and national institutions (i.e., public scholarship; some prefer the term civic engagement). The Race and Pedagogy Institute articulates these tenets in its various initiatives.

This course is the primary methods course for the major. The course provides students with a thorough grounding in the interdisciplinary literatures and research approaches within African American Studies. In this course students are taught to understand and investigate historical and contemporary phenomena through thoughtful reflection on their positionality and community experiences.

Special Topics in Race & Ethnicity provide students with content related to racial and ethnic groups not primarily covered in African American Studies (AFAM) courses, while using the foundations of the discipline to interrogate the experiences, knowledge, impact, and engagement of different peoples with the plight and knowledge of Black people. The course topic is determined by the instructor. Courses under this theme provide an in-depth examination of particular racial or ethnic groups alongside unique transdisciplinary theoretical approaches to interrogating their experiences.

This course examines the renaissance of African American literature, music, and visual art that, for the most part, emerges from Harlem, a cultural hub in the 1920s and 1930s. The course also approaches the literature, music, and visual art, as well as the social changes in Harlem, from different disciplinary perspectives, including literary criticism, cultural history, music criticism, art criticism, and aesthetic theory. Students explore social and aesthetic debates that arose during the Harlem Renaissance and connect these to parallel debates today.