SBS 301 Cultural Diversity/Koptiuch
Course Description
The chief learning objective of this course is to familiarize students with a range of theoretical and public/popular cultural discourses that will enable them to develop for themselves an informed, critical framework for apprehending te complexities of the contemporary "cultural politics of difference." Focus is on the United States, with some comparative materials. The course will problematize "culture" and explore key "borderlands of difference": race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, (trans)nation.

Diverse readings draw from interdisciplinary social sciences, humanities, and on literature and popular culture as prime story-telling site of our cultural imaginary. Tracking between analytical theory and  popular culture sharpens our interpretive skills the better to guage our own social positioning within the heterogeneous community of the US (trans)nation and its diasporas, so that we can more effectively intervene in and contribute to current diversity debates. Our strategy will be to critically appreciate and assess the images and narratives that compose the discourse of diversity, always in relation to social structures and institutions, and always in an historical context of the changing transnational political economy.
 

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