Winter 2025

This course explores the fundamental role that race and racism have played in the structure, stratification, and social functioning of American public schools, and how schools in turn shape our collective ideas about race in the United States. Working from both a historical perspective and an analysis of contemporary policy, we will use theoretical and empirical texts to explore questions of identity, otherness, and ethics, such as: what can the histories of schooling for Black and Native students reveal about the educational project of the nation?

Globalizing and local forces are generating a new politics in the United States and around the world. This course explores this new politics by mapping its emerging elements: the rise of social issues, ethno-religious and regional attachments, environmentalism, gender and life-style identity issues, new social movements, transformed political parties and organized groups, and new efforts to mobilize individual citizens

Medical disciplines from psychiatry to surgery have all attempted to identify and to treat gendered misalignment, while queer theory and feminisms have simultaneously tried to understand if and how trans- theories should be integrated into their respective intellectual projects. This course looks at the logics of the medical treatment of transgender (and trans- more broadly) in order to consider the mutual entanglement of clinical processes with theoretical ones.