WINTER 2021

JANUARY 4 – JANUARY 22, 2021

UNDERGRADUATE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

Topics: Pandemic: Politics and Policy – SCA-UA 280.001

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 9:00-12:00pm, Online

Prof. Lisa Duggan

This course will focus on the history and politics of epidemics and global pandemics, and on their implications for public health policy. We’ll examine the political economic as well as medical and biological conditions for disease transmission, and consider class, race, gender, disability and geography as crucial contexts for analysis. During the Jan term, various guest speakers will share their research. The class will bring this history and research to bear for understanding the coronavirus pandemic. (Counts as faculty elective for these major/minors: American, Asian/Pacific/American, Gender & Sexuality, Metropolitan and SCA).

Topics: Afro-Latin Soundscapes / SCA-UA 721.001 Same as SPAN-UA 401.001

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 9:00-12:30pm, Online

Prof. Dylon Robbins

 How does what you listen to shape your sense of self? How do we relate to each other through music? And how does music cross linguistic, political, social, and ethnic boundaries? This course will take up some of these questions as it explores a few historical instances in which music has traveled extensively, finding listeners in a wide array of places. We will revisit the reception and performance of different musics in the Americas and beyond to consider how rhythms and compositions were resituated in different contexts, with particular concern for their roles in bridging between members of the African diaspora. Throughout the course, we’ll listen to musical examples from Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, New Orleans, New York, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast, while reading interventions by critics and musicians regarding these musics, their contexts, and their theoretical implications.

The course is taught in English and carries no prerequisites. The course will count toward the major and minor in Spanish if students complete writing and key readings in Spanish. (Counts as cross listed elective for these major/minors: Africana and Latino and for American and SCA majors NOT minors).