Culture & Politics (CULP)

This course aims to provide an overview of theatre practice as political intervention across India in the 20th century, with a view to understanding the role of politics in shaping both form and content in performance practice as well as the effect of theatre as means of political engagement in the present. The theoretical objective is to locate this practice within the dialectic of the colonial and neocolonial that frames the emergence of cultural resistance in the ‘post’colony. Hence the course is predicated on a theory of ‘political theatre’ crafted as a shared history of resistance to what Ngugi wa thiong’o has called the colonization of the mind, as well as part of the struggle of the economically oppressed to wrest control over the production of culture in the ‘post’colony. We will thus establish a comparative framework to understand the practice of political theatre in contemporary India. The documented history of ‘political theatre’ in India goes back to the Dramatic Performances Act passed against the ‘nationalist’ anti-colonial stage in 1876, preventing the performance of plays, and the banning of plays critical of the colonial government’s policies . Beginning with Ngugi’s conceptualisation of theatre as a tool of colonization we will position ‘national theatre’ as a form of anti-colonial resistance in the Anglophone world. Our attempt will be to understand how the idea of the ‘political’ underlies performance and dramatic texts, locating them in the time and place of their production and reception. The issues and themes deemed political and the forms used to create awareness and induce mass participation in action for change, together form the ‘political’ as conceptualized in this course. Hence, the professed relation to established political parties or ideologies as well as the shape and form of theatre as communicative and art form will underlie the readings of performances and texts used in this course. The diverse and rich traditions of local forms and the influences of theatre practice worldwide have interacted in ‘post’colonial India to produce performative platforms like Third Theatre and People’s Theatre, unique to the Indian experience. The course charts the relevance of such performance forms as strategies of political engagement and means of resistance and change in a ‘developing’ ‘post’colonial society. In this course, our aims are to understand 1. ‘Politics’ as a shaping influence on the form and content of performance 2. The ‘post’colony as the location of performance engaging with cultural imperialism 3. The relation between performance and life practice in a neocolonial/’post’colonial space

Students in this course will examine some of the major theoretical material that is foundational to the CULP major. In particular we will focus on subjects of race, labor, sexuality, nationalism, identity, and culture. Moving across historical moments as well as geographic spaces, we will study how these subjects have been formed and reformed in time and in different contexts and are meaningful in contemporary life and influence how we think about politics, economics, and culture.

This course invites you to explore three questions central to the processes of governance and the concept of liberty in the “Digital Age.” First, how do the architecture of the global Internet and the design of Internet-connected devices encode values and norms? Second, how are laws and policies responding to shifts in power dynamics among citizen, state, consumer, and company brought about by the digital age? Third, how is our increasing reliance on technology to govern and deliver services shaping our cultural conceptions of choice and liberty? Although many of the assigned readings are U.S.-centric, the course explicitly incorporates international perspectives, drawing most frequently on developments in China and India.

First, we will consider how technical design choices reflect the constant negotiation of social values like innovation, security, openness, and inclusiveness. Second, we will apply these principles of technical design to policy issues that illustrate how the interests of various stakeholders are balanced and mediated. These issues include cybersecurity and data protection, privacy, and speech and expression, and national security and government surveillance. Third, we will apply lessons from these policy debates to specific case studies in the United States, China, and India on network neutrality, the regulation of online speech, and artificial intelligence. In each of these three phases, we will consider how power dynamics and the nature of culture and community are shaped by deliberate, but often hidden, technical and policy decisions.

How should you think about governance and liberty in the digital age, and how can you influence the technical decisions and behavioral rules that will shape societies for decades to come? This interdisciplinary course offers analytical tools to guide your approach as citizens and consumers.

This course is a 1-credit version of CULP 326, with very similar course content. Those who have already taken CULP 326 should not take this course.

This course is an introduction to culture and inequality, specifically focused on the role of film. Students will immerse themselves in various film genres and strategies for portraying inequality. What strategies do filmmakers utilize to create ethical representations of inequality? How might filmmakers (re)produce suffering subjects? Students will watch two films a week and will read from theories that help us understand the role of the film in our critical understanding of global inequalities.

This virtual course will ask us to critically reflect on the genre of human rights film. What types of strategies do filmmakers use to make rights claims? How might filmmakers use the camera to challenge historically emplaced inequities and/or inadvertently reinforce them?

Practicing Culture and Politics is an events-based class led by students in the CULP major. Students in the course will design and plan a series of student events related to the themes of the major. This one-credit course is for both the students who have organized these events, as well as for students in the major who are involved as participants.

The 21st century Internet has democratized the circulation of ideas within and beyond the nation-state. In this context, music serves as a means of both alternative ideas and a reinforcement of the established order. International organizations, government actors, NGOs, artists, and a range of activists (from religious to social) have invested in music for their cultural, political, social, and economic ends. This seminar will focus on music as a way to reflect on globalization and international affairs in the 21st century via issues such as cultural diplomacy, soft power, conflict resolution, community building, social movements, national hegemony, propaganda, and protectionism. More broadly, this course encourages students to rethink political power, international affairs and nationalism beyond the nation-state, and the power of music as an agent of global transformation, and a tool to analyze and comprehend globalization and its complex issues. Methodologically, the course will introduce students to ethnography and performance analysis, among other non-textual approaches to investigating the politics of culture and representation online and onsite.

Communication is central to how we understand international affairs. Political leaders, diplomats, and citizens recognize that communication shapes global politics. Globalization and advances in communication technologies, such as social media, have only amplified this, as manifested in notions and concepts such as soft and smart power, new public diplomacy, or network power.

This course will introduce students to the conceptual, theoretical, and historical foundations of strategic and political communication in order to develop a systematic understanding of how political actors seek to shape order through narrative projection in this new environment. We will also examine and analyze a variety of case studies, and students will have the opportunity to practically apply their knowledge through a number of hands-on projects, such as constructing effective strategic narratives as part of group work assignments, as well as in the setting of a diplomatic simulation.

What makes one set of words more convincing than another, and how can language best be put to work in the service of diplomacy and international relations? This course promotes language awareness as a means of sharpening the students’ analytical skills, as well as improving their communication skills in preparation for a potential future career in the field of diplomacy. Close attention is paid to case studies of treaties, presidential speeches, public announcements, government advertising and media materials in order to link theoretical discussion to practical examples. Since effective communication has much to do with reading intentions and contexts correctly, insights are provided into relevant cultural, social and psychological variables.

2016, President Donald Trump banned Muslims from certain countries from entering America. The executive order increased media attention and mainstream discourse, including narrative constructions of Muslims as undesirables—essentially marginalizing three million American Muslims and resulting in an escalation of Islamophobic vandalism and hate crimes. But this begs the questions: what is an American Muslim? From ethnically diverse backgrounds, who speaks for them? As an introduction to American Muslim literature and culture, this course explores the narratives of American Muslims by examining the ways in which they have responded to the pressures of national and transnational belonging, cultural citizenship, and identity formation through a variety of literary and cultural forms, including spoken word, short story, plays, novels, sitcoms, and film. The cultural output of American Muslims are divided into three categories of narratives: immigration narratives, second-generation identity construction narratives, and postcolonial narratives. In doing so, the course will look at how race, gender, ethnic heritage, and immigration policies politicize (and otherize) their identities. We will also consider how the peripheralized can be recentered through counternarratives that have been acculturated into the mainstream, undertaken by an analectic integration rather than a dialectic assimilation.

The Social Construction of Pandemics: Science, Policy, and Media This course examines the production of knowledge at the intersection of scientific research, policy making, and mass media. At the same time, it explores how knowledge about our world is inseparable from the way we live in it. Specifically, how we simultaneously produce knowledge about COVID-19 and experience it as the lived reality of our times. To explore this relationship between science, policy, media, and society we will questions about who produces scientific knowledge and how scientific authority is located. We will explore how scientific research informs policy makers, and how policy responds to societal pressures channeled through mass media. Finally, we will engage in critical analysis of current and past journalistic and social media practices, and how they affect our daily lives, our understanding of the world, of science, and of life in a pandemic. We start this journey in the past, looking at the history of pandemics, of media, and of the healthcare system of the United States. We then engage with different theoretical frameworks from the social sciences that will guide our analysis of the present, including medical anthropology, science and technology studies, public health, political economy, and media studies. We will use ethnographic and archival data, as well as scholarly sources to investigate the complexities of the COVID-19 pandemic and the information and disinformation that is in constant production and circulation. This research will lead the participants of this class to the formulation of their own critical analysis of knowledge in-the-making during a pandemic and the crafting of their own final project. Final projects can be written papers, short films, podcasts, or other creative form of expression previously discussed with the instructor.

Lying Liars, Fakes, and Frauds: Cultures of Mendacity in Politics from Ancient Athens to the Age of AI “It is the lie, much more than the laugh, that characterizes man.” – Alexander Koyré This course will examine the history and philosophy of lies, fakes, and frauds from the ancient world to the present, investigating their abiding, often infuriating, and perhaps critical role in private and public life. Pairing readings in classical and contemporary critical theory--Plato, Augustine, Nietzsche, Derrida, Arendt, and others--with case-studies of present-day liars, fakes, and frauds, we will interrogate the evolution of the very idea of the "lie" and the attendant efforts to define, classify, and quarantine its reach. We will concentrate especially on how lies are distinguished—or not—from truth, error, falsehood, misinformation, "bullshit," and deception. While many considerations of lies and lying have tended to narrow their concern to the moral dimensions of lying—“Is it good or bad to lie?” “Under what conditions is a lie morally permissible?”—we will attempt to understand what is at stake for individuals if and when they choose mendacity. Weekly readings will be supplemented by a series of guest lectures from practitioners on how mendacity is dealt with and discussed in politics, technology, journalism, and law.

How does love emerge under conditions of war? This seminar explores what it means to sustain intimate relations in the face of overwhelming violence. Through the fields of Queer Studies, Black Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Anthropology, this course considers how intimacy and love figure in the production and maintenance of racialized, classed, and gendered difference. Taking up a variety of love relations and attachments (conjugal, sibling, ideological) and how they appear across a range of genres, including ethnography, state documents, memoir, novel, and film, students will examine the conundrums that love raises in the study of conflict. Students will further grapple with the possibilities and limitations of writing about intimacy and war through three written assignments (film review, critical reflection, and speculative ethnography).

Does “hope” propel social transformation? When is it a “cruel optimism” that entraps people in immiserating circumstances? This course considers how scholars in the fields of Queer Studies, Black Studies, and Anthropology have taken up the subject of hope. We will consider what methods are employed, and what these methods reveal about the social phenomena of aspiration, optimism, and hope, as they structure political formations, collective feelings, time, and identities. In addition, students will analyze case material from a range of social movements and the writings of political organizers, to trace the concrete methods of mobilizing “hope” in diverse political projects.

There is renewed attention to workers and the labor movement in the United States. Much of this tends to focus on statistics, union leaders, and implications for politicians, and moreover assumes that "the worker" is a white man in a hardhat. But what is life on the job actually like? What are workers, in fact, thinking and doing? This is a “terra incognita,” an unknown or unexplored land, in the coverage. This course interrogates a global history of worker self-activity, from the nineteenth century to the present, to explode these assumptions and open up new perspectives on the past and present of this major part of human society: life at work. We study texts that consider, “from below,” plantation slavery, agricultural work, convict labor, indentured migrant labor, factory work, maritime work, domestic work, mine work, and white-collar work—with examples drawn from around the world. We will think critically about the insights that this mix of scholarly works, oral histories, and worker writings might offer us about class society, historical social change, and the prospects for struggle today.

This interdisciplinary course employs techniques of devised performance to engage narratives from various pandemics, including both the COVID pandemic and the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918, as a catalyst and developmental research process for a new performance project, In Sickness & In Health (working title), a collaboration between Georgetown's Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, the School of Health, Global Health Institute, and DC's Mosaic Theater Company who will premiere the original staged production in February 2024. Inspired in part by the legendary oral historian and Pulitzer Prize winning author Studs Terkel (with whom Professor Goldman collaborated on several projects), the course will engage oral histories, ethnography, and written/ verbal interviews with (and narratives by) people around the world impacted by both the COVID pandemic and the flu pandemic - including medical professionals and frontline workers; scientists; patients; surviving family members; policymakers and political leaders; artists; clergy; and everyday citizens. Together we will explore how these pandemics are represented, performed, and re-imagined and how they intersect with and radically influence our understanding of community, identity, social justice, art, care, plague, disease, well-being, and health. Drawing on an understanding of socially engaged performance as a mode of caring, and interrogating the boundaries between care practices and performance, the project is conceived as a liberatory artistic offering of embodied engagement with an ongoing living history of a pandemic in our midst. In this way it seeks to offer an antidote to the human urge to move on and forget, reminding us that despite the massive scale of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which infected close to a third of the global population and killed 25-50 million people (far more than World War I), society never fully processed or chronicled those events, and the pandemic produced no narrative equivalents to All Quiet On the Western Front or countless other classic "wartime" narratives.

Students with an interests and backgrounds in devised performance, global health, medical anthropology, nursing and health sciences, narrative / dramatic literature, oral history, culture and politics, visual arts, and related areas are all encouraged to enroll. The approach of the course and the production seek to highlight and center diverse global and local voices -- rather than an American/ Eurocentric perspective. Students from all cultural and disciplinary backgrounds are welcome and encouraged.

The Indian Ocean World is one of the first global systems to encompass a wide range of nations, markets, cultures, and languages in interaction with another, connecting an enormous geography between the Malay Archipelago in Southeast Asia and the Swahili Coast in East Africa. In this course, we will explore the intense globalization that has characterized the Indian Ocean world historically and which continues to do so today. We will pay particular attention to the mobilities, circularities, and settlements that connected peoples and societies across the seas, bays, and gulfs of the Indian Ocean. The course will draw on a variety of disciplines to construct the worlds of the Indian Ocean and to provide students with a framework for exploring histories of interconnection from East Asia to East Africa–while at the same time encouraging them to reflect critically on the strengths and challenges of this framework. Students who complete this gateway course to the Indian Ocean studies will not only be introduced to the work of key scholars in the field but also acquire a solid training to think afresh in transregional terms about key social and political questions of identity, belonging, hybridity, and globalization today. Through Indian Ocean studies, students will gain a distinctive vantage point at the crossroads between landmasses labelled conventionally as “Asia,” “Africa,” the “Middle East,” and “the West.”

This course examines the complex and multifaceted interplay between language, identity, and the political sphere. Students will review the literature on language and identity, examining various linguistic and non-linguistic approaches (e.g. pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography, Critical Discourse Analysis, and multimodal analysis) and will analyze an array of data types, from everyday casual conversation to political speeches and mediated discourse. We will explore the construction of a number of aspects of identity, including race, gender, religion, and ethnicity, regional and national origin, and political persuasion. Students will also examine the construction of both personal and community identity and explore how these intersect as well as how they are affected by the passage of time. We will further consider the discursive construction and negotiation of various policy issues (e.g., education, health, immigration), focusing on how these issues are framed by different political parties and stakeholders with divergent interests and ideologies. We will also take on the notion of language as a political issue itself, examining topics such as standard and official language movements, the role of language in the construction of national identity, and the status of language planning initiatives in addressing the shifting linguistic ecology of a globalizing world. Readings, discussions, and writing assignments will highlight a number of important themes, among them access, agency, authenticity, borders, community, ideology, indexicality, and style. Together these themes will provide students with a framework for conducting an original research project on the construction of identity and its implications in the political sphere.

Is it true that modernity denotes the extinction of the rural? Does the rural necessarily imply traditional ways of life in idyllic landscapes? This course raises these two interrelated questions in order to challenge much received wisdom in the social sciences as well as in popular culture that equates the “modern” with the city and the “traditional” with the countryside.

Reading classic and contemporary works in political science, history, anthropology, sociology, and economics, we shall explore the myriad meanings of modernity in rural contexts, whether contemporary or historical, Western or non-Western. Along the way, we shall strive towards a more sophisticated understanding of the how rural peoples, crops, and landscapes have shaped – and continue to shape – modern societies and imaginations.

This course revolves around a selection of travel literature texts from late 19th to the present that are written by both Arabs and Westerners. The general aim of the course is to contrast and compare both travel writings. The idea is not to study travel literature as a literary genre, but rather to examine it as a corpus where notions such as otherness, religion, and clash of civilizations are more dominant than dialogue and similarities. Travel writers from both sides endeavor to decipher differences rather than similarities. They perceive the other through the lenses of religion.

Islam is at the center of both writings in as much as Westerners tend to interpret the behaviors of Arabs and the structure of their society through their limited knowledge of the religion. Similarly, Arab writers, whenever they travel to the West, focus in turn on how Islam is ‘different’ from Western creeds.

The course will seek to understand why these two literatures are focused so intensely on religion, which leads both sides to statements of intolerance and racism. Both sides also highlight the issues of gender in their portrayals of society. Women in the public space are scrutinized from both sides and often linked to the way society is organized and to religion.

The class will attempt to find patterns that could lead to dialogue rather than clash, to universalism rather than parochialism, and to permanence rather than transience.

The course is interdisciplinary in scope in as much as it resorts to comparative literature, history, the sacred, theories on space and place, and gender issues among others.

This course introduces students to the interplay between cultural practices and sustainable development using the case of Qatar to demonstrate how a nation can harness the “Power of Culture” to advance its sustainable development goals. The course will be divided into three main sections. The first section lays the foundations. During this part of the course, students will look at history, theory, and institutions impacting sustainable development. They will be encouraged to think critically about issues of cultural protection, nation-building, and what historically sparked the first sustainable development attempts. The second section demonstrates how a nation can utilize culture as a driver for human, social, economic, and environmental sustainable development. During this part of the course, students will engage with the theory around culture as a sustainable development instigator while examining the ecosystem of collaborators within Qatar who support its national development strategy. Students will have the chance to learn first-hand from leaders within the arts and culture field in Qatar through guest lectures and site visits. In the course’s final section, students will examine issues arising from, and standing in the way of, the advancement of culture as an instigator and driver of sustainable development through discussing morals and ethics as well as policies, mandates, and legal structures.

Global Tapestry: Understanding the World through Collections" is an interdisciplinary course designed to explore the profound impact that collections—ranging from art and historical artifacts to digital data and personal memorabilia—have on shaping global narratives, cultures, and identities. By examining a diverse array of collections from global to local, this course encourages students to consider how the act of collecting and the contents of collections themselves reflect, influence, and sometimes challenge our understanding of history, society, and identity. Through a combination of lectures, case studies, and hands-on projects, students will gain insights into the ways collections can serve as a lens to view the complexities of global cultures and the interconnectedness of our world.

This introductory course offers a broad overview of Islamic civilization, tracing its development from pre-Islamic Arabia, through the major Islamic empires, down to the contemporary period. Ideal for both newcomers and those already familiar with Islam and the history of the Near East, the course covers the life of Prophet Muhammad, the influence of the Qur'an, and the evolution of key social, political, and religious institutions. Students will explore classical Islamic texts in translation, delving into themes of philosophy, law, science, art, and architecture, alongside discussions on gender and cultural interactions. Through primary sources and scholarly articles, students will deepen their understanding of the historical intricacies and civilizational achievements that have left a lasting legacy on the world.

Popular cultural depictions of Islam and its legal and theological traditions are often cartoonish. “Islamic law” is presented as a theocratic regime where the literal word of scripture is applied unthinkingly as an act of zealous devotion. This course will dispel these myths by tracing the development of Islamic legal traditions, their interaction with a greater moral theology, and the contentious relationship between the state and ʿulamāʾ in contestations over legal authority.

This one-credit class engages students in the Culture and Politics Program in a variety of online programming available during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students will participate in online events that are associated with the program. These range from book talks hosted by faculty, lectures hosted by Georgetown University, online theater or performances, as well as artistic works launched in virtual format. We will use these works as a starting point to examine how culture and politics are being transformed by the current crisis, as well as to engage pertinent themes to the major. These include analyzing how culture, power and knowledge intersect in the present moment. Students will be required to attend 10 online events and prepare a 250-500 word written response for each one.

The statue of a 17th-century slave trader, Edward Colston, toppled in Bristol, by BLM protesters, in the spring of 2020, sparked a global conversation about Britain’s attitudes to race, slavery, identity, empire, and belonging. This has also led to a renewed debate about the moral and ethical underpinnings of British and other European empires as well as highlighted the complex and interconnected legacies that were left behind around the world, from Cape Town to Washington, DC. For example, the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, the British Governor-General of India, by the House of Lords in the late 18th century was cited as a precedent during the 2021 impeachment deliberations in the United States Senate. In this class, we use an interdisciplinary lens of theoretical readings, literature, and film, along with sources such as historical documents, print media, documentaries, and oral histories to consider the complex cultural, political, and economic legacies of colonialism that continue to shape global societies to this day.

This course is open to students from all majors.

No required texts. Readings/Texts will be made available on Canvas.

Life Unworthy of Life:” Nazi Policy and Practice Regarding Disability. This course will examine both the philosophy and the practice of the Nazis against those who were disabled, whether German, Roma or Jewish. Emphasis will be placed in two areas: (1) the roots of the concept of “disability” in Nazi thinking and medical policy and (2) the application of this policy by medical and social service personnel throughout Nazi-occupied territory. A close look at the role of eugenics, social Darwinism and “race and blood” hygiene laws will also be included as contributing to the notion of “disability.” Various figures in implementing these policies will also be studied, such as Hans Asperger, a pioneer researcher in Autism, whose own discoveries encouraged the elimination of disabled children at killing centers such as Spiegelgrund. Mid-term essays and oral finals. Seminar and lecture. Reading and film assignments. Letter grades awarded. Team-taught: Fr. Patrick Desbois and Fr Dennis McManus.

This Multimedia Production Lab, explores contemporary feminist and Indigenous activisms on contested, yet invisiblized, global borderlands. Although “crossing” through the US/Mexico, Iran/Turkey/Syria, India/Burma/China, Haiti/DR, Israel/Palestine, Ethiopia/Eritrea, “border checkpoints,” the course expands the notion of borderlands, beyond its fixed geographical and political registers. We will explore the imaginary, symbolic, and psychological boundaries diasporas, refugees, and civil societies transgress as they struggle for— political, religious, disability, labor, LGBTQIA+, and Indigenous and women’s— rights. Students will produce multimedia work: an autoethnographic short story about their own border “transgressions;” and a 10-minute activist audio documentary expanding on a theme from the course.

This course will explore the changing relationship between different kinds of "hard power" (coercion by military or economic might) - and the power of the arts to shape identity, to unite, inspire and lead, to prevent and recover from conflict, and to counter extremism and authoritarianism. Thinking of cultural diplomacy as a way to understand the people, societies and politics of countries and regions, the course will look at the ways creative expression in all its forms helps us to do that. As the 24-hour news cycle, social media, and citizen journalism upend traditional power structures, cultural diplomacy and “soft power” play increasingly important roles in diplomacy and foreign policy. At the same time, performance, film, literature, and media increasingly engage international issues and/or topics of concern around the world and, in some cases have an impact on shaping those issues. The course will study the intersection of culture and politics from the perspectives of diplomacy and international relations, as well as from the standpoint of culture and its creators. We will look at a range of films, media events/ broadcasts and performances that have, purposefully or not, played explicit roles in the shaping of policy, or are reflections of them. both “high” and “popular” culture, from ballet to hip hop, and traditional to “digital” diplomacy. We will compare the U.S. strategy for cultural diplomacy with the approaches of other countries. We will also attend live performances in the DC area, discuss, and reflect upon them. Topics to be studied include how creative expression foresaw the Arab Revolutions, how Idol programs are changing the world, and the role of narrative in shaping identity, countering extremism, and sparking conflicts such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We will look at numerous case studies, draw on the rich resources of campus arts programming as well as on Washington’s arts institutions, NGOs, and government agencies. Guest speakers from the arts, civil society, the private sector, and government will illuminate ideas in the course through their own personal experiences. As co-Director of Georgetown’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics (The Lab), a joint inter-disciplinary initiative in the School of Foreign Service and the College of Arts and Sciences with the mission of humanizing global politics through the power of performance, Ambassador Schneider will engage The Lab’s methodologies and events during the course.

How we tell stories shapes, impacts and influences the lives of those in our communities and around the world. In this class, we will explore a deeper and more nuanced look into journalism, storytelling, and reporting, while specifically and critically examining U.S. foreign policy through the human voices at stake.

In this course we’ll read and discuss works written in the period from World War II onward in which religious belief figures into both the material and its presentation; and we’ll consider the ways in which religion supports, complicates, or defies familiar categories of literary and social interpretation.

The novelist Flannery O'Connor spoke of her literary technique as a “realism of distances,” in which she sought the long view in a manner akin to prophecy. The texts here are vivid expressions of the different ways authors who deal with religious material aspire to a “realism of distances,” and they open up the questions that emerge in the process. Is religion a distinctive expression of a particular society, or is it a “contrast structure” set against a society’s sense of itself? Is religion nationalism or tribalism writ global, or is it a truly transnational phenomenon? How do a particular writer's convictions and stance toward religious belief shape his or her texts, and how do our own convictions shape our encounters with them as readers? How might a grasp of matters of belief help us to understand our own and other societies, and how might it stand in the way of such understanding?

These questions --- questions practical, political, literary, or religious, depending on one’s point of entry --- will animate our discussion of a dozen strong literary texts. Students will sharpen their insights in a succinct essay about a single text, and a broader essay taking in two or more texts.

War, more specifically the Second World War, has become the most evocative emblem of modernity. In a decisive way it signaled a transition in the register of knowledge itself, i.e., what collapsed comprehensively was the nineteenth-century belief that knowledge/ science/ ‘progress’ would bring an end to war.

However in his famous debate with Einstein in 1932, Freud’s answer to the question ‘Why War?’ resonates with profound ambiguities. For Freud, war precipitates a crisis of knowledge; it leads to strange and terrifying blurring of boundaries between reality/ fantasy (illusion), rationality/ paranoia, science/ speculation, and also critically, to ideas of stable sexual difference. Yet curiously here Freud writes not only of the futility but also the necessity of war. In fact, for Freud the ambivalence of war mirrors the fundamental ambivalence of culture/ civilization itself, as we have imagined it so far.

The course will aim to use psychoanalysis as a tool for the analysis of political issues --- nationalism, citizenship, power, ‘culture.’ It will explore the many ways in which Freud’s vision enables us to connect with and question the horrific violence of our times. We will especially highlight the relevance of Freud for one major category of human beings who were represented by the master-narrative of the Enlightenment as incapable of representing themselves: the colonized races, (women and children being the other two).

The body of work loosely referred to as ‘Critical Theory’ has undoubtedly enabled new ways of understanding the subtle configurations of culture and power in the world. Yet what is often overlooked is that this ‘radical’ theory too [Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben et. al] is limited to the history and experiences of modern Western Europe. In our course on ‘Other Asias’ we will attempt to understand how the experiences of Asia/ the non-west might compel us to understand the imbrications of culture and power in completely new ways.

The arrival of the Portuguese off the coast of Calicut [/Kerala] on the 20th was an abrupt end to an entire era of peaceful navigation that had been the hallmark of the Indian Ocean region till then. This encounter between da Gama’s men and Malabari society, the terror and violence of the Portuguese, would also lay the blueprint for Europe’s relationship with Asia for the next five hundred years. The point to be underlined is that European presence in Asia was always founded on armed force/ violence. Indeed this dichotomy of democracy at home and colonialism/ despotism abroad continues to be the mainstay of, for example, US foreign policy very much today in its ‘War on Terror.’

In her landmark book Other Asias, (2007), which marks one of the most incisive theorizations of the ‘Asian Century’, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak however cautions against overhasty notions of an ‘Asian identity.’ As Spivak insightfully reminds us, the models of colonialism were many, not one. Using her book as our scaffolding, we will read a selection of essays/books/films in an attempt to understand the many ‘Asian’ presents as the new postcolonial states in turn find themselves overwhelmed by an all-encompassing market logic(/globalization).

In India, cultural and political domains have overlapped since the colonial period, making separation between the two difficult and unproductive. Purely “cultural” activities, such as for example the celebration of festivals, double as instances of mass mobilization, either against the government or in support of a political party. This course will examine how cinema emerged as an institution that is at the cusp of culture and politics in India. Students will gain insights into:

a) The ways in which films depict socio-cultural and religious life in India b) How the cinema itself became a site for group activities which have political implications c) How and why popular film stars evolve into political leaders.

A selection of Indian films made in different parts of India between 1918 to the present will be screened as a part of this course. Students will also read a range of critical and scholarly writings by film researchers as well as political and cultural theorists.

The Global South: Politics, Literature and Film: In literary and cultural studies, the Global South has been employed in a transnational sense to address spaces and peoples impacted by the legacies of colonization as well as globalization. The course would explore historical, cultural, literary and cinematic applications of the term, especially in the context of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Oceania.

This course invites you to explore three questions central to the processes of governance and the concept of liberty in the “Digital Age.” First, how do the architecture of the global Internet and the design of Internet-connected devices encode values and norms? Second, how are laws and policies responding to shifts in power dynamics among citizen, state, consumer, and company brought about by the digital age? Third, how is our increasing reliance on technology to govern and deliver services shaping our cultural conceptions of choice and liberty? Although many of the assigned readings are U.S.-centric, the course explicitly incorporates international perspectives, drawing most frequently on developments in China and India.

In Part 1, we will consider how technical design choices reflect the constant negotiation of social values like innovation, security, openness, and inclusiveness. In Part 2, we will apply these principles of technical design to policy issues that illustrate how the interests of various stakeholders are balanced and mediated. These issues include cybersecurity and data protection, privacy, speech and expression, and national security and government surveillance. In Part 3, we will apply lessons from these policy debates to specific case studies in the United States, China, and India on network neutrality, the regulation of online speech, and artificial intelligence and biometrics. In each of these three phases, we will consider how power dynamics and the nature of culture and community are shaped by deliberate, but often hidden, technical and policy decisions.

How should you think about governance and liberty in the digital age, and how can you influence the technical decisions and behavioral rules that will shape societies for decades to come? This interdisciplinary course offers analytical tools to guide your approach as citizens and consumers.

The current migration “crises” have sparked heated political debates about people on the move seeking safe haven from violence, armed conflict, and poverty. In these debates, the fate of migrants is defined by competing visions of them as pawns or pioneers, as passive victims or driven agents. Moreover, many of these narratives are created by outsiders: politicians and policy makers, journalists and celebrities, and armchair scholars. In this course, we will look at how documentaries, films in local and world cinema, autobiographies, novels, and ethnographies created by migrant filmmakers, novelists, and scholars narrate decisions to leave home, present different migration trajectories, explore what it means to be an undocumented migrant or member of the ‘second generation.’ We will also explore how geography, citizenship, class, gender, age, ethnicity, race, and religion feature in these narratives. Students will critically analyze how migrants are represented in these narratives through active class discussions and several written essays.

Whether or not we like it, the world has indeed become a global village. In this context, the seminar will deal with the international cultural heritage and its preservation. Heritage and history are often confused. In essence, cultural heritage is something appreciable in our lives. It can be tangible, such as a building, or intangible such as music. In essence, history is a record of what happened. Our heritage can also be very personal, a family matter involving ancestry and property. The largest familial unit of personal heritage is race. Our common cultural heritage is shared with our fellow citizens on many levels — neighborhood, municipal, county, state, and national communities. From the national we move to the international community and our shared common cultural heritage which belongs to the family of humankind.

Paul Mellon, the inspired philanthropist, collector, and humanist, whose father founded the National Gallery of Art, insisted that the Gallery remain open to the public free of charge. He helped to make that a reality. The reason why he felt so committed to such a generous policy was that he deeply believed that every person should be able to “enjoy a five minute reverie with beauty.” Beauty in all of its manifestations — architecture, objets d’art, paintings, landscapes, cityscapes, literature, music (to name but a few) — the potpourri that composes what goes by the name of civilization is of daily significance for all persons. All other disparate elements that compose civilization are interrelated and quintessentially necessary for an informed and happy life. Our shared heritage offers all of us the opportunity to better understand our fellow human beings around the globe, to glimpse through a glass darkly into random or selected corners of the past that might offer some insights into our own lives and help us move forward in a meaningful way, to understand that we all, for the most part, share basic norms, aspirations, doubts, fears, and dreams, to realize that we are all necessary to one another, that we are all in the journey together, and to relish the breath of the human imagination and its ability to create beauty in all its guises from the Taj Mahal, to a netsuke, to a Benin bronze, to an Inupiat baleen basket. The seminar opens with a consideration of the importance of reverie.

TBA

The digital has profoundly changed many aspects of sociality. This course explores the multi-faceted nature of these changes and critically investigates the effects of technological advances on contemporary society. It pays particular attention to the ways in which the digital is reshaping cultural practices, redefining politics, and reconfiguring the economy. Of interest are both the changes and challenges spawned by the advent of the digital era. We will examine a number of themes and topics in relation to the digital and society, including power, identity, citizenship, activism, surveillance, and privacy. The course uses a critical approach that draws on insights from sociology, political science, history, communication studies, cultural studies, and new media studies to better understand the dynamics and implications of these ongoing changes and transformations. Students will engage these topics through readings, class discussions, and assignments.

This course is designed to help students of international affairs discover different facets of education understood as an evolving historical concept and continuing socio-political practice. It proposes to interrogate the ideological foundations on which the notion of education rests, but which can often be taken for granted and left unexamined. The key question to explore through selected readings, class discussions, and written responses concerns the dual role of education. On the one hand it is generally acknowledged that its intention is to instigate personal, cultural, economic and social change. On the other hand, its fundamental but latent goal is to maintain the status quo and produce compliant and cooperative members of society.

This course offers students an immersive dive into the evolving world of cultural diplomacy, a rapidly emerging facet of public diplomacy, distinct in its impact and nuanced methodologies. Grounded in a robust theoretical framework, this course systematically uncovers the historical and contemporary facets of cultural diplomacy, with a particular emphasis on Qatar's innovative and strategic approaches. The course starts by grounding students in foundational concepts. In this part of the course, students will delve into the history, theory, and institutions of cultural diplomacy and soft power. They'll engage in critical discussions about cultural protection, nation branding, and the historical catalysts for cultural diplomacy. In the second part of the course, the focus shifts to methodologies. Students will study theories behind Qatar's innovative strategies in leveraging soft power and enhancing its cultural diplomacy at an unprecedented speed. Students will have the chance to learn first-hand from the leaders of cultural diplomacy in Qatar through guest lectures and site visits. In the course’s final section, students will examine issues impacting contemporary cultural diplomacy and analyze how they impact Qatar’s model.

The Digital Humanities is a huge and growing field spanning many disciplines and skill sets. The focus of this course is on tools and methods that allow students to collect, create and analyze textual corpora as purveyors of stories, information. This is the point of view often taken by analysts who work for universities, think tanks and intelligence agencies who seek to understand cultural trends and mindsets from volumes of digital texts. For such analysts, close reading is an indispensable part of their work and computing tools help focus their reading while reading helps refine their understanding of the computer output. The course will give students intensive practice with digital text analytics methods and tools. The students will be able to collect and analyze social media data at the word and sentence level. The students will be also introduced to an array of practical Digital Humanities Tools and Applications.

This course provides an overview of feminist movements in the MENA region, introducing main authors, themes, issues, and debates in gender, Islam, and postcolonial theory, with an in-depth focus on the intersections between Feminist and postcolonial theory. The course engages with both historical and contemporary approaches to the field of Arab feminism(s) and postcolonial theory. The course’s materials range from classical theory and case studies (generated mainly via ethnographies, histographies, and narratives of various genres), through to modern day journalistic interventions.

Media Entertainment and Technology in the Middle East. This course examines established and emerging forms of media entertainment industries in the contemporary Middle East. It pays particular attention to the intersection between media, entertainment and technology. Students will explore how media entertainment fosters artistic production and communication spaces, but also how emerging digital creative industries create new arenas for artistic expression, communication and contention. Equally of relevance is the sociocultural, economic and political underpinning of these developments. The course looks at various sectors in the entertainment industry, including popular media, TV drama, film, and music but also an array of online media cultures, from YouTube channels to creative productions on popular social media platforms, which are associated with a predominantly younger demographic and reflective of broader global trends.

This seminar will introduce students to the vibrant interdisciplinary field of critical energy studies, sometimes referred to as energy humanities, and prepare them to undertake research in energy studies. Together, we will consider how energy systems shape and are in turn shaped by lived experiences, human cultures, and historical processes. We will also work to decenter the historical focus on North Atlantic in energy studies to instead foreground Global South and Fourth World contexts, perspectives, and methodologies. Through this shift in focus, we will apply a critical and imaginative lens to common concepts in energy studies such as “energy transition,” “sustainability,” and “energy futures.” By engaging with course readings, discussions, and assignments, students will develop dexterity in analyzing energy across multiple critical and disciplinary registers and in reading for energy in different media and objects. Students will also learn to articulate original research questions in energy humanities and develop ethical and sound research strategies to answer them. This course includes required experiential learning activities, which will take place both on campus and in other areas of Doha. Students with questions or concerns about these activities should contact the instructors before enrolling.

The course will examine a selection of mostly Indian cinema, but with some examples also taken from Bhutan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. A prominent director in the course will be Satiyajit Ray – who deals extensively with adaptation and the majority of whose films are taken directly from famous works. However, the course will also focus on the idea of adaptation – what does it mean to translate a work of fiction into a work of cinema or tv? What takes place in the transition from the textual to the visual? Do certain problems and decisions repeat themselves? How do we view adaptations if we know the original – and how does this knowledge change our idea of the film? Are there two audiences for a film – one that knows the source, and one that doesn’t? Three central scholarly texts (Naremore, Hutcheon, Stam and perhaps also Andrew Dudley’s earlier 1984 book) will also be considered by us as we move through these questions.

This course examines the complex relationships between energy, culture, and society in the Gulf region, focusing on how energy resources—particularly fossil fuels—have shaped social identities, political power structures, cultural expressions, and environmental imaginations. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, we will investigate how energy production and consumption have influenced the lived experiences of Gulf societies both historically and in the present. Through an extensive and diverse selection of primary sources and scholarly works, we will analyze the cultural dimensions of hydrocarbon modernity and the narratives that surround energy systems, uncovering how energy shapes the cultural and political landscapes of the Gulf both materially and symbolically. By the end of the course, students will acquire the analytical tools needed to critically assess the complex interdependencies between energy forms and cultural practices and productions.

In this course, students will explore the emerging genre of the adult graphic novel in the Middle East and trace its development over the past two decades. They will examine the history of comics in the Arab world and the growing popularity of the graphic novel as a dynamic and engaging medium for storytelling that appeals to diverse audiences. Throughout the course, students will learn the core vocabulary and formal conventions associated with the graphic novel format. They will also analyze how Arab artists have used these conventions to engage with various sociopolitical conditions. The course will feature a range of notable graphic novels from different genres, including Metro: A Story of Cairo (2008) by Magdy El Shafee, A Game for Swallows: To Die, To Leave, To Return (2007) by Zeina Abirached, The Arab of the Future (2015) by Riad Sattouf, and Baddawi (2015) by Leila Abdelrazaq, among others. In studying each work, students will consider how visual symbolism and artistic rendering (alongside text) can offer unique approaches to addressing complex themes such as war, exile, identity, gender, and personal and collective trauma. Class discussions will focus on important elements such as graphic design, drawing style, artistic framing, narrative techniques, and key themes in each work. Supplemental readings, including theoretical essays on comic studies and historical writings on the Middle East, will enrich students’ understanding of the medium and contextualize each text in its temporal/geographical moment. Additionally, students will critically assess the subversive potential of the graphic novel and its role in political and social resistance. By the end of the course, students will have developed a deeper understanding of the genre and a greater appreciation for its growing cultural significance in the Arab world as a powerful medium for artistic expression and social critique.

How do art and literature shape our understanding of politics, identity, and belonging? This course examines cultural production in and about modern Syria through a range of genres and media, including novels, poetry, plays, short stories, films, and TV shows. The course will pivot around significant events in the history of modern Syria, such as the tumultuous era of post-independence, the defeat of 1967, the ascendancy of Hafez al-Asad to power, and the onset of the revolution and the subsequent civil war of 2011. We will consider how Syrian artists and writers negotiate structures of state censorship, hegemony, historical consciousness, national identity, community-making, and collective memory. We will explore how Syrian intellectuals have and continue to use aesthetic form as a means of critique, survival, and resistance. The texts and visual media we encounter in this course range from the intimate to the epic, the realist to the experimental, offering complex conceptions about systems of oppression and narratives of nationhood. To analyze the various Syrian cultural texts, we will adopt an interdisciplinary lens, drawing on political, literary, and film theories, media and cultural studies, and historical analysis in order to trace how narratives reflect and reshape the social and political contexts from which they emerge. We will read and view works by prominent Syrians, including Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, Adonis, Nihad Sirees, Samar Yazbek, Ghada al-Samman, Muhammad Malas, and Sa’dallah Wannous among others. This course will be taught in English and all texts will be read in translation.

What happens when a (seemingly) unstoppable force meets a (seemingly) immovable object? This is the question we seek to answer when thinking about the question of the impact of colonial modernity on the Islamic tradition. How did Muslim societies and the Islamic intellectual tradition receive modernity? What were the responses to the intense disruptions caused by colonialism on Muslim self-imagination and their interaction with their traditions? How did Muslim thinkers around the world reimagine their own traditions in the wake of these cataclysmic encounters? And what were the major intellectual currents that continue to shape the way we understand Islam as both a tradition and lived experience today?

Simonides of Ceos (556-468 BC) is said to be the “inventor of memory,” for he stepped out from a dinner party in Thessaly one day and returned to find that while he was outside, the walls of the dining hall had collapsed upon the guests, crushing them beyond recognition. Luckily, Simonides, a poet, had committed the seating arrangement to memory, so when the relatives of the dead came to collect the remains, he was able to point them to the right bones. The story of Simonides marks the start of a certain manner of approaching and sifting through the past. One might imagine him walking around the ruins of his dinner party, dissecting, sorting, and labeling the site of the collapse. It is telling that, according to this ancient anecdote, the invention of memory emerges from loss, but does not predate it. Memory anticipates loss just as buildings and memorials have been said to anticipate their own destruction. “The story of Simonides tells us that the birth of memory preceded the accident, the collapse of the roof, death, disappearance,” Dubravka Ugrešić writes. Memory mobilizes against what Harald Weinrich calls the “menacing catastrophe of forgetting: the sudden death that makes remembering a problem.” The arts of memory and forgetting share a point of origin: Cicero tells us that when, one day, Simonides offers to teach his contemporary Themistocles about the art of memory, Themistocles replies that he would rather learn “how to forget everything he wants to forget.” “According to another version of the anecdote,” Weinrich writes, “Themistocles curtly replied that he was not interested in an art of memory (ars memoriae) but rather was interested in the art of forgetting (ars oblivionis).” Here, and forever more, memory and forgetting have a dialectic relation. “There can be no Aletheia (truth) without a measure of Lethe (oblivion),” the classicist Thomas Cole writes. “The antithetical powers are thus not contradictory but tend toward each other.” This course will investigate the dialectic relation of memory and forgetting in history, law, politics, literature, and philosophy. We will survey the emergence of practices of both memory and forgetting as ways of reckoning with the past and ask whether there can be such a thing as an excess of memory. When have societies deliberately chosen to forget? How is collective forgetting orchestrated, agreed upon, and enforced? What are the political and cultural motivations of these episodes? What are their effects?

This course is exploratory, it engages with concepts such as virtual civil societies in the Gulf region and the emerging trends in digital media. How has our life moved to online? What does social media and posting a tweet or picture on Instagram impact our sense of self? How does engagement with various people and entities online impact various levels and forms of identities in the Gulf region? And what role does state policies play in restricting/framing our personal freedom and narratives online?

The course will explore these concepts and trends and other major questions and debates around the digital transformation of societies and cultures together from international to regional level focusing on the Gulf. The course is multi-disciplinary and will cover various topics relevant to different, shifting, and contested aspects of cultural identities in the Gulf . This will include an in-depth study of role of media in shaping identities as well as the socio-political link between social media and identity, as well as key concepts such as virtual civil society, cyber feminism, twitter bots, and digital authoritarianism. This will be done through an intensive engagement with a variety learning resources (videos, blogs, social media platforms) and intellectual texts/readings at the intersections of the social sciences, gender studies, politics and economy.

Washington, DC is both a pivotal node of global power and a place where people live. This seminar course will explore the relationships between these two realities, analyzing how Washington acts as a site of transnational command and exchange and how these processes are entangled with the built environment and everyday life of the city and wider region. We will begin by situating the nation’s capital within comparative histories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, asking how doing so might reframe the ways we understand its spatial arrangements and symbolic sites. Examining how Washington-area financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have reshaped cities globally, we will assess how neoliberal ideologies and policies are implicated within the cultural and economic shifts that have taken place in DC over the past thirty years. Turning to the wider region, we will grapple with the connections between its development and designs for war and empire, from the dominant role of defense contractors and national security institutions within the local economy to the multiple migrations of survivors of US military interventions to the Virginia and Maryland suburbs. Finally, we will survey the ways that social movements and subaltern populations have sought to reclaim the city as a proving ground for alternative forms of political order and an assembly point for forging internationalism(s) from below. To further our inquiry, we will draw on multiple fields of study including anthropology, critical ethnic studies, geography, history, and transnational American studies. Engaging Washington as our classroom, we will also take several field trips throughout the course. For a final project, students will analyze a specific site through a critical transnational lens and contribute to a collective ‘counter-mapping’ of the city.

This seminar introduces the field of political ecology, which involves the ways that politics, power and culture shape relationships between humans, other animals, nature and the environment. What are the gendered, racial, and class dynamics of green campaigns for sustainability and "saving endangered species"? Is environmentalism a politics of the privileged, an urgent global human rights issue or is there such a thing as inter-species justice? How do cultural representations of "nature" and "environment" reinforce power inequalities or inspire social change? While there may be little argument about the need to address climate catastrophes, how might people, organizations and movements define and prioritize problems to move towards desirable solutions? Featurng film screenings, lively guest speakers and on-campus "field trips". Students will choose a theme and format for their major project: community service, grassroots activism, hands-on beekeeping/farming, NGO proposal, creative writing, mutli-media or film criticism.

Contagion, corruption, invasion, infection – with these ideas the foreign body is often portrayed as a threat to the integrity of a nation or person. However, the wellbeing of both physical bodies and nation states also demands exchange with and incorporation of the world outside the self. This course explores the dual valance of foreignness and the ways in which images of the foreign move between politics and medicine. We will examine how bodies come to express human difference and become a means to reject, tolerate, or aspire towards a life with others.

This course examines the social and political dimensions of medical diagnoses. We will investigate how diseases like AIDS, malaria, cancer, and schizophrenia are defined, imagined, and distributed across an uneven global landscape. Reading anthropologists, historians, and literary works on places ranging from contemporary Botswana to late imperial China, we will explore how diagnoses both reveal and impose forms of power in the body. Course material will cover a range of issues with respect to politics and medicine in a global setting and expand students’ conceptual toolbox in the social sciences.

Transnational Queer Theory and Mediamaking: This course brings in conversation western queer theory and its Black, Indigenous, and Diasporic critiques with ethnographic accounts of LGBTQIA experiences from around the world. We will explore queer, quare, and kuaer theories to unsettle western-centric understandings of queerness and to gain an in-depth view of how gender pluralism manifests in non-western contexts. Beyond tackling LGBTQIA topics at large, we will discuss the ethics, politics, and controversies of cross-cultural queerness and queer media production. From performance artists to painters, sculptors, and poets; from fashion designers to photographers and filmmakers, we will apply course theories to understand queer media praxis—its openings, limitations, and ongoing questionings. We will learn how to “read,” write about, and produce media ourselves. Students will produce a public scholarship multimedia project informed by queer theory and praxis, that will include a film journal, an annotated Spotify Playlist, and a short (5-10 minutes) experimental film.

Bodies, Technology and Violence" addresses gender and globalization from 1945 to the contemporary through intersections between technologies, bodies, and violence. The course asks students to analyze how assemblages linking humans, machines, and territories act politically and study the consequences of these interactions. Violence, figured through war, environmental degradation, economic inequalities, and other forms of injustice, is central to these considerations. The course will highlight connections between technologies and violence, and their relationship to human bodies. We will explore multiple forms of embodiment, taking into account not only gender, but also sexuality and race. Drawing on key theoretical texts, the initial part of the course considers perspectives from science and technology, gender studies, queer theory and critical race studies. The second part of the course studies how these concepts play out in diverse contexts, including the Nevada Test Site, Hiroshima, computers, the Gulf War, and at the Israeli / Palestine border. A film, novel, and contemporary video art also form part of the course materials.

Colonial empires ruled over much of the modern world for a large part of the 18th, 19th, and 20th century. Colonizers expropriated land, extracted labor and resources, and sought to ‘civilize’ peoples from contexts as seemingly disparate as Martinique, India, and the United States. But has colonialism really ended? If not, what are its lasting legacies? This course asks us to take seriously the lasting impact of colonialism on our present, what some call the ongoing coloniality of power, paying particular attention to questions of race and capitalism. By looking at a series of different colonial encounters – such as the first contacts made between British traders and Chinese rulers, or the brutal dispossession of indigenous peoples from their land by American settlers, or the interactions between Belgian missionaries and violent colonial officials in the Congo in the 19th century, or the racialized caste and religious stratifications imposed upon British colonial subjects by British officials in India, or the late-20th century rise of American imperial power and its perpetual war on terror – we examine how race became and continues to be an integral colonial technology to maintain social hierarchy and control while also setting the foundation for unequal accumulation. We trace the colonial institutionalization of racism in the creation of nation-states, in governance, in law, in development projects, in the enshrining of gendered and sexual norms, and in economic relations. Readings and course materials will be drawn from foundational theoretical texts along with primary sources, including newspapers, novels, photographs, artwork, oral histories, and films.

This course will provide an entry into critical humanitarianism and border regimes as they pertain to migration studies with a special focus on the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa. Though border regimes are often imagined as closing off movement, we will also consider the directed, strategic enactment of borders and frontiers by nation-states. This will open paths to inquiry into questions of sovereignty, belonging, and how asylum-seekers are mobilized to refashion the borders of the contemporary nation-state. Whereas much attention has been directed at efforts at entrenching racial and sexual borders, renewed interest in the materialities of border regimes in the form of documentation, physical constructions (walls, checkpoints), and topographic elements (bodies of water, deserts, mountains), disregards the projection of bodies themselves as border-making technologies. Through an interdisciplinary corpus of works of anthropologists, philosophers, literary critics, and political scientists, we will consider law and asylum, governmentality, policing, surveillance, borders, and frontiers, as well as how those in movement and confronting borders are classified, categorized, and fixed. In addition, we will read essays and political tracts written by emigrants.

This course will explore several important issues in culture and politics.

The riots in Paris in November 2005 highlight tensions surrounding population pressures in Europe.

· Native populations of Europe are reproducing slowly and aging quickly. How will these countries provide social services for the elderly and maintain a labor force?

· Descendants of immigrants who arrived in Europe 30 years ago have come of age with the belief that they should have the same rights and opportunities of all other citizens in their country, only to find out that their last name or perhaps their clothing creates walls that they did not know existed. How will the second-generation integrate and assimilate, or will multiculturalism be tolerated?

· There is increasing demand from other countries to accept new immigrants. Africans who walked for hundreds of kilometers through the Sahara Desert charged at reinforced fences around the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in September and October of 2005. Many more potential immigrants die each year on boats trying to get to the southern fringes of the EU. What should be the policy response? Who should be allowed in and under what conditions?

This course will examine these issues with a focus on the cultural consequences of population strains within the EU and possible policy responses to alter, reverse, or maintain these trends. This discussion-based course will allow students to debate issues surrounding the complex intersection of demography, culture, and politics in present day Europe.

This course seeks to develop critical green analytic tools that cultivate new understandings of the enmeshment of ecology and society, “green politics” and everyday life. We will explore green discourses, environmental issues, and the aesthetics of green actions historically, theoretically, and practically through weekly experimental constellations of readings, artifacts, films, and featured topics. No course is able to cover the diversity of green political topics—this course will argue that all social projects are ecological projects. Our goal is not to cover all environmental controversies; nor will we enterprise to become experts on environmental issues, although we will become more knowledgeable about different environmental issues by sharing our work with one another. Our goal is to develop critical thinking skills and a keen eye for the discourses, patterns, and strategies that shape meaning and action on social and ecological issues. Weekly topics foreground several keywords on many green agendas, but the success of the course requires the contribution of your own empirical knowledge and experiences in order to hone the class’s green-thinking toolkit.

The course focuses on critical green theory and practice with the broader aim of contributing to the development of social justice through creative reflection and rigorous analysis. The course proceeds from the assumption that discourse is a key site of struggle in efforts to influence environmental attitudes, policies, and actions. Rather than viewing symbols/stories/metaphors/keywords/images/actions as transparent representations of the world, or employing an instrumental perspective that perceives discourses as mere tools to achieve pre-determined ends, we will develop a constitutive understanding of discourse as material practice and aesthetic action. As a result, this course will consider how green discourse extends to those who do not consider themselves environmentalists, even to those hostile to environmentalism. A respectful classroom is essential. All students must be mindful of the opportunities and hazards of communicative patterns and interactions in the classroom. This class involves critical thinking rather than out-right criticism; rather than reject a position immediately, you must first understand that position as it functions rhetorically—in relation to situation, purpose, audience, institution, etc—and materially with reference to institutions, nature, everyday life. This holds for both what we read and what we discuss in class. There are many advantages to this approach, an important one being that you have the opportunity to excavate how your own beliefs, attitudes, and values are always already shaped in/by green discourses. This will help you to think and act more carefully and thoughtfully about the positions you take, the arguments you make, and the taken-for-granted assumptions that shape what you do.

Course work involves weekly readings and film viewings, conceptual map exercises, and applications; a paper that critically dissects a particular issue/crisis; an in-class forum/exhibition on green social projects and manifestos; administration of one class (small groups); a final portfolio project that includes a paper or creative action project that thinks critically “green” about Washington-DC.

This course will provide an interdisciplinary introduction to research on global urbanisms, drawing on literature and case studies from architecture, geography, anthropology, and cultural studies. We will consider the strategic roles cities have played within the wide-ranging changes associated with globalization and neoliberalism through the figure of the global city, and spend most of the semester tracking some of the major characteristics of contemporary urban infrastructures, spatial politics, and geographical forms using materials spanning traditional scholarship to films and art/architecture. We will engage with the critiques and concerns of scholars from within the growing literature of/about the Global South and critical geopolitics, in order to examine the power relations and implications of different urban theories and methodologies. Globalizing urban theory requires that we map and are mindful of diverse theoretical perspectives, modes of representation, and social justice issues that underlie global urban issues and research. Class readings and materials cross-cut contemporary urban themes and theoretical perspectives with “site visits” that span what are typically understood to be “global cities”—Shanghai, Berlin, São Paulo, Dubai, Johannesburg, and Mumbai—as well as cities and places often considered to be ordinary or peripheral to globalization, from Accra, Ghana to Flint, Michigan, or from the logistics city to refugee camp. Special emphasis will be placed on how urban spaces are constructed and represented through methods of research and visual documentation.

Class work includes weekly concept maps and “snapshots,” one in-class group presentation, and a sequence of multimedia assignments: (1) postcard/flashcard assignment, (2) sister city assignment, and (3) a “detouring globalization” guidebook/portfolio. This sequence asks students to apply/reflect on global urban methodologies—including urban criteria/concepts, comparisons, pedagogy and creative documentation—by engaging with conventional tourist formats in critical ways. The final project—the guidebook entry—may take the form of a visual essay or podcast to be included in a collective class “detouring the global city” guidebook.

This course provides an introduction to critical geography in two parts: “Critical Mappings” and “Spatial Tools.” In the first section, we will deconstruct cartographic representation, exploring maps and mapping as forms of social practice. We will trace a genealogy of geography’s investments with empire, including: the cartographic gaze and visual cultures; cadastral maps, capitalism, and property; mapping geo-bodies of state, territory, and nation; and the politics of digital mapping, geosimulation and models. The second part of the course will examine the emergence of "space" as a dominant paradigm in modernity and postmodernity. We will survey key spatial thinkers in the field of critical geography, and practice "thinking spatially" in a variety of applications. Featured spatial tools incorporate place, space, landscape, nature, waste, scale, and a glance at alternative spatial ontologies. In the final weeks, students (in small groups) will design and administer a course session organized around an application of spatial concepts and tools. Students will have an opportunity to creatively experiment with geographical approaches and analysis, representational strategies, and interactive classroom formats. Course work involves weekly readings and conceptual map exercises; two critical papers, including an analytic-synthetic paper and a case study; administration of one class on select geographical concept and site; final take-home exam that involves student-directed creative re-working of the "Map of the Modern World" or some aspect of (your) geographic imagination and education.

With a record 200 million people living outside their country of birth, immigration is a global phenomenon with profound demographic, economic, social, and political implications for both sending and receiving countries. The debates over immigration policies have become increasingly volatile and, in some instances, characterized by misinformation, hate, and xenophobia. Beyond the politics of immigration, genuine challenges to immigrant integration abound. Successful integration of immigrants is critical to the long-term prosperity of host countries that rely on immigrants as workers, consumers, taxpayers, innovators, and entrepreneurs in light of their aging native-born populations and lower birth rates.

In this course we will explore the cultural and historical basis for conceptualizing immigrants as the Other. We will also explore the ways, in which both the term and the concept are translated into contemporary policy towards immigrant “others” and how immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers now claim to speak as Others. We will raise questions about traditional understandings of nationality, loyalty, place and identity; discuss models of multiculturalism citizenship, as well as transnationalism and post-nationalism, paradigms that challenge an integrationist reading of migration. Theoretical writings, ethnographies, and works of fiction will inform our discussions. We will focus on case studies of France, Germany, the United States, and Canada. This course is an upper-level seminar and is structured around active student participation and discussion. It is of interest to students of anthropology, sociology, international relations, government, public policy, gender studies and ethnic studies.

This course is taught as part of the Doyle Initiative on Engaging Difference. See http://doyleinitiative.georgetown.edu/

COURSE OUTCOMES

By the end of the semester, students will be able to:

• Identify the cultural and historical basis for conceptualizing the Other;

• Think critically and comparatively about the meanings of difference, identity, and belonging;

• Understand and engage with contemporary debates related to immigrant integration policies and practices;

• Prepare discussion questions and lead class discussions on a wide range of issues;

• Write reflectively about immigrant integration, identity, and belonging;

• Design a policy memo on selected integration issues; and

• Use theoretical concepts and frameworks discussed in class to analyze a work of fiction dealing with immigrant integration and identity. REQUIRED READINGS

In this class we will be reading a wide variety of publications, including theoretical and empirical papers published in peer-reviewed journals as well as ethnographies and works of fiction.

Books (in order of reading). All books can be purchased from local or online bookstores. Some are also available on Kindle.

Zygmunt Bauman. 2011. Culture in a Liquid Modern World. Cambridge: Polity.

Jhumpa Lahiri. 2003. The Namesake.

Ruth Mandel. 2008. Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany. Duke University Press.

Tricia Danielle Keaton. 2006. Muslim Girls and the Other France. Race, Identity Politics, and Social Exclusion. Indiana University Press.

Dinaw Mengestu. 2007. The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears.

Peggy Levitt. 2001. The Transnational Villagers. University of California Press.

Joseph O’Neill. 2009. Netherland.

In this course, we will take a look at the politics of South Asia through the lens of literature and film. The focus of our discussions will be the transformative historical and political moments that have shaped the Indian subcontinent since 1947, the year of Indian and Pakistani independence from British rule. We will begin by reading fictional accounts of the Indian Partition in order to understand the violent legacy of this great divide and the ways in which it continues to haunt the body politic of India and Pakistan seventy years after Independence. We will also explore fictional accounts of the Bangladesh War (1971) and the long-drawn-out civil war in Sri Lanka (1983-2009) in order to understand the profound and devastating effects of these wars on civil(ian) society in South Asia. The impact of influential political figures such as Zia-ul-Haq on South Asian fiction will also be considered. In addition, we will examine the fissures inherent in the production of a modern postcolonial South Asian nation state by watching contemporary films which tackle such urgent and critical issues as minority belonging, ethnic and gendered violence, and the rise of religious fundamentalism in the region.

In this course, we will take a look at the politics of Africa through the lens of fiction and film. Our discussions will focus on the transformative historical and political moments that have shaped the African continent over the course of the last two centuries. We will begin by reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a fictional narrative written in the heydays of European colonialism, as a means to understand the profound and inescapable effects of colonization. We will also explore fictional accounts of Apartheid in South Africa, the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, and the Biafran War in Nigeria, among others, in order to understand the close and inextricable links between literature and politics in Africa. The enormous impact of iconic political figures such as Nelson Mandela and Seretse Khama on fiction and film will also be considered.

In Depth: Long-form Nonfiction as a Means of Encounter

Paul Elie

[Thursdays], 3:30 – 5:30 p.m.

Journalism is often seen as deadline work: immediate, devoted to the emerging story, a first draft of history at best. But for many of us, long-form nonfiction writing is one of the most reliable and pleasurable ways for us to encounter the lives of others in depth; and long-form journalism is the basis for memoir, current affairs, biography, and other forms of fact-based storytelling. In this course, we’ll read two dozen outstanding works of long-form nonfiction – articles, essays, books – with attention to the ways they enable writers and readers to access the experience of others in depth. We’ll work through subject areas that demand depth and complexity (the self; social change; strife and conflict; the earth and climate; religion and the spirit); and we’ll master strategies that allow writers to “go deep” in a relatively short span of time and space. Students will write short nonfiction pieces and then write and revise a long-form article or essay.

Paul Elie is a senior fellow in the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and a regular contributor to The New Yorker; his long-form journalism has appeared there and in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times Magazine, and his two books, The Life You Save May Be Your Own (2003) and Reinventing Bach (2012), were National Book Critics Circle Award finalists.

This course will outline the history of the cinema in 20th century India to show how intimately it is linked to the transformation of the country from a British colony to a modern democracy. On the face of it, the need for such a close examination of the cinema appears self-evident from the increasing numbers of film stars from across India contesting elections. Further, since 1977 two south Indian states have been ruled intermittently by film stars.

The course offers insights into deep connection between cinema, a modern capitalist entertainment form driven by the need to maximise revenues, and the emergence of novel possibilities of imaging the nation as a unity of diverse if unequal peoples. In India, the political significance of cinema was brought into sharp focus by widespread illiteracy that limited the role of print in political communication. Early filmmakers of colonial India were acutely aware of the cinema hall’s potential to constitute and address a “national” public. The possibilities and tensions resulting from what could potentially be an explosive mixture of unequal, and at times antagonistic, social groups among the cinema’s public has shaped the evolution of storytelling techniques as also the content of Indian films. Students will learn about this history of cinema as a political form and how analyses of democracy in India may be enriched by a detour into the neighbourhood cinema hall.

Race, ethnicity and migration are complex terminologies. They often emerge interdependently. Dealing with these terms requires observing issues of privilege and oppression and looking in particular at their intersections with different aspects such as class, gender, religion, regional and national as well as international politics and policies of their praxis. Even though some overall concepts explain these terms, there are different understandings and significances of race and ethnicity as well as praxis of racism in different countries. The main focus of the seminar will be on European immigration countries, although we will also be comparatively in touch with the US- Context throughout the seminar. The seminar will question how race and ethnicity are socially constructed and maintained also by (a) migration policies, (b) interpersonal relationships and (c) social structures. In terms of doing this, we will first examine race, ethnicity and their intersectional components. Next, we will consider migration and its subjects, as well as its regulation and control in Europe. Then we will look into different European immigration countries, their policies. As an interdisciplinary seminar this seminar enables students to gain knowledge of main concepts and critical approaches to issues of race, ethnicity and migration in European contexts. You will develop skills of oral communication through Group works and discussions. This seminar encourages you to develop academic and practical as well as methodological knowledge while drawing connections and analyzing intersections between race, ethnicity and migration in different European countries and in your daily life in the US. Identifying the processes through which disparity is created, maintained and justified in racial/ethnic terms is an important part of our class objective.

Global exhibitions, born as a vehicle for national propaganda, today command press attention and impact cultural-economic policies worldwide, mobilizing not only artists, curators, and gallerists, but sponsors, celebrities, and politicians alike. This course examines the rising role of international art biennales, art fairs, and global museums in the world of cultural diplomacy and global exchange. We will trace a critical genealogy that begins with the rise of World’s Fairs, industrial modernity and colonial spectacle, and various national museum projects, to dissident art in the age of social networks, contemporary “glocal” exhibition practices, and the transnational urban enterprises and geographies of art/museums/biennales today, connecting DC and Doha, Paris and Shanghai, among others.

We will critically explore the ways museums—through their policies, programs, exhibitions, and architecture—define regional or national values, shape cultural attitudes, inform social and political views, and even effect one’s understanding of the meaning of a work of art. Museums and World’s Fairs have served as pivotal knowledge-generating apparatuses, deeply implicated in national rivalries, class struggle, cultural authority, conquest and commercial dominance. This course builds on their historic and global significance to explore the shifting role of exhibitions today, in the context of transnational and “glocal” culture, practices, and citizenship. Exhibitions continue to serve as potent instruments of cross-cultural exchange and formative sites of regional, national, and global identities, as well as of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism.

We will investigate some of the most famous examples of the twentieth and twenty-first century recurrent state-sponsored exhibitions, contextualized by critical literature on the relationship among culture and politics. Case studies may include: the Venice Biennale, Johannesburg Biennial, Havana Bienal, Kassel Documenta, various Asian biennals, and the soaring number of contemporary art fairs. These sites will prompt reflection on diplomacy and the geopolitics of art exhibitions, architectural and urban development, and the deeply intertwined relationship among cultural institutions and knowledge, power, and place. We will additionally analyze the impacts of social networking, virtual exhibition spaces, and contemporary museum development and display technologies. Particular emphasis will be placed on culture as practice, integrating theoretical discussion with applied examples and case studies.

Course work involves: a commitment to debate and plurality in the classroom; the production of a series of critical readings and critical reflections; the collating of keywords that serve as building blocks for the study of the politics of exhibitions, globalization, and power/knowledge relations; and regular participation in a series of in-class exploratory gallery visits and prompts about your own positions. The course will culminate in the production of a final synthesis paper or critical virtual exhibition that puts course materials to work and demonstrates your intellectual development. The course draws on the unique resources and expertise of The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, and will be co-taught by a Georgetown Culture and Politics Program core faculty member and seasoned Phillips museum professionals. Students will also have the opportunity to participate in special co-sponsored events linked to the cultural policy arena of Washington, DC and beyond, including the SFS-Qatar campus and Doha museum development.

Maps are efficient modes of communication with a strong hold on people’s imaginations. They are usually quotidian functional artifacts that help individuals find their way and comprehend the world. As graphic representations, maps are short-hand for complex processes, conditions, and concepts. They tell convincing stories by appearing objective through the conscious efforts of mapmakers or, on a more basic level, through what’s shown or left out of the map. With the use of geolocation in everything from hand-held devices to wind farm turbines, mapping is ubiquitous, authoritative, and taken-for-granted. The ways we map, however, are inextricable from violent forms of power: Mapping conventions reflect legacies of imperial exploration, resource extraction, colonization, and state control. These strategic activities have required the collection of more precise data and objective scientific procedures, resulting in what seems to be value-neutral “mirrorings” of space rather than interest-laden renderings of the surface of the planet.

This course considers the role of maps and power dynamics of contemporary mapping in political struggles—specifically, how maps are political and how mapping can be a political act. First, we will examine the genealogy of map power, defined as a way of representing space as an abstraction from concrete reality in order to facilitate its domination and control. Second, while maps reinforce dynamics of coercion and manipulation due to map power, maps can be—and are—used as tools to support social movements for liberation and social justice. Thus we will explore two broad efforts that involve critical and creative cartographic practices: map critique as a social justice project, and mapping as a method of resistance. Map critique involves social theory applications that reveal the formal construction of maps and their use as tools of power. Students will gain familiarity with counter-mapping projects that challenge official maps and lay claim to resources/land or render alternative worlds, such as the Gall-Peters projection controversy and indigenous atlases/Aboriginal Mapping Network. Mapping techniques and technologies are also utilized as applied methodologies to resist the status quo. Students will have an opportunity to engage with at least three ways that mapping is used as a method to enhance social justice work: Mapping as a form of protest and argument, from do-it-yourself cartography to geopolitical critique maps; mapping as immersive social commentary, exemplified by alternative history trails and collective walks that feature marginalized experiences and local knowledges; and mapping for community education and grassroots local organizing, wherein mapping functions as a form of information sharing and process-based participatory learning. Throughout the semester we will discuss a number of social and policy issues related to map literacy as an educational tool for envisioning and advocating social change.

This course asks how processes of racialization and systemic racism structure humanitarian and development work. We link the current non-for-profit industrial complex to the legacy of colonialism and reveal the values, ideologies, and systems that determine how funds are distributed, how organizations are managed, and how specific populations are identified for interventions.

This course provides a critical appraisal of international human rights laws relating to women. It considers the role of the law in the construction, reinforcement and breakdown of gendered inequalities, as well as gendered assumptions that inform the processes of law, legal method and law making. In this course, students shall consider gender justice and inequality in the regional (MENA) and international contexts in light of international legal frameworks. Most notably, assessment of substantive content and state responses to the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) shall form a foundational element to the course, with due regard to theories of cultural relativism. The equalities framework in UK law shall also be used as a comparative tool, to explore legal responses to calls for gender equality. Finally, as part of the syllabus, students shall be introduced to a range of feminist theories with a specific focus on feminist legal theory.

This class is primarily based on the book Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture, written by Andrei S. Markovits and Lars Rensmann. In addition, we will read some articles from academic journals and magazines such as The Economist. We will become familiar with terms such as assimilation, citizenship, cosmopolitanism, globalization, glocalization, identity, nationalism, and localism. Markovits and Rensmann focus on one field of popular culture, sport, which has become a universal global language: people all over the world follow professional leagues such as the American NBA (basketball) and the English Premier League, EPL (soccer). Unlike the cosmopolitan composition of teams in those leagues, international sport is (apart from a few exceptions such as the Tour de France) organized along national lines: The FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games have become arenas for countries to compete with each other for soft power. At the same time, international sports serve governments as a tool to prove to the domestic audience the capabilities of the nation-state, even while witnessing external threats from economic globalization. Interestingly, despite the emergence of global sporting arenas, some unique local sporting cultures persist, such as the Australian Rules Football (AFL, the most popular sport in the Australian state of Victoria), Gaelic football in Ireland, and camel racing in Qatar. To situate the course within the context of contemporary issues, students are expected to give a class presentation reviewing the press coverage of any recent topic on the intersection of globalization and sports, for example on the postponement of major sporting events such as the 2020 Olympic Games due to the coronavirus outbreak.

The course will explore the history, politics, and aftermath of the violence that accompanied the expulsion of Arabs during the 1964 revolution in Zanzibar. The trip will focus on tackling the lack of information on the ethnic conflict in Zanzibar, and look at how genocide is constructed and labeled in the international community. While studying the concepts of ethnic cleansing, reintegration and repatriation, students will have the opportunity to conduct their own archival and ethnographic research in the field. This seminar will engage with the historical, travelogue, anthropological and political debates on the question of Zanzibari identities, diasporic communities in the Gulf, collective memory and transnational identically across the Archipelago as a site of circularity in the Indian Ocean Rim. Additionally, material addressing the broader questions of racial justice, legacies of slavery and colonization will be covered in depth.

Memory, broadly defined as the past made present, is one of the defining academic fields of our contemporary world. Over the past four decades, memory studies have attracted wide scholarly attention and have sparked heated debates that had various political and social repercussions. This course aims to introduce students to these debates by exploring how memory has been approached and represented in global cinema. As some scholars note, the film has become the chief medium for carrying the stories our societies tell themselves about their past, present, and future. In addition, films offer us stories that materialize and visualize various theoretical issues that have been for years dominating the field of memory studies, including the representability of genocide, coming to terms with the past, individual and social trauma, history and memory, mourning and melancholia, guilt and collective responsibility, return of the repressed, and multidirectional memory. These and other issues will be discussed through a selection of global films that have been widely recognized as influential in this field. Accompanying these films are relevant theoretical and critical articles that will further illuminate the films and open them up for discussion.

This seminar will be taught in English, and all films will be streamed on Canvas with English subtitles. The selected films belong to various epochs, cinematic traditions, and languages, from Akira Kurasawa’s 1950 Rashomon and Alan Renais’ 1959 Hiroshima mon amour to Roberto Benigni’s 1997 Life Is Beautiful and Michael Hanake’s 2005 Cache. Readings will include works by Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno, Dominick LaCapra, Tzvetan Todorov, Pierre Nora, and Andreas Huyssen.

This course introduces students to significant debates about gender and politics in the Arab Gulf. It uses gender as a lens and connecting hinge through which the historical and political development of states, societies and people in the Gulf region can be re-examined. The course is divided into four parts. The first part will seek to highlight a number of important debates about gender (gender as biological/sociological construct, gendered selves and the politics of difference, coloniality of gender, gender and power relations, gendered in/securities). The second part of the course looks at the pre-modern Gulf states’ histories from the 1800’s to their emergence as independent states in the late 1960s – 1970s. The third section looks at state-building processes in the Gulf’s contemporary period (1970s- present). In the fourth and final section, students will engage with feminist epistemologies (standpoint theory) as they examine primary sources (archives, military expenditures, arms transfers) in order to question what we understand as power, and power in society. I encourage students through their research to abandon the notion of ‘objectivity’, and to instead explore how our ‘politics’ and understanding of ‘history’ is intrinsically shaped by our positionality.

This course will sharpen our sense of the issues important for the analysis of postcolonial literary fiction: race and ethnicity, class distinctions, gender and sexuality, ideology, hegemony. We will read essays in postcolonial theory (Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and others) in conjunction with works of fiction (in English translation) by three Francophone authors: two French writers (Albert Camus and J.M.G. Le Clézio) and one African writer (Camara Laye). Produced from the 1950s to 1980, these short stories and novels represent French colonialism and its legacy in former French colonies in Africa (Algeria, Morocco and French Guinea). Students will demonstrate their engagement with, as well as their understanding and appreciation of, both the theoretical and the literary texts by writing essays, making classroom presentations and participating in classroom discussions.

This course provides a thorough examination of contemporary challenges related to cultural politics, focusing on the legal framework that governs cultural institutions, the artworlds and the media (including the press; broadcasting; internet and social media; entertainment media and the audio-visual). It combines different areas of legal knowledge (comparative constitutional law; international human rights law; intellectual property law) as well as cultural politics in order to address questions related to arts, cultural policies, and the promotion of cultural diversity.

Gulf Futurism’ explores the dynamics of social dislocation for young khaleeji generations amidst the rapid hyper-modernization of the region. It’s starting point is an aesthetic observation – strong visuals of local culture that are located and often juxtaposed against icons or genres strongly identified with Western culture or ‘modernity’. The term which was first used by artist and writer Sophia al-Maria, examines the social and political significance of personal technology and its clash with Gulf traditions and notions of ‘modernity’. The class would examine how rapid shifts in wealth, regional conflict, rapid modernization, and social dislocation can both expose and mask gender and power politics in the region.

In this course, we will examine the current and historical development film and visual culture in the Gulf. The course aims to offer a conceptual and critical framework to analyze the social, political, and cultural role of the moving image in the modern Gulf. To this end, in the first part of the course, we will focus on how the moving image has functioned as an important medium for both the British colonial administration and the oil companies to generate the post-oil image of the region. In the second section, we will trace the history of local filmmaking and its evolution in the aftermath of the independence of Gulf countries in the early 1970s. In the third portion, we will look at the contemporary scene of film and visual culture that has emerged in the context of the rise of the Gulf as a regional and global hub.

Identity & Globalization in Contemporary Arabic Writing (Course taught in English). "This course has the following objectives: 1. To define and interpret the concept of globalization in general and to examine how it has been interpreted in the Arab world. 2. To clarify the link between globalization and identity by studying the impact of globalization on Arab societies. While globalization is welcomed in some parts of the Arab world, it is often perceived as detrimental to Arab identity and culture. 3. To analyze the implication of this concept on Arabic thought through socio-political and philosophical articles as well as through novels. 4. To compare Arabic writing on globalization and identity to some seminal texts of western culture on the same topic."

This course will be a comparative approach to the minorities of Ottoman-Turkish and Habsburg-Austrian contexts, starting from late nineteenth century extending to late twentieth century. It aims to analyze how minorities are represented in canonical texts as well as how minorities write back to hegemonic powers. Similar developments in Ottoman-Turkish history and Habsburg-Austrian history make a comparative approach a potentially productive tool to explore further into the transition from late empires into nation-states in the twentieth century. Main focus will be Armenian, Jewish, Kurdish, and Greek representations in the Ottoman-Turkish case, and Jewish and Slav representations in the Habsburg-Austrian case. The course attempts to understand the place of minorities within nation state identities and programmes and how literature represents, and expresses this struggle. Questions asked in the course include - but are not limited to: what does it mean to have a minority voice in literature? How is such a literature different from majority texts? To what extent are the minorities in this course publically recognized, and how far are they crypto identities? How does gender and class further inflect the status of the minority writer?

This course will look at a constellation of issues surrounding writing and representation in the Islamic world from the 7th to the 20th centuries. The Islamic arts of the book (calligraphy, miniature painting, etc.) will be a particular focus, with several classes to be held at the Freer and Sackler Galleries of Art. In addition, social-historical issues like literacy, patronage, and proscription of images will be examined in case studies.

The course aims to address the issues which underpin the construction and the reconstruction of identity in the modern Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. This will include the issues of political identities in its various forms such as national, transnational, religious, ethnical, cultural, and modern personal identity. How do the emergence of identities challenge or answer the domestic cultural context of modern MENA states? What role is played by the representation or recreation of identity politics in shaping regional foreign policies? This course aims to explore these questions in the context of the modern MENA region, where it has been broadly observed to be shaped and re-shaped through the rise of different ideological identities. In considering key questions and debates about the cultural evolution of the modern MENA countries, the interaction of cultural, national, and religious memberships within and across the politics of these polities will be studied. This course will examine the fundamental issues which established the various political identities in a modern MENA society while simultaneously introducing students to core concepts and ideas which will form part of the foundations for the study of the region’s politics.

How are gender dynamics woven into, contested, or reinforced within the music-making and consumption practices of societies and/or communities around the globe? This inquiry has been a subject of analysis in music and performance studies since the 1980s, marked by the infiltration of gender and queer theory into these fields. Scholars have delved into examining gender power dynamics in the consumption and production of music across cultures, musical genres, and aesthetic frameworks. Their exploration has intersected with studies of gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, age, religion, and disability. Focusing on recent scholarship that tackles the ongoing social transformations of how gender is performed and experienced, globally, we will ask: In what ways has this transformation influenced the emergence of novel global musical genres and scenes? What role do artists and creators play in contributing to these transformative changes? With these questions in mind, this course will explore the historical and contemporary approaches to studying gender and music, focusing on literature in ethnomusicology and popular music studies. It will engage artists, musical traditions, genres, institutions, and audiences that inform local and global gender politics with a special emphasis on women's roles. Course also listed as MUSC 3289 and JCIV 3289.

This course provides a detailed description and analysis of Standard Arabic and selected colloquial varieties. It focuses on three components: (i) Arabic speech sounds and sound system; (ii) Arabic words, their structure and meaning; and (iii) Arabic phrases, their structure and meaning. Throughout the course, students will develop skills and engage in exercises that help them identify linguistic structure and behavior, make linguistic generalizations, and explain these generalizations by using evidence-based reasoning.

This course examines truth, lying, and deception as parts of the natural world and human culture. It explores the nature of these phenomena in relation to our role in the world and our responsibility toward it and toward each other from a number of ethical perspectives. It briefly shows how Lying and deception are manifest in the behavior of plants and animals in order to highlight the ubiquity of the phenomenon in the natural world and how humans contrast with animals. It then looks in more detail at human deceptive behavior in children and adults, including self-deception and the deception of others. It examines the behavior of professional liars and the methods that have been developed for detecting deception. It also explores lying and deception in the public sphere in political speech, journalism, visual images, etc. In all this, the course relies on a high level of faculty-student engagement.

How do images and technologies of image reproduction affect how we think about bodies, sexuality, and gender? In this course, we will study the ways in which desire, power, politics, and playfulness are entangled with visual media and the representation of the body in Indian public culture. You will read about the gaze, the body, and media technologies with a regional focus on India. You will watch Indian popular and documentary films and explore how Indians express themselves through photography and poster art. The course pushes you to ask, is seeing culturally informed? And if so, how can we recognize, identify and appreciate what makes it so? Thinking through the materials in this course, you will learn how to ask, how do images affect you?

Caste and race are two of the most persistent, oppressive, and powerful forms of global hierarchy. They have long, sordid, complex histories that have commingled by way of colonialism and diasporic travels. At times, scholars have linked the two -- even collapsed the two -- and at others they have insisted on their inherent distinctiveness. What, exactly, are "race" and "caste" and how are they related, if at all? By way of this question, students will grapple with institutionalized power, inequality, difference, and hierarchy that, in turn, structure everyday life in many contexts all over the world.

Music, Politics & Diplomacy

The creative industries—comprising a range of sectors such as print, audiovisual, and digital media, cinema and film production, visual arts, performing arts, music, cultural heritage and crafts, advertising, architecture, design and fashion, gaming and other software/app development for leisure, arts organizations and festivals—represent a growing and important area in contemporary global culture and economy. The creative industries have been main drivers of the global shift toward innovation, design, cultural organizations, and “intangible” assets for cultural capital creation and social transformation. They have also been key players in generating effective cultural diplomacy as a means of soft power-based foreign policy and activities. In this course, we will focus particularly on the specific circumstances in establishing, managing, organizing, and sustaining creative industries in the context of Qatar. As such, the course will examine together current scholarly debates and theoretical perspectives on global creative industries and Qatar’s aspirations toward becoming a hub for the global creative community through a range of institutions, including Qatar Museums, M7 Fashion, Design & Technology, the Msheireb Art Centre, the Liwan Design Studios and Labs, Al Najadah, Doha Film Institute, Tasweer, Katara Cultural Village Foundation, and INJAZ Qatar, among others. Students enrolled in this course must be available to attend the seminars and field trips in downtown Doha

In this innovative seminar, students will embark on a journey of discovery, tackling pressing social issues through a unique blend of individual exploration and collaborative teamwork. Each participant will select a social issue that ignites their passion and curiosity. The heart of this course lies in its innovative approach to research: 1. Digital Deep Dive: Students will conduct an intensive internet search, harnessing the power of search engines to uncover the pulse of public interest. They'll analyze the "People Also Ask" sections, related queries, and Google's recommended materials, spanning both text and visual content. 2. Decoding Anonymous Inquiries: By examining these online questions - both those similar to and divergent from their own - students will gain insight into the collective consciousness surrounding their chosen issue. 3. Academic Synthesis: Participants will then bridge the gap between public curiosity and scholarly knowledge by delving into academic literature on their topic. This process will illuminate the fascinating interplay between anonymous online queries and rigorous research. 4. Diverse Perspectives: Throughout the seminar, we'll emphasize the importance of recognizing the varied backgrounds and motivations behind online questions. Students will learn to appreciate the nuanced tapestry of public inquiry, avoiding oversimplification or generalization. This multifaceted approach will equip students with valuable skills in digital literacy, critical analysis, and the ability to synthesize information from diverse sources. By the end of the seminar, participants will have gained a deeper understanding of how social issues are perceived, discussed, and explored in both public and academic spheres.

This advanced seminar explores cultural diplomacy as a multidimensional force shaping global politics, culture, and international relations. Students will critically examine how countries, institutions, and individuals use cultural diplomacy to foster dialogue, promote national interests, and influence global narratives. Employing a comparative approach, the course investigates diverse strategies across regions, including Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as well as practices in Qatar, providing a comprehensive understanding of the dynamic interplay between culture and diplomacy.Incorporating diverse teaching methods—such as interactive simulations, case studies, guest lectures, and creative projects—the course encourages students to apply theory to practice. Students will be challenged to design a comprehensive cultural diplomacy strategy tailored to a specific country or region, integrating their understanding of cultural diplomacy theories, methodologies, and current global challenges.

In this course, we will study the rich tapestry of prose, poetry, memoirs, and more by a range of writer-diplomats to explore the intricate connections between diplomacy and literature. In the intersecting crafts of literature and diplomacy lies a fascinating figure: the author as a diplomat. This course will take us through the nuanced landscapes where words become bridges, navigating the diplomatic and literary wonders. To this end, we will examine how diplomatic career shapes the perspectives and narratives of prominent writers of world literature such as Octavio Paz (Mexico), Kofi Awoonor (Ghana), Chinghiz Aitmatov (Kyrgyzstan), Navtej Sarna (India), George Seferis (Greece), Pablo Neruda (Chile), among others. In turn, we will also gain a deep understanding of literature’s important role in shaping international relations.

The term “Global South” captures both a political collectivity and ideological formulation that arises from an entire history of colonialism and neo-imperialism which led to a range of differential inequalities of power along racial, ethnic, gender, class, and spatial lines. In this course, we will explore the historical and theoretical frameworks of emancipatory decolonial thinking from multiple standpoints and continuing examples of praxis across the globe. We will embark on close reading of key texts by prominent intellectuals of the Global South from intersecting histories and lived experiences of anticolonialism, decolonization, and post coloniality. What brings these thinkers together is a radical call for dismantling all forms of Eurocentric dominance in politics, philosophy, culture, history, arts, and education, while envisioning how “freedom” with respect to thinking, being, knowing, understanding and living might look like. In light of this intellectual framing, the course will engage with the following questions: What does it mean to ‘decolonize’ now and here? How is decoloniality constructed in and through praxis? What are some key insights and strategies of decolonial thinking? How do we decolonize knowledge as well as the methodologies and practices by which it is produced and disseminated?

Arguably, there have been more substantive changes in every aspect of cinema since 1990 that in the medium’s previous 95 years: the move from celluloid to digital media, the decline in theatrical viewing, an ever-increasing globalization, etc. Interfacing with social and political developments, these changes have resulted in new forms of cinematic storytelling, greater emphasis on some forms of film style (e.g. camera movement) with a subsequent de-emphasis on others (e.g. montage), and a new relationship between the cinematic image and physical reality. This course will trace a range of developments in cinema since 1990, offering a wide, international panorama of exemplary works by artists ranging from Michael Haneke and Wong Kar-wei, from Lucrecia Martel to Merawi Gerima.

Arriving barely six months after its public unveiling in Paris, the cinema spread quickly throughout Latin America, becoming part of a cultural landscape that was constantly and radically evolving. Being both part of yet separate from Euro-American culture, filmmaking in Latin America consistently kept up a healthy dialogue with trends in world cinema, interpreting approaches and styles—neorealism, melodrama, modernism, cinéma verité, postmodernism—in unique and often revealing ways. Featured filmmakers include Luis Buñuel, Glauber Rocha, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Raúl Ruiz and Lucrecia Martel.

Technological shifts, digital transformations, and advances in information technologies are reconfiguring many aspects of our lived reality. This course examines what characterizes this new era of digital capitalism and what the ongoing changes mean for our modern society. It explores the promises and challenges associated with fast-paced digital transformations and the kind of reconfigurations they engender at the level of the individual, the state, and the market. For example, how did we become dependent on a small number of powerful social media platforms? How did big tech companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Uber wield considerable power? What regulatory challenges come with these socio-economic and technological shifts? What happens when global streaming services like Netflix defy the territorial control of nation states? How did popular social media platforms like TikTok become at the center of geopolitical tensions between global economic players? Does the advent of the digital reshape power or does it merely perpetuate global dependencies? And what are the geopolitical implications of technological supremacy and data colonialism? The course offers students the opportunity to engage with and reflect on key debates surrounding digital transformations through a combination of readings, YouTube resources, class activities, and interactive discussion.

Cultural Narratives of Struggle and Empowerment: This course explores cultural narratives and individual stories rooted in themes of struggle, empowerment, and self-discovery. Through a close examination of a rich array of literary and non-literary works (including short stories from around the world, documentaries and film productions), we will gain a deeper understanding of how individuals across various cultures grapple with issues of power, how they redress injustices, how they reclaim identity against societal constraints, and how they maintain a sense of self amid chaos. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which writers representing various traditions, including in contemporary world literature, critique societal power structures, confront socio-economic injustices, and navigate political turmoil. Among the topics that will be discussed is how unprivileged communities and marginalized individuals across class, gender, racial, and ethnic divides strive to subvert a system that ensnares them and to advocate for change. Of relevance is also how cultural experiences and individual journeys reflect, depict, and contest both the dominant societal mindset and the socio-cultural and political ethos of the time.

This course examines the development of contemporary cinema in the Gulf, situating recent films and filmmaking practices within broader historical, political, and cultural contexts. Students will explore how contemporary Gulf cinema engages with questions of identity, globalization, urbanization, and migration, and how filmmakers navigate the opportunities and constraints of transnational production, circulation, and reception. The course examines feature films, documentaries, and experimental works, with close attention to aesthetics, narrative strategies, and production infrastructures. By situating Gulf cinema within world cinema and global media ecologies, the course provides a critical framework for understanding film as both a cultural practice and a site of social and political negotiation in the contemporary Gulf.

TBD

This course approaches the world-shaping forces of capitalism by tracking the concept of imperialism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This brings several continents into focus, and concentrates our attention on dynamics of labor, race, unequal exchange, development and underdevelopment, crises of accumulation, and finance capital. Our reading equally highlights past and present sequences of anti-imperialist struggle in both the Global South and Global North, including examples of resistance, rebellion, armed struggle, and militant organizing.

Pearling Worlds: A Comparative Ethnography From the pages of memoirs to travelogues, from scholarly archeological, archival, maritime history to mythology, the story of pearls and pearling that span over 7,000 years served as a tie that bound diverse communities along the bustling shores and trading routes. Pearling bears witness to human ingenuity working in harmony and ironically in tension with nature’s bounty. It tells a story of the rise and fall of cities and ports as well as it unveils the tripartite celebrations of pearls in museum exhibitions, trading narratives and in high-end retail spaces bridging the gap between past and present. Whether displayed in a museum or told in an oral narrative, each pearl carries with it the weight of history illuminating the alchemy of transforming raw substances into objects of fascination and from aesthetic appreciation to ethical considerations about its fetishisms. This seminar will examine pearling in diverse locations in the Gulf Region, China, Japan Western Australia and Tahiti to compare and contrast different hierarchies, gendered practices and art forms as well as emerging forms of consumption of ethically resourced gems. The seminar will be theoretically situated in what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “the social life of things,” an approach that brings together conceptual tools to understand the multifaceted dynamics of pearling across environments and cultures. The seminar will cover readings on archeology, history, cultural studies and memoirs of traders and observers who chronicled the subtilities enmeshed in these lustrous gems.

This seminar critically examines the role of heritage in shaping power structures, identity, and global politics. It explores how heritage is used as a tool for political legitimacy, cultural diplomacy, and national identity formation, as well as how it intersects with issues of colonialism, contested histories, and repatriation. By analyzing diverse case studies, from UNESCO World Heritage sites to museum collections and intangible heritage, students will investigate how heritage is claimed, preserved, and mobilized in political and social contexts. Utilizing interdisciplinary methodologies, including historical analysis, policy evaluation, and public engagement strategies, the course encourages students to critically engage with heritage debates and develop their own heritage-related research projects.

In an influential 2013 manifesto, Eric Zimmerman named the 21st century as the “ludic,” or playful, century. Many scholars and designers have since argued that games and play must become a primary analytic lens through which we understand and engage with contemporary culture. But though they may seem like complementary activities, games and play pull us in different directions. Proponents of gamification use game design to engage with complex systems that structure everyday life, seeking to “optimize” human behavior. On the other hand, theorists and philosophers of play have long argued that attitudes of playfulness preserve a resistant and utopian spirit of anti-utilitarianism within human activity: to play is to do something in the sheer pursuit of fun and enjoyment, a means to its own end and an antidote to the exploitative and alienated culture of contemporary work. It is precisely because games and play span this wide spectrum—from usefulness to uselessness, from work to fun, from design to art—that they hold a unique place at the nexus of cultural and political life. This course will give students a broad overview of critical approaches to games and play and provide them with a range of methodological tools for both studying and creating play activities. Readings will span from classic work on the theory of play—including Johan Huzinga, Bernard Suits, Brian Sutton-Smith, Gregory Bateson, Walter Benjamin, and Susan Stewart—more recent works of play and theory and game criticism from scholars such as Ian Bogost, Miguel Sicart, and Mary Flannagan. It will cover topics such as gamification and its discontents, narrative theory of games, critical play theory, material culture of games and toys, theories of rule design, and the rhetorical analysis of play. The course will of course also involve enacting and analyzing students’ own play experiences through games, playgrounds, toys, and other forms of playfulness. Students who enroll in this course must be willing to have fun—and to take play seriously.

This course, Trauma and Cinema, explores the intricate relationship between film and the representation of psychological and collective trauma. Drawing from psychoanalytic theory, memory studies, and visual culture, the course examines how cinema mediates, distorts, or makes visible experiences that often resist narration. Through close analysis of films from diverse geopolitical contexts—including post-war Europe, Latin America, and post-colonial societies—the course interrogates how trauma is encoded in cinematic form: through fragmentation, silence, repetition, and temporal disruption. Students will engage with key theoretical texts (Caruth, Felman, Kaplan, LaCapra) alongside films by directors such as Alain Resnais, Atom Egoyan, Lucrecia Martel, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The course ultimately asks how cinema can function not only as a site of witnessing but also as a medium that shapes the ethics and politics of remembering.

The seminar introduces a wide range of artistic and curatorial practices that build on radical critiques of neocolonial patterns in the arts. On the one hand, we will explore the historical and theoretical backdrop that informs these practices. But just as importantly, the seminar will emphasize efforts that move beyond critique alone, and point to examples of new propositions, structures and working criteria, however incomplete or speculative. On various levels, the course will be closely tied to the concurrent exhibition We Refused, curated by Vasif Kortun & Nadia Radwan, opening 31 October 2025. The theoretical component of the seminar will address the establishment of decolonization as a key working term with considerable traction across the Global South as well as the West, particularly within the field of contemporary art. Which definitions and working premises currently hold sway among artists today? And how can contemporary art contribute to the debate around decolonization; which are its specific strengths and limitations in light of the historical questions that are raised by said debate? Readings will include critical theorizations of the dominant working paradigms of contemporary art, the role of art in recent settings of extractive economies and neocolonial settings, and literature pertaining to ongoing artistic and curatorial experiments in decolonization – some of which will feature in the Mathaf Doha exhibition We Refused. In order to activate and maximize collective discussion, sessions will include group excursions, collective readings, breakout groups and guest speakers. Students will also be required to lead the seminar discussions at least once over the course of the semester, also by means of short presentations of ca. 15 minutes. These presentations and discussion are meant to be informal, but must address the core concerns of the readings, along with three to four questions for the group to address.

What does it mean to tell a story visually and how can images capture the complexity of a culture in ways words cannot? What makes a visual narrative compelling, and how can form shape meaning? This course invites students to explore the power of visual storytelling through photography, video, and multimedia composition. Designed as a workshop format, Visual Storytelling and Culture emphasizes hands-on experimentation, creative process, and peer exchange. Students will be guided through the development of original visual narratives that reflect their personal voice and critical engagement with culture. The course blends theory and practice to build foundational skills in storytelling across visual media. Students will examine how images convey mood, space, and emotion. Special emphasis will be placed on representing place and heritage, drawing on Qatar’s rich traditional and contemporary cultural landscape. Local partnerships with institutions such as the Qatar National Library Archives, Doha Film Institute, Qatar Museums, and Tasweer Photography will support student exploration and field research. Throughout the semester, students will produce a series of visual exercises and narrative projects, culminating in a final piece to be publicly showcased. Along the way, they will develop their ability to tell both linear and nonlinear stories, engage with collaborative storytelling practices, and reflect critically on the relationship between text and image.

The course will examine a selection of fiction and cinema belonging to the genre of contemporary horror. Theorists such as Noelle Carroll, Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Zizek will be employed to approach topics of sexuality, gender, class, race and capital in a wide range of (global) horror texts and films. Exactly what constitutes modern horror? How endebted to US genre is it? To what extent are other cultures influenced by US cultural hegemony – and to what degree do other cultures (German, Japan, South Korea) influence contemporary US horror? Sample titles are featured below – in conjunction, the Cambridge Companion to Horror will also be utilized as a course text.

The creative economies—encompassing sectors such as design, fashion, film, media, architecture, visual and performing arts, cultural heritage, gaming, and digital innovation—have emerged as a defining force in global cultural and economic transformation. They have been main drivers of the global shift toward innovation, design, cultural capital creation and social transformation. The creative economies have also been key players in generating effective cultural diplomacy as a means of soft power-based foreign policy and activities. In this course, we will focus particularly on the specific circumstances involved in establishing, managing, organizing, and sustaining creative economies in Qatar, whose national strategy places creativity, innovation, and cultural production at the heart of its transition toward a diversified and knowledge-based society. Students will explore how the creative economies shape and are shaped by local institutions, markets, and policies, analyzing Qatar’s expanding cultural infrastructure. Through seminars, field visits, and discussions with practitioners, the course investigates the dynamics of cultural entrepreneurship, creative labor, intellectual property, and sustainability in a rapidly globalizing creative landscape. Special attention will be given to how Qatar engages global creative networks to build cross-cultural partnerships and foster inclusive, future-oriented creative ecosystems. Students enrolled in the course must be available for scheduled seminars and field trips in downtown Doha.

How do we make meaning from the world around us? This course will introduce students to interpretive approaches used across the human and social sciences. We will explore how scholars, writers, and artists construct, contest, and transform meaning through texts, archives, images, and media. Students will learn how to “read” cultural, political, and historical materials—ranging from case studies and ethnographies to textual, archival, and visual sources—while developing a critical understanding of what interpretation itself entails. Students will practice identifying and applying key interpretive methods, connectevidence to argument, situate materials within their social and historical settings, and reflect on how interpretation both shapes and is shaped by the researcher’s own perspective. By the end of the semester, students will be able to craft persuasive, evidence-based interpretations and communicate their insights effectively in written, oral, and visual forms. This course is especially recommended for students in Culture & Politics (CULP), International History (IHST), and International Politics (IPOL), as well as for those pursuing certificates or minors. It aims to provide a strong foundation for theses, capstones, and research projects that involve analyzing cultural, political, and historical materials. No prior methods coursework is required.

This course investigates how art and cultural heritage participate in the historical construction, political negotiation, and public expression of identity across diverse contexts. Moving beyond formal art history, we will examine how museums, monuments, exhibitions, archives, public art, architecture, and cultural policy shape narratives of belonging, memory, and identity. We will also consider how governments, cultural institutions, and international organizations mobilize artistic and heritage practices to advance claims about citizenship, sovereignty, and inclusion. Grounded in Qatar’s rapidly evolving cultural landscape, the course engages Qatar Museums and related institutions as a living laboratory to explore how identity is curated, institutionalized, and circulated. Through theoretical inquiry and site-based analysis, students will examine how art and heritage function as arenas of power, negotiation, and representation at local, regional, and global levels. Students must be prepared to participate in structured field visits to Qatar Museums and affiliated cultural sites.

The course explores the relationship between language and society in the Arab World. Introduces and examines the diglossic relation between Standard Arabic and the different colloquial varieties. Explores language variation and change, with special focus on the relation between linguistic variation and other social variables, such as ethnicity, religion, urbanization, social class, gender, power, and ideology. Introduces the social phenomenon of codeswitching between Arabic and other languages, mainly English and French, as well as diglossic codeswitching. Analyzes the structural characteristics of codeswitching and the socio cognitive motivations behind it. Introduces and discusses language policy and planning in the Arab World.

This new course opens up new vistas into Arab anglophone women’s writing. The class will focus on the four following themes: 1.The reason behind choosing English rather than Arabic to convey their ideas. 2. How the Arab world views these female writers. Do they admire them for having an international audience, or do they think they are undermining the Arab cause by abandoning their mother tongue? 3. To compare these women’s creative writing to that of Arab women who write in Arabic. 4. To explore the reaction of the English-speaking world to this type of writing.

The Israeli war on Gaza that began in 2023 marks a devastating new chapter in the ongoing Palestinian Nakba. With a scale of violence and destruction unprecedented in previous assaults on Palestinians, the war has become one of the most defining events of our time. It has ignited fierce intellectual and political debates over how to describe it, with “genocide” increasingly invoked as the most fitting paradigm. The war also raises urgent questions about its implications for academic fields such as International Law, Genocide Studies, and Postcolonial theory, as well as for thinking about anticolonial struggle and the limits of armed resistance in contexts of extreme power asymmetry. For Gazans themselves, the war has been catastrophic: entire communities shattered, thousand of lives lost, children maimed, infrastructure annihilated, and cultural heritage sites erased. Yet it has also been extensively documented from within Gaza. Writers, poets, artists, and journalists have produced searing testimonies about the war, turning Gaza into one of the most intensively self-narrated spaces of catastrophes in modern history. This course pursues two objectives. First, it will introduce students to literary and artistic responses to the war, produced by Gazans and non-Gazans alike. Through these works we will ask: What role can art and literature play in times of catastrophe? Can words adequately convey the Gaza Nakba? What are the ethical limits of representation, and who has the right to make Gaza a subject of imaginative production? Second, the course will engage key intellectual and political debates about of the war: How has it been framed? What are its potential impacts on disciplines that grapple with human suffering and mass atrocity? And how do we understand Western powers’ complicity in the destruction of Gaza? Readings will combine primary and secondary sources. Primary sources will include translated works of Palestinian writers, comics, and films. Secondary sources will include scholarly books, chapters, and essays published since 2023.

This course will explore the rich heritage and widespread influence of the Arabian Nights in the Global South. While traditionally, people have focused on the Nights’ impact on Western literature, this course will emphasize the vital role this extraordinary collection has played in the literatures of Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the modern Arabic world.

This course will examine how the Global South engages with the Arabian Nights, not to focus on the language's complexities but to show how writers from the Global South created a counter-narrative that critiques colonialism and exploitation while revealing the cultural identity that the West diminished. These authors reimagined the Nights’ stories to incorporate their own folklore and highlight their cultural backgrounds.

Authors from the Global South reimagined stories to forge a new form of magical realism, especially in Latin America, through the innovative works of Jorge Luis Borges, Paulo Coelho, Gabriel García Márquez, and Isabel Allende, among others. In India, writers like Salman Rushdie and Gihta Hariharan reinterpreted the "Nights" within Indian tradition and style. Finally, the Arab world, with Naguib Mahfouz and Elias Khoury, produced even more imaginative novels that blend harsh reality with the most fantastical realms.

Peer Mentorship will prepare students for active roles in mentorship in the CULP community. This course is designed to provide a space and soft structure for mentors to envision, collaborate, and co-create opportunities and events for CULP. These events and initiatives should encourage CULP students to interact with each other and seek each other for guidance, extending the innovative pedagogy and creativity of CULP beyond the classroom to foster a community of difference, share ideas, and provide support. In the first part of the course, we will work on team building, group facilitation, problem-solving, decision-making, and communication skills, with a focus on increasing inclusivity and a sense of community. We will also explore case studies of community organizing and examine the institutional structure that we are working within. Mentors will collectively set goals for the peer mentor network with these case studies and conversations in mind. Afterward, they will organize themselves into sub-groups, discuss ways to engage mentees, explore different events and programs they can create, visit a gateway class to hear from the latest CULP cohort, and develop and carry out a semester plan that outlines prospective events. The second part of the course will be more action-oriented. Peer mentors will regularly update peer mentor network platforms of communication, plan, propose, run events and programming, and offer constructive feedback to each other on ways to increase engagement. Peer mentors will wrap up with a group semester-in-review session, where they will revisit their goals and look toward the next semester.

ENROLLMENT IN THIS COURSE IS BY INSTRUCTOR APPROVAL ONLY, VIA AN APPLICATION WHICH CAN BE FOUND HERE: https://myguabroad.georgetown.edu/index.cfm?FuseAction=Programs.ViewProgram&Program_ID=10318

Societies throughout the globe use performance, culture, and the arts to remember, represent, and understand complex and often traumatic pasts, and to re-imagine the future. The arts in general, and performance, in particular, play a crucial role in remembering and recovering from conflict and/or genocide, and in rebuilding a future. This course will study this important intersection of politics and performance in diverse examples from the past and the present, from Cambodia to post World War II Europe, to Australia, West Africa, South Africa, and the United States. The recent destruction of monuments and artifacts by ISIS and other extremists has focused attention on the importance attached to controlling history and narratives, but the positive role that the restoration of living culture plays in recovery from conflict has not received sufficient attention, and offers a rich field for study.

Using examples ranging from the Civil War and the legacy of slavery and racism here in the United States to the to the Holocaust in World War II Europe to the Cambodian genocide, to more recent events such as the end of apartheid in South Africa and the occupation of Timbuktu, the course will look at how cultural products such as performances, memorials, films, music, and literature narrate and shape the ways these complex and fraught histories are remembered and understood. The process of rebuilding, in which arts and culture plays a vital role, is still ongoing in places like South Africa, Cambodia, and Mali, and the class will be able to learn about these processes directly from the cultural actors leading them. The dual cases of indigenous populations in the United States and in Australia and the roles that diverse arts have played in their struggles to assert identity and envision their futures will provide a fascinating comparative case study. Using a variety of rich and resonant living examples, and in dialogue with leading artists from around the world through the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, we will look closely at how these cultural workers navigate the politics of representation, including the tensions between the spoken and the unspoken, between presence and absence, and between remembrance and erasure.

As a centerpiece of the course we will have an optional 1-credit travel portion over Spring break (CULP 291) to Cambodia as guests of Cambodian Living Arts (CLA) and its visionary Executive Director Phloeun Prim, a member of the Lab’s Think Tank. In addition, current Lab Fellow Chankethya Chey, Artistic Director of Amrita Performing Arts in Cambodia, whose celebrated work as a dancer and choreographer engages personal and political history, will interact closely with the students. Cambodian Living Arts has been at the forefront of the revival of Cambodia’s arts sector (90% of Cambodia’s artists were killed in the genocide), and its contribution to the revitalization of the country. Through CLA the students will meet artists shaping Cambodia’s future, as well as key survivors of the Holocaust such as CLA founder Arn Chorn Pond. To better understand how Cambodians remember and present their past, the class will visit key sites of memory of the holocaust such as the “Killing Fields” and “S-21” prison, as well as Youk Chang’s Documentation Center of Cambodia and Rithy Panh’s Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center. In addition students will travel to Battembang to visit the extraordinary circus and arts school Phare Ponleu Selpak and to Siem Reap to see Angkor Wat and the home base of Artisans Angkor. After their return from Cambodia, the students will have the opportunity to share their experiences intellectually and creatively as part of relevant public events presented by the Lab on World Theatre Day and/or Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Through the Lab’s rich network of relationships students will also engage with organizations such as the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw; the US Holocaust Memorial Museum; Ford’s Theatre; the National Museum of African-American History and Culture; James Ngcobo, Artistic Director of the legendary Market Theatre in Johannesburg, South Africa; Native American playwrights Mary Kathryn Nagle, Emily Johnson, and Larissa Fasthorse, Dr. Abdel Kader Haidara, who saved Timbuktu’s manuscripts from the extremists; Manny Ansar, founder of the Festival Au Desert in Timbuktu, and others.

This course builds on the highly successful experiences Professors Goldman and Schneider have had co-teaching courses such as Culture and Diplomacy: Performance, Art and Media, drawing students from varied cultural and disciplinary backgrounds, from both SFS and the arts, into rich, collaborative exchanges.

ENROLLMENT IN THIS COURSE IS BY INSTRUCTOR APPROVAL ONLY, VIA AN APPLICATION WHICH CAN BE FOUND HERE: https://myguabroad.georgetown.edu/index.cfm?FuseAction=Programs.ViewProgram&Program_ID=10318

CULP 291 is an optional opportunity to participate in international fieldwork in Cambodia during spring break. Enrollment in the SFS Centennial Lab CULP 290: Politics & Performance is mandatory and instructor approval is required. Instructor approval can be obtained through an application.

What is indigeneity? How can we better understand the suffering, survival and resilience behind indigenous peoples’ struggles to be heard? Native communities are processing various kinds of globalization and legacies of colonization with different degrees of self-determination, territorially-based sovereignty and resistance. They may have aspirations for ethnonational state-building, but they lack their own “nation-state” and their lands are often disputed, sometimes under siege. While they are frequently lumped together as the “fourth world,” their social, economic, political and cultural revitalization conditions vary widely in “glocal” contexts that reveal activism at various levels of local, regional, state and global interactions. We debate U.N. concepts of indigeneity, federal or state recognition variations, and the salience of self-identity for individuals and First Nations communities. Particular attention is paid to American Indian communities, with international comparisons.

The course is designed to enhance student understanding of multi-disciplinary, practical, ethical, and human rights synergies that come together under the rubric of indigenous studies. The course builds on and is interactive with our indigenous studies website: https://indigeneity.georgetown.edu. An important focus is on student direct experience with indigenous organizations, in partnerships for mutual benefit and learning. Hot issues where student participation may be welcome include ecology protest; health services; legal groundwork for sacred lands claims, Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act [NAGPRA] logistics, language revitalization, and prison justice.

This course explores the possibilities of “civic geographies” and provides a platform for the pursuit of semester-long individual or collaborative projects defined by students (diverse outputs/formats are welcome). The course meets weekly to discuss assigned materials/readings and to workshop project ideas and development. We will examine creative research methods and a range of projects and activities that link the theme to student interests and inquiries.

In this particular capstone, we will explore the future of collective life through the framework of “civic geographies” in relation to major challenges of our times, including pandemics, racism, the politics of public space, militarization, and so forth. We will explore various versions of civics and the connective and associational dimensions of civics, including: the sensibility of engaging with places, buildings, and wider infrastructures of collective life, the problems and promise of civility, making publics in a “post-truth” world, challenging conventions of knowledge production and the power relations of intervention, and public geographies and research methods designed for socially transformative public life. Each week we’ll focus on the politics of a public space/infrastructure at various scales, such as masks, monuments, protests, university campus, cemeteries, public transit, alleys, social media campaigns, public data, municipal budgets, the “internet of things,” lines & waiting rooms, and so forth.

Whether we are on campus for face-to-face instruction or virtual, this course will form working groups (potentially based on project theme, method, or type of proposed output) to support the design, development, and peer review of individual and group projects as a capstone to your CULP major. The course is best suited for seniors and juniors with a project idea at the intersection of culture, politics, and power in some way.

This course considers the relationship between ideas about race and nonhuman animals, as well as “nature,” the environment, and the land, from the 18th century to the present. By considering natural historical, biological, and conservationist literature alongside contemporary responses from critical ethnic studies and other scholarly fields, we will develop the interpretive and analytical skills necessary to understand how certain groups of humans and non-humans have been represented as “invasive” and “alien” to settler colonial landscapes. We will apply the lessons from our intellectual history of ideas about race, nonhuman animals, and the “natural” world to consider several historical and contemporary cases where the tropes and conventions of racialization cross species lines, including in campaigns to manage the Japanese beetle and the Asian giant “murder” hornet; in controversies over dogfighting and the use of dogs in policing; and in anti-poaching campaigns within and beyond the United States. In doing so, we will ask: How do processes of racialization develop over time, according to specific geographical, ecological, and political conditions? How do colonial representations of the natural world inform racial ideology, and vice versa? What do struggles for racial, environmental, and interspecies justice have to learn from one another?

TBA

From George Washington to Barack Obama, America’s relations with the rest of the world have been shaped by enduring traditions regarding the use (and abuse) of power and involving the complex of ideas and beliefs that go into forming what might be called the American “character.” This course will examine those traditions and how they shaped American foreign policy for more than two centuries. It will emphasize the role of ideas in shaping American attitudes toward the world, especially the American conviction that the United States is the keeper and sole protector of a set of universal principles. Students will be asked to investigate and challenge common attitudes about America’s role in the world, both today and in the past. They will examine American “imperialism,” past and present, and compare it to the behavior of other imperial powers. They will also draw comparisons between recent American policies and those of its past. Although this is a course about history, the goal is to use history to understand the present and to make informed decisions about the future.

Independent tutorials for students pursuing CULP Honors.

This capstone seminar is meant for CULP majors in their senior year, but may also be taken by other students in any major who are pursuing research projects that draw on interpretive and qualitative methods. It is designed to support the research experience of students completing honors theses, certificate capstones, UREPs, or other independent research projects. Any senior with a research project that can benefit from methods such as primary source analysis, case studies, ethnography, or oral history is welcome to enroll. The primary purpose of this weekly seminar is to scaffold independent student research through a supportive workshop community. While assigned readings in the course will be limited in comparison to upper-level electives, you will be required to submit regular writing assignments reflecting your work in progress, and to read and respond to one another's work through discussion and written feedback. The workshop format will enable you to hone your research questions and methods (in coordination with your faculty research mentors), to undertake effective literature review, to develop your intellectual contribution through an iterative writing process, and to effectively communicate your research intervention. The seminar will also provide participants with a much-needed sense of community throughout the challenging and rewarding experience of independent research.

Peer Mentorship will prepare students for active roles in mentorship in the CULP community. This course is designed to provide a space and soft structure for mentors to envision, collaborate, and co-create opportunities and events for CULP. These events and initiatives should encourage CULP students to interact with each other and seek each other for guidance, extending the innovative pedagogy and creativity of CULP beyond the classroom to foster a community of difference, share ideas, and provide support.

In the first part of the course, we will work on team building, group facilitation, and communication skills, with a focus on increasing inclusivity and a sense of community. Mentors will collectively set goals for the peer mentor network, organize themselves into sub-groups, discuss ways to engage mentees, explore different events and programs they can create, visit a gateway class to hear from the latest CULP cohort, and develop and carry out a semester plan that outlines prospective events.

The second part of the course will be more action-oriented. Peer mentors will regularly update peer mentor network platforms of communication, plan, propose, run events and programming, and offer constructive feedback to each other on ways to increase engagement. Peer mentors will wrap up with a group semester-in-review session, where they will revisit their goals and look toward the next semester.

Permission of SFS Dean's Office required.

This 1.5-credit workshop course is an elective for all CULP students who are seniors. It will be offered as a pilot in Spring of 2025. The purpose of this course is to develop an ePortfolio/website to help seniors reflect on and highlight what they have learned in their studies; to help them develop and present the skills they have gained to a broader public; to assist them as they prepare either for further studies or for entering the workforce; and to give them a chance to gain essential experiences in the presentation of their own work and accomplishments. Each week, students will participate in design and writing exercises that will help them to develop an electronic portfolio. The course will give students the opportunity to reflect on who they are and who they aspire to be, and how to use an online tool like an ePortfolio/website to achieve their personal and professional goals.

Honors students only. Permission of SFS Dean's Office required.

Honors students only. Permission of SFS Dean's Office required.