Joseph Singer, HUNAP Faculty Member Open to Upper Level JD students Mondays/Tuesdays, 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
This course examines how courts choose which law should be applied to transactions, relationships, or occurrences having contacts with more than one state in the United States, or with a state in the United States and a foreign nation. The course will also touch on adjudicatory jurisdiction, recognition of foreign judgments, and tribal sovereignty of American Indian nations. We will address the various approaches adopted by states and...
This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of how North American Indigenous communities, particularly women and two-spirit people, navigate activist movements through material culture and media. We will examine Indigenous material culture across various timelines and focus specifically on trajectories of objects of resistance. Students will learn how to approach material objects from a historical perspective as well as how to consider these objects in their current cultural context. In addition to...
This community based research course focuses on some of the major issues Native American Indian tribes and nations face in the 21st century. It provides in-depth, hands-on exposure to native development issues, including: sovereignty, economic development, constitutional reform, leadership, health and social welfare, tribal finances, land and water rights, culture and language, religious freedom, and education. In particular, the course emphasizes problem definition, client relationships, and designing and completing a research...
This hands-on course will introduce key episodes and issues in the history of American astronomy by close looking at rare early scientific instruments and tangible objects in Harvard collections. Starting with the story of Captain John Smith, Pocahontas, and a sundial, the course will move from colonial relations with Native Americans to the controversial placement of observatories on sacred mountaintops today. In between, we will discuss the roles of religion, politics, science, and culture in the...
Community development is a heterogeneous and contested field of planning thought and practice. The profession has generally prioritized people and places that are disproportionately burdened by capitalist urbanization and development. In the US, the dominant focus has been on personal or group development and widening access to opportunities, with a growing reliance on market incentives to deliver housing options and spur economic development. Yet for many communities at the margins, development has rather connoted practices of...
Kathryn Sinkkink Mondays/Wednesdays, 9:00 AM - 10:15 AM ET
Can international law be a tool for promoting global justice? We will explore whether international criminal accountability for mass atrocity can deter human rights violations and satisfy victims. Should reparations be given for slavery? Can environmental law help reduce climate change and provide justice for climate refugees? Can trade law contribute to a fairer and more equitable trade system? Could better international health law mitigate a future crisis like COVID-19? We will use a global...
Why does the Mexico-U.S. border continue to be a space for debate and controversy? This course examines how the creation of the U.S.-Mexico border in 1848 shaped modern Mexican society from the nineteenth century to our present. For many, the border served (and serves) as a protective barrier from poverty, violence, and, especially, disease. By the early twentieth century many Mexican bodies were perceived as “alien,” “illegal,” and in need of patrolling. Yet these descriptions were also used by Mexican politicians to describe and isolate groups such as Indigenous and Chinese within...Read more about GENED 1089 The Border: Race, Politics, and Health in Modern Mexico
This course examines the colonial basis of the continental political economy of the United States and Canada, which has long been understood as the United States’ main resource hinterland. It offers students a range of analytical tools through which to understand contemporary contestation over land and resources in both countries. Drawing on writings by political scientists, geographers, anthropologists, and historians, the course moves between theories of nature and settler colonialism; Indigenous perspectives that transcend and exceed...
In this perilous moment in human history, the world desperately needs leaders with the courage, drive and hardball political skills to fight climate change and help restore the natural world. At the same time, we need leaders who will advocate for social equity, recognizing how marginalized and low-income communities suffer disproportionately from pollution and climate change.Leadership is difficult in any enterprise, but it is especially difficult for environmental leaders who face opponents with...
Thomas Dichter Mondays/Wednesdays, 12:00 PM - 1:15 PM ET
Is prison abolition a serious proposal, an aspirational ideal, a trendy slogan, or a blueprint for social transformation? This interdisciplinary and community-engaged course situates the prison abolition movement in deep historical context and explores its current relation to the politics of criminal justice reform. We will study the movement’s connections to slavery abolitionism, anti-lynching activism, Indigenous struggles for sovereignty, and the Black Power movement. We will examine the emergence...
In this advanced seminar course, we will explore questions of indigeneity and decolonization in Latinx and Xicanx communities and diasporas across Abya Yala (the Americas, including the Caribbean). Thinking from the intersections of Latinx/Xicanx and Native/Indigenous Studies and communities — and through a comparative and critical Ethnic Studies lens — we will trace key terms and concepts that emerge from these important transdisciplinary fields, social movements and debates. How does indigeneity relate to concepts such as...
Collier Brown Undergraduate Seminar Dates/Time: TBA
The impenetrable wilderness of The Revenant, the diseased streets of Children of Men, the trash heap cities of Wall-E—these are the wastelands that fascinate our pop culture. On the screen, they come to life as horrifying alternate universes and dead civilizations—the very fates we must avoid at all costs. And yet wastelands are not exclusively the stuff of science fiction. In this course, we will grapple with both imaginary and actual wastelands. We will begin with short...
Zach Nowak Mondays/Wednesdays, 7:30 PM - 8:45 PM ET
Harvard’s history is a story of professors, students, courses, and research that has led to world-changing innovations. But it is also a story of student unrest, gender unease, and the exclusion of women and minorities, enslaved people, Native Americans, and working-class people. All of them made Harvard and left traces in its archives, libraries, and museums, its buildings, and even in its soil. Some Harvard stories have been told; others have been forgotten. In this class, we will uncover Harvard’s past...
Sarah Dimick Mondays/Wednesdays, 3:00 PM - 4:15 PM ET
This course considers the relationships between systems of human injustice and environmental issues—including industrial disasters, ocean acidification, and resource extraction. We examine environmental justice writing and artwork with a transnational, interconnected approach. For example, we ask how the Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa’s writing on oil pipelines in the Niger Delta anticipates Native American protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. We draw connections between a poem documenting...
Sven Beckert Tuesdays/Thursdays/ 12:00 PM - 1:15 PM ET
How did capitalism emerge, expand and transform daily life in North America over the past 500 years? In this course, students will gain an in-depth understanding of how North America turned from a minor outpost of the Atlantic economy into the powerhouse of the world economy, how Americans built a capitalist economy and how that capitalism, in turn, changed every aspect of their lives. In the process, they will come to understand how contemporary capitalism is the result of centuries of human engagement, struggle...
Whales, wolves, great apes, big cats, buffalo, bears-- these animals populate human cultural imaginations. From animal advocacy groups to zoos to movies, so-called "charismatic megafauna" and/or “flagship species” dominate a wide swath of debates. By focusing on a selection of animals, this course explores a) how people interpret these animals, and b) how human interactions impact these animals and their natural environments. Organized around different animals and the controversies, questions, and events...
Throughout history, social justice movements and social justice organizations have utilized disciplined inquiry or research to highlight untold stories, illuminate goodness, expose power and colonialism, and offer pathways to more equity and freedom. Yet, we often do not provide educators or doctoral students with research methodology training oriented to these aims. More specifically, we often do not provide educators in the field or doctoral students with research methodology training beyond those...
The purpose of this course is to question prevailing, relatively uniform and quite limiting forms of education in light of approaches that escape or overcome these forms. A mode of education is more than mere content and pedagogy. It refers to ways of knowing, forms of life, conceptions of power, value systems, and structuring goals that ultimately underlie a people’s understanding of what education is and does. Therefore, this course concerns more than a simple familiarity with alternative models of learning—rather,...
This field-based research course focuses on some of the major issues that Native American Indian tribes and nations face as the 21st century begins. It provides in-depth, hands-on exposure to native development issues, including: sovereignty, economic development, constitutional reform, leadership, health and social welfare, land and water rights, culture and language, religious freedom, and education. In particular, the course emphasizes problem definition, client relationships, and designing and completing a research project. The course...
Ju Yon Kim Tuesday and Thursdays, 1:30 PM - 02:45 PM
From depictions of exchanges in the early colonial Americas to efforts to envision alternate and imminent futures, this class will examine representations of interracial encounters in U.S. American culture. We will explore how various texts and performances have conceived, embodied, and reimagined the relationships not only among differently racialized groups, but also between race and nation, individual and community, and art and politics. Topics addressed in this course will include narratives of indigeneity,...
Zachary Nowak Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:00am-10:15am
What’s the problem with wilderness? Or the environmental movement? Or invasive species? This course examines how humans thought about and used the natural world over the centuries—and the consequences of both use of and thoughts about the nature. Students will learn about food, climate change, pollution, conquest and resistance, environmentalism, and energy. This course actively seeks to show the importance of the material world and the contributions of a broad spectrum of historical actors to US...
Water is life, but is it a human right? Water governance is a contentious issue globally because humans rely on water for nearly every productive activity; moreover, it is often scarce and not distributed equally. To better understand the persistence and escalation of struggles over water access around the world, this course uses a multidisciplinary approach that allows students to examine both the social and physical shape of water in a modern and historical context. While all bodies of water deserve mention,...
This hands-on course will introduce key episodes and issues in the history of American astronomy by close looking at rare early scientific instruments and tangible objects in Harvard collections. Starting with the story of Captain John Smith, Pocahontas, and a sundial, the course will move from colonial relations with Native Americans to the controversial placement of observatories on sacred mountaintops today. In between, we will discuss the roles of religion, politics, science, and culture in the...
Initiated by a Muskogee student, this course will be advised by Prof. Ann Braude (Harvard Divinity) and Marcus Briggs-Cloud, HDS 2010. Any student interested in indigenous history and culture of the Southeastern US is welcome. Meeting time to be arranged. Permission of the Instructor required. For further information contact ann_braude@harvard.edu.
Eleanor Craig Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:30am-11:45am
How might critical attention to race and ethnicity as they intersect with gender and sexuality—and also frameworks of indigeneity and class—shape how we study? How do these lenses shift the questions we ask, the information that counts as data, and the genres of work that we recognize as 'academic'?For those newer to studies of race and ethnicity, this course provides intersectional frameworks for recognizing what assumptions undergird academic projects and fields of study. For...
This course explores ways in which human collectives have conceived of other animals, whether in analogical relations for scientific research, exploitative relations for food and labor, affective relations like fear, disgust, love. What are some histories of these unique interdependencies between human animals and nonhuman animals? We will critically explore the relentless and yet slippery divisions between humans and nonhuman animals, seeing them as a falsely singular, conflictual and segregatory divide that has played...
This course introduces the archaeological study of the ancient societies of eastern North America, with a focus on the Ohio River Valley region, the first frontier of the United States. We will explore inter-related aspects of religion, economy, technology, and human biology associated with the span of time ranging from the first arrival of humans to the European invasion of the continent. The emphasis is on key forms and changes in social organization associated with shifts between foraging and farming, the...