Prerequisites: A prior or concurrent course or clinic in international human rights law is recommended but not required.
Exam Type: No Exam
During the last 70 years, the Inter-American System for the protection of human rights (IASHR) is the venue for some of the most significant developments in international law. Placed at the heart of the oldest international organization in existence (the Organization of American States, successor to...
How do we understand justice? What are the connections between trauma, education and mass incarceration? From cradle to prison cell, what is our praxis—that is, how do we do education, and what are its fruits? This course explores the systems of racialized punishment that have created the current conditions around school suspensions, arrests, and incarceration. It focuses on the growing movement for restorative/transformative justice, paying particular attention to factors...
*Lottery-based Enrollment* Engaging in conversations about racism, past and present, is essential to building bridges and promoting democratic values. Many educators wish to teach about racism but may hesitate to explore controversial topics with students, especially younger learners. In this course, participants develop the knowledge and skills to teach the histories and realities of racism in the United States. We consider the developmental needs of students in grades K-12, racial-...
F - Split Schedule: 9:00am to 12:00pm or 1:15pm - 2:30pm
The UN IPCC reports on climate change make it clear that to avoid the most devastating climate impacts, we need a global societal transformation, and we all have a role to play in advancing solutions. Education has been identified as a critical social tipping point to help the world meet the decarbonization needed by 2050, and yet education is underutilized in climate solutions. Whether transitioning our largely diesel school bus fleet to electric, leveraging post-...
An exploration of the ethics of scientific and social eugenics in 20th/21st century U.S. through historical, bioethical, critical race, Indigenous, gender, and disability frameworks. Attention to roles of medicine, law, and government in relation to eugenic techniques: sterilization, segregation, and marriage restriction as well as genetic technologies, land conservation, and immigration policy. Consideration of resistance to eugenics (moral, scientific, religious, artistic, political) and recent strategies of...
Mass incarceration is a catastrophe in the United States, especially affecting Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and poor communities. Different forms of carceral confinements have long been an integral part of the formation of the United States and other settler colonies in the Americas. In this course, we will focus on the history of Indigenous confinements. While the incarceration of Indigenous peoples today resembles the incarceration of other minoritized peoples, it has similar and distinct historical genealogies...
Health inequities within and between societies are garnering increased attention, but some historical and structural processes are insufficiently considered despite their significant contributions. This course introduces students to the concept of settler colonialism and its health equity implications for indigenous and settler populations. Utilizing case studies from the United States, South Africa, and Palestine/Israel, comparative analyses in this discussion- and lecture-based seminar will...
This seminar focuses on the public memory of settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession in North America and Turtle Island, with a focus on stories told within museums. We will be oriented by remediation in two senses: telling a story in a new medium and efforts of remedy and repair. In addition to readings and class discussions, we will have multiple class visits with curators and staff at three Harvard museums: the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, the Harvard Art Museum, and the Harvard...
As the original inhabitants of the Americas, Indigenous communities resist and thrive across the hemisphere, despite the dynamics of colonization that still affect their existence and way of living. Many prejudices affect these communities, sometimes perceived as ‘timeless’ and ‘pure’ subjects, when in reality adaptation and migration have been a constant characteristic for many of these groups. The course offers an exploration of the diversity of Indigenous Latinx communities...
The course is an introduction to Australian First Nations Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island art and new media. The focus is arts of the Central and Western Desert. The course maps sites of language and cultural (re)production, forms of materiality and conditions of colonialism in order to develop appreciation of relationships between art, life and survival. Against neo-liberal and market driven tendencies to commodify Aboriginal culture, the course considers not only contexts in which art is...
This reading group will cover a variety of current and enduring questions involving fundamental issues of freedom, equality, property, and democracy. We will focus on legal issues involving race, sex, sexual orientation, religious liberty, tribal sovereignty, the American rejection of titles of nobility, and inequality in access to income and wealth. Issues addressed include conflict of laws about...
In ways both charged and complex, Native Americans and African Americans together contributed the ground/work of the U.S. nation and the European colonies that preceded it. This course traces intertwined historical lines among Indigenous peoples and African-descended people within the borders of the present-day United States. We will discuss multiple regions, tribal nations, Black communities, and “mixed-race” families across the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries as well as contemporary...
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...
American Indian, First Nations, and other Indigenous communities of the USA and Canada contend with disproportionately high rates of “psychiatric” distress. Many of these communities attribute this distress to their long colonial encounters with European settlers. Concurrently, throughout the 20th century, the disciplines and professions associated with mind, brain, and behavior (e.g., psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis) consolidated their authority and influence within mainstream society....
Professors: Daniel D'Oca, Philip Deloria, Eric Henson
T - 9:00am to 11:45am
This course will explore three critical dimensions in American Indian land issues: 1) historical land loss, 2) contemporary tribal governmental efforts at land reclamation, stewardship, and co-management, and 3) indigenous futurism. We will begin by tracking the history of land dispossession from colonial settlement to the present day. We will then move on to explore the reality of contemporary tribal governance and how that critical function turns on jurisdiction over traditional...
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...
