Religions have functioned throughout human history to inspire and justify the full range of human agency from the heinous to the heroic. Their influences remain potent here in the 21st century in spite of modern predictions that religious influences would steadily decline in concert with the rise of secular democracies and advances in science. Professionals in a wide range of fields need to understand these complex religious influences in order to understand modern human affairs across the full spectrum of...
Climate change has placed Amazonia at the center stage of global socio-environmental consciousness, particularly after the fires of 2019, which revealed the continental scale of land grabbing and deforestation in the region. Highways and paved roads have spearheaded the expansion of resource frontiers. They have also served as conduits for a complex process of state-driven colonization/urbanization which would more accurately be described as a favelization or entropic occupation of the rainforest. In this...
This course will explore the principles and methodologies of equity-centered approaches for knowledge generation, meaning making, and social transformation through inquiry and the research process. We will examine community-based, participatory, action, and decolonizing approaches to inquiry, and engage with various perspectives on the process, practice, and applications of liberatory inquiry methodologies. We will discuss epistemology and research paradigms; explore a variety of approaches and methodologies, including...
What can histories of tension and cooperation at the U.S.-Mexico border tell us about our own nation's public health programs and national racism?
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,...
This course is intended to provide hands-on practice toward doing research on Latinx issues, with an approach grounded in the understanding that terms ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latinidad’ are not static concepts and, at the same time, not a homogeneous mix. We will examine culture, intellectual production, languages, economics, and political thought, as well as the dynamics of Latino/a/e people in the United States. Throughout the class, students will become familiar with a wide range of thinkers, currents, concepts...
Since the last quarter of the XXth century Latin America has lived under the shadow of two parallel, sweeping (and often contradictory) processes: democratization and economic liberalization. These massive shifts have posed enormous challenges to established political actors such as electoral and patronage-based parties, as well as to economic actors such as domestic business and the labor movement. In this context, traditional stakeholders (protected industrial business, populist parties and mainstream...
This tutorial introduces students to qualitative research methods and how they can help us understand the successes, failures, promises, and limitations of human rights. Students will take a close look at “human rights in action,” or the way ordinary people interpret, demand, mobilize around, or resist human rights. We will discuss cases like women’s rights organizations in India, campaigns against female genital cutting in Egypt, truth and reconciliation commissions in Chile and Argentina, and indigenous rights...
This course focuses on the history and phenomenology of African peoples’ religious experiences in the Americas. The historical and social processes that led to the emergence of African diasporic religions in Latin America and the Caribbean will form the core of our reading materials. We will examine the role of myth, ritual, arts, and symbols as well as the social and political processes that explain the evolution of Black Atlantic religious traditions as formed by African indigenous traditions, African Christianity,...
This course will provide students with an understanding of water that will inform their professional approaches to landscape architecture, architecture, and planning, and contribute to protecting, improving, restoring, and sustaining water resources. Emphasis will be placed on both the science and the application of this science in designs for projects involving a wide range of interactions with water including coastlines, inland rivers and lakes, and urban stormwater. Through lectures, readings...
What can African spiritual traditions contribute to human flourishing in the contemporary age?
Taking the Marvel blockbuster Black Panther as a starting point, the course will explore the African spiritual heritage both on the continent and the diaspora communities (Black Atlantic diasporas). We will begin by spelling out the features of African indigenous religious traditions: cosmology, cosmogony, mythology, ritual practices, divination, healing ceremonies,...
This course will introduce students to critical race approaches to digital culture, primarily through Asian American, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx perspectives on and experiences with settler colonialism, racial capitalism, state violence, war, and empire. Together, we will explore how racial formations in the U.S. have shaped and been shaped by the infrastructures and interfaces of our digital world, as well as how communities of color give voice to their histories, desires, and creativity through digital...
This course examines the Pacific, not as an object of exploration, but as an agent of oceanic relations. We will begin with the ancestral connections between Pacific Islands, travel through the 18th and 19th centuries as we interrogate the entanglements of European imperialism and native Pacific sovereignty, through to the role of the Pacific in World War II and the Cold War, before landing in the 21st century and the modern Indigenous Oceanic connections of environmental movements. Inspired by Banaban-scholar/...
This course explores disability as a crucial aspect of power and identity in modern American history. Over the course of that history, debilitating and maiming forces have produced impairment in the bodies and minds of groups and individuals in unequal ways. In this course we consider some of these forces, from indigenous dispossession and slavery to industrialization, war, social responses to disparities in state support or to state-supported violence, and environmental degradation. Through applying a...
Are binary conceptions of the human and the body presupposed when we perform gender analyses? This course examines the usefulness of gender as a cross-cultural category of analysis from the standpoint of Afrolatine/diasporic religions and non-western ritual practices such as Afrocuban Santería, Winti, Yoruba, Ifá, Native American, and Mesoamerican indigenous practices - practices that trouble canonized approaches to gender research and knowledge production. Should practices like altar-building, initiation, and...
As a central player in the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and widely known as the last of the European powers to let go of its grip on its African territories in 1975, Portugal earned a reputation as one of the most violent imperial powers in modern world history. Over 500 years, tactics of violence and coercion were key tools for building its empire across Asia, the Americas, and Africa, particularly for the purpose of enslavement and recruitment of forced indigenous labor, and to establish colonial "order...
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...
