Probes the complex relationship between architecture and social/cultural change in the 20th and 21st centuries with an emphasis on specific architectural "visions" and their intended/unintended consequences. Modern architecture and design has often been based on identifiable visions and dreams of a future utopia made possible through good design and careful planning. Indeed, many architects and […]
Open to advanced students only, this course offers the highly motivated student an opportunity to pursue intensive study pertaining to a theme emanating from culture and its expression on his or her own under the guidance of an instructor.
Open to advanced students only, this course offers the highly motivated student an opportunity to pursue intensive study pertaining to a theme emanating from culture and its expression on his or her own under the guidance of an instructor.
This course explores the ways that ideas and discourses about race and ethnicity shape how social policy is debated, adopted and implemented. Identifying the uneven policy effects on different social groups, it seeks a critical understanding of issues of inequity, oppression, and social exclusion from a social policy framework. The course confronts various ethnicity- and […]
This course provides practical experience analyzing issues through the lens of Black Canadian Studies. Placement will be in the offices of school trustees and MPPs.
This seminar combines creative texts—novels, music, and the visual arts—alongside slave narratives, nonfiction and theoretical works in an examination of questions of Transatlantic slavery, the imagination, and the idea of freedom. Beginning with slave narratives, students will theorize slavery and freedom, thinking through what Saidiya Hartman calls the “afterlife of slavery” and what Rinaldo Walcott […]
This course examines and compares the responses of Africans and their descendants to the experiences of enslavement, racism, colonialism and imperialism. It begins with an examination of sub-Saharan African societies, the sources of enslaved populations transported to the Americas. Major debates around the Atlantic Slave Trade and comparative histories of enslavement in the Caribbean, Brazil, […]
This course explores concepts of soul from early Greek Civilization to the early Christian era. It examines a cluster of related concepts -- soul, spirit, shade, consciousness, will, and mind - that express the self or “inner person.” Entailed are soul as a thing separate from body; sensation and perception; relation of soul to body; […]
This course addresses city formation, urban space, and the socio-religious structure in Islamic cities from early Islam to the pre-modern period. The course approaches the Islamic city both as an urban phenomenon and as a modern analytical concept. Its content include some central themes in Islamic studies such as the place of religion in the […]
This course explores diversity in early Christian thought and practice by investigating groups traditionally viewed as “heretical.” This will include analysis of the New Testament Apocrypha, Nag Hammadi writings, and the opponents attacked in canonical and heresiological literature. RELIGIOUS TRADITION(S) COVERED: Christianity