| | 01 | M------ | 4:00P-5:20P | TBA | Toliver-Diallo | See instructor | 30 | 29 | 0 | | Desc: | Required course for AFAS majors. |
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-T-R--- | 4:00P-5:20P
4:00P-5:20P | TBA
TBA | Mutonya | Dec 12 2024 1:00PM - 3:00PM | 10 | 8 | 0 | | Desc: | For AFAS majors, this course satisfies the one semester foreign language requirement. |
| | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | This course introduces students to Wolof language and culture. Wolof is a West African language spoken in Senegal and the Gambia. It is also spoken on a smaller scale in Mauritania, Mali, French Guinea, and in the migrant communities in the US and France. This is the first course of a beginning-level of a Wolof program. In order to acquire a basic proficiency, students will practice speaking, reading, writing and listening. Each module will begin with a thematic and practical dialogue from which we can study vocabulary, aspects of grammar as well as a cultural lesson. Interactive material, including texts, images, videos, films, and audio, will be provided. Its aim is to provide students with knowledge of the basic structures of the language and the ability to communicate. Students will also learn important aspects of life and culture of the Wolof. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 10:00A-11:20A | TBA | DIALLO | Dec 12 2024 1:00PM - 3:00PM | 5 | 2 | 0 | | Desc: | For AFAS majors, this course satisfies the one semester foreign language requirement.
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| | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | As sources of national memory and identity, public monuments, place names, historical markers, and other elements of commemorative landscapes are potential sites of cultural violence (e.g., alienation, disrespect, and erasure) contributing to broader conflict and inequality, and therefore important considerations in movements for equal opportunity and justice. Some contend that memory sites are "the new lunch counters," where our racial politics are worked out. This course examines the racial politics of commemorative objects and practices, and commemorative intervention as a strategy of anti-racist activism. We begin with an historical survey of various ways that racism has been inscribed on the commemorative landscape, and readings in history, political theory, cultural studies, and other fields to gain insight on these contested commemorative objects, their development, and social significance. We then turn to a critical assessment of efforts to remove and recontextualize commemorative objects, and to erect new objects commemorating neglected figures and issues. We consider how these reparative efforts relate to what political theorists call remedies of recognition, and specifically how they might aid in advancing equal opportunity and justice. Through our study and engagement with contested commemorative landscapes, including local, national, and global cases, students will become familiar with the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of memory studies, diverse forms and sites of commemoration, local and global efforts to advance what has been termed "commemorative justice," and challenges they face. |
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| | 01 | ---R--- | 3:00P-5:50P | TBA | Ward | Paper/Project/TakeHome | 15 | 0 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | The goal of this course is to provide a glimpse into how youth reshape African society. Whether in North Africa with the Arab Spring, in West Africa with university strikes, or in East Africa through a linguistic full bloom, youth have been shaping social responses to societies for a long period. In this course, we will study social structures, including churches, NGOs, developmental agencies as well as learn about examples of Muslim youth movements, and the global civil society. The course will also explore how youth impact cultural movements in Africa and how they influence the world. In particular, we will examine Hip-Hop movements, sports, and global youth culture developments that center on fashion, dress, dance, and new technologies. By the end of the course, students will have enriched ideas about youth in Africa and ways to provide more realistic comparisons to their counterparts in the United States. Course is for first-year, non-transfer students only. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 1:00P-2:20P | TBA | DIALLO | Paper/Project/TakeHome | 15 | 0 | 0 | | Desc: | This course is for Freshman only. |
| | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | 01 | TBA | | TBA | Parsons | No final | 1 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 02 | TBA | | TBA | DIALLO | No final | 1 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 03 | TBA | | (None) / | Parikh | No final | 1 | 0 | 0 | | |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 2:30P-3:50P | TBA | Mutonya | No final | 10 | 2 | 0 | | Desc: | For AFAS majors, this course satisfies the one semester foreign language requirement. |
| | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 2:30P-3:50P | TBA | Mutonya | Dec 12 2024 1:00PM - 3:00PM | 10 | 0 | 0 | | Desc: | For AFAS majors, this course satisfies the one semester foreign language requirement. |
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| | Description: | In this course, we will see how the camera, in still and moving photography, has served to register blackness in Latin America as a structure, experience, and representation frequently neglected in popular media. Starting with the images of enslavement and freedom in the form of painting, sketches, prints, daguerrotypes, and other early photographs in nineteenth-century Latin America, we will explore how the camera has marked the passing of time and created racial histories-actual and fictional-that educate us, move us, and influence how governments make policy. We will view an array of films, video, and still photography, across multiple genres, that center the histories and present-day joys and struggles of black people in Latin America while actively considering how our own consumption of media informs our racial perceptions of Latin America. The work that we view and read about will be used to question Latin America's perceived racial exceptionalism narratives, such as mestizaje, mulatismo, and racial democracy, and how they depend on sugarcoated histories of race mixture during slavery and colonization. This course will also focus heavily on how image-making becomes a persuasive means to make one's blackness known in the framework of the Latin America nation-state, to stake claims to rights, and to document black life in productive, pleasurable ways that do not always center the ongoing gentrification, annihilation, and genocide of black communities.
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 2:30P-3:50P | TBA | Mundell | Paper | 15 | 8 | 0 | | Desc: | For AFAS Majors, this course fulfills area requirement 4. |
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| | Description: | The course provides an overview of the field Africana Studies and provides analysis of the lives and thoughts of people of African ancestry on the African continent and throughout the world. In this course we will also examine the contributions of Africana Studies to other disciplines. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach drawing from history, philosophy, sociology, political studies, literature, and performance studies and will draw examples from Africa, the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, and South America. When possible, we will explore Diaspora relationships and explore how the African presence has transformed societies throughout the world. This class will focus on both classic texts and modern works that provide an introduction to the dynamics of African American and African Diaspora thought and practice. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 2:30P-3:50P | TBA | Shearer | Dec 18 2024 3:30PM - 5:30PM | 30 | 28 | 0 | | Desc: | Required course for AFAS majors & minors. |
| | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 4:00P-5:20P | TBA | Himes | Dec 18 2024 6:00PM - 8:00PM | 15 | 4 | 0 | | Desc: | For AFAS, this course fulfills Area Requirement 1. |
| | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | The course surveys the evolution of African American images in film, which began with the first major feature length silent film, Birth of a Nation (circa 1915), which celebrated the Ku Klux Klan and contained racist depictions of African Americans. The first "talking film," Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer contained the (in)famous song, "Mammie," which was sung by Mr. Jolson in Black Face, a carry-over from White performers who darkened their faces with burned cork during minstrel and vaudeville live performances. Those early films were produced and directed by European Americans who tended to portray African Americans through negative sterotypical depictions. Gradually, with the passage of time, technology, and the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, a combination of European and African American film makers began to provide a broader array of Black portrayals that included a spectrum of negative to positive depictions of Black people. We will include an examination of Washington University's Eyes on the Prize archives. |
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| | 01 | --W---- | 3:00P-5:50P | TBA | Baugh | No final | 30 | 9 | 0 | | Desc: | The course fulfills Area 2 requirement for the AFAS major. |
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| | Description: | France and Africa have a long historical relationship, dating back to the early Euro-Mediterranean empires, the first explorers, long-distance traders, Christian missionaries, colonialists, and today's French West and North African communities. In this course, we delve into this long process of interaction between France and its colonies of Africa. During the first half of the semester, we explore these historical relationships and examine the scientific constructs of race in the 19th and early 20th century. We touch on themes that defined the colonial encounter, including the development of the Four Communes in Senegal, the Negritude movement, and French Islamic policies in Africa. The curriculum for this course includes articles, films, and monographs, to explore these themes and includes writers and social activists living in France and the African diaspora. The second half of the course examines Francophone Africa after independence. Here the course explores the political and cultural (inter) dependence between France and its Francophone African partners. In addition, we examine the challenges of many African states to respond to their citizen's needs, as well as France's changing immigration policies in the 1980s, followed by the devaluation of the West and Central African Franc (CFA). |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 2:30P-3:50P | TBA | DIALLO | Paper/Project/TakeHome | 15 | 15 | 0 | | Desc: | This course fulfills Area 4 for the AFAS Major. |
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| | Description: | The United States of America has historically been known as a "nation of immigrants." However, current rhetoric has brought this notion into question. This country has consistently been a magnet for millions of people from all over the world, and this course seeks broadly to understand recent African immigration. In Black studies, most attention has been paid to the forced migration of the enslaved during the Atlantic Slave trade. Studying 20th and 21st African immigration is key to truly understanding the Black experience in America. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, 2.1 million Africans live in America as of 2015. The majority of these migrants are from Sub-Saharan Anglophone Africa (Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa), but they are also from war-torn countries such as Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia. The primary focus of this course will be on contemporary African labor immigrants, including skilled professionals, children who arrived in the United States for family reunification, refugees, and winners of the Diversity Visa lottery who are now permanent residents. The migratory flux also includes people who were forced to leave their birth countries for political reasons as well as genocide. Through the class, we will examine the "push and pull" factors of immigration. The second part of the course explores the lived experience of Africans in America, whether they are well educated as compared with other migrant communities or whether they are laborers. We will study the role of remittances, language barriers, paths to naturalization, and job opportunities once Africans reach American soil. Increasingly, repatriation (both voluntarily and forced), xenophobia and Islamophobia are challenges that rock African immigrant communities. Today, many Africans live between two countries: Africa and America. This transnationalism allows them to navigate different lives, stories, identities, and cultures. Several activities are organized in the African local community. There is a large group of Ghanaians, Kenyans, Egyptians, Senegalese, Nigerians, Ethiopians, and Somalians in St. Louis. We will invite these individuals to the class as guest speakers so that students can fully understand their multiple lives in the St. Louis metropolitan area. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 4:00P-5:20P | TBA | DIALLO | Paper/Project/TakeHome | 19 | 19 | 0 | | Desc: | For AFAS majors, this course counts as Area Requirement 4. |
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| | Description: | The African Diaspora and more importantly variations of blackness, black bodies, and black culture have long captured the imagination of audiences across the globe. Taking a cue from exciting trends in popular culture, this course bridges the world of history, film, and culture to explore where and how historical themes specific to African descended peoples are generated on screen (film and television). Fusing the film world with digital media (ie. online series and "webisodes") this class will allow students to critically engage diasporic narratives of blackness that emerge in popular and independent films not only from the United States but other important locales including Australia, Brazil, Britain, and Canada. Moving across time and space, class discussions will center an array of fascinating yet critical themes including racial/ethnic stereotyping, gender, violence, sexuality, spirituality/conjuring, and education. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 10:00A-11:20A | Seigle / 106 | Mustakeem | Paper/Project/TakeHome | 15 | 12 | 0 | | Desc: | For AFAS majors, this course fulfills Area Requirement 2. |
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| | Description: | This course introduces students to the histories and politics of postcolonial writing and art. By tracing the genealogies of writing and art produced in the aftermath of colonialism, this course will explore how writers, artists, and scholars working from the context of formerly colonized nations have responded to the legacies of racial, cultural, and economic oppression. Students will look at novels, poems, art, and theater produced by those working from Africa, the Caribbean, and other formerly colonized nations in order to chart the complex networks of political solidarity these works enable. Writers like Franz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Gayatri Spivak will be read alongside literary and artistic pieces by writers such as Chinua Achebe, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Jamaica Kincaid, Derek Walcott, Safiya Sinclair, Arundhati Roy and artists such as Zanele Muholi, Santu Mofokeng, Tessa Mars, William Kentridge, and others. Topics such as racial memory, postcolonial identity, radical aesthetics, and Afro-futurism will be explored. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 11:30A-12:50P | TBA | Mbatha | No final | 19 | 8 | 0 | | Desc: | This course fulfills Area 2 for AFAS majors. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 1:00P-2:20P | TBA | Lloyd | Paper/Project/TakeHome | 30 | 28 | 0 | | Desc: | For AFAS majors, this course fulfills Area Requirement 3. |
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| | Description: | In this course, we will examine the attraction of some African Americans to the ideas and aims of conservatism: limited government, individual freedom, the objectivity of merit, religious tradition, self-reliance, and a free market economy. On the matter of race, African Americans who identify as conservatives tend to be strongly opposed to affirmative action, to distrust race-based public policy solutions and government intervention in race issues generally, to opposed to reparations for slavery, and to believe in character-building and values such as thrift and hard work as important virtues for Blacks to cultivate. Their hostility toward liberalism and leftist ideology is not quite the same as some religious-based Black conservatives, such as the racially militant Nation of Islam and the several black Pentecostal sects, who strenuously believe that white liberalism and white leftist thought are expressions of white decadence. However, their beliefs are not far removed from this. In this way, Black conservatives aBre seen in a harshly antagonistic way by the national lack political establishment, which is largely liberal, and by black intellectuals and scholars, who are, for the most part, leftist-leaning. The critics of Black conservatism cannot understand how some Black people can be attracted to ideas that are rooted in racist assumptions, that are justifications for white domination, and that have been used to defend the white-dominated status quo and a white, Eurocentric value system. Race must be used as a weapon for liberation from white thralldom. What does a Black person have to conserve, and why would they want to identify with an ideology that has been used to oppress them? Black liberals and leftists call Black conservatives "Uncle Toms" and "Sellouts." Black conservatives return the antagonism in full measure, arguing that white liberals and leftists use the victimology of Blacks as a cudgel to beat whites with whom they politically disagree in order to effect the social change they desire and that they treat Blacks essentially as injured children who need to be either indulged, romanticized, excused, aided, or pitied. Racial identity is nothing more than a mere weapon of resentment. Black conservatives feel that Black liberals and leftists play into the hands of white liberals and leftists by making race an overdetermining factor in the lives of Black people. They also argue that the public policy solutions of Black liberals and leftists have not worked and that they in fact mostly benefit the Black middle class. They call civil rights leaders and Black liberal and leftist intellectuals "race hustlers" and "race charlatans." The conflict here is not simply or solely political; it is also deeply psychological and a question of identity. What does being Black mean, and what is it prohibited from meaning? We will look closely at many of the major works of significant Black conservatives to understand the nature of their arguments and their claims to legitimacy. How do Black people see conservatism? What do they hope conservatism will do for the Black community? Have they made much of an inroad among Blacks? Is it true, as some conservatives have claimed, that Blacks have a natural affinity for certain conservative ideas?
For AFAS majors, this course counts as Area Requirement 2. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 10:00A-11:20A | TBA | Early | Dec 16 2024 10:30AM - 12:30PM | 15 | 7 | 0 | | Desc: | This fulfills Area 2 requirement for the AFAS major. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 1:00P-2:20P | TBA | Mustakeem | Paper/Project/TakeHome | 35 | 35 | 20 | | |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 10:00A-11:20A | TBA | Leath | Paper/Project/TakeHome | 40 | 40 | 12 | | |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 2:30P-3:50P | TBA | Wanzo | Paper/Project/TakeHome | 25 | 13 | 0 | | Desc: | Waitlist managed by dept. |
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| | 02 | TBA | | TBA | Mustakeem | No final | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 03 | TBA | | TBA | Mutonya | No final | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 04 | TBA | | TBA | Parsons | No final | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 06 | TBA | | TBA | Frierson | No final | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 07 | TBA | | TBA | DIALLO | No final | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 08 | TBA | | TBA | Fenderson | No final | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 10 | TBA | | TBA | Parikh | No final | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 11 | TBA | | TBA | Shearer | No final | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | Public history, or applied history, encompasses the many and diverse ways in which history is put to work in the world and applied to real-world issues. This course teaches public history practice with particular emphasis on engaging in the public history of slavery through research and interpretation on the regional histories of enslavement within St. Louis and at Washington University. Students will learn by engaging critical scholarship on public history, debates about how public history is practiced, and learning core tenets of public history interpretation, museum best practices, oral history, preservation, and material culture and their particular application to public history interpreting slavery. This includes grappling with the politics of memory and heritage that shape, limit, and empower public history practice on slavery, and how white supremacy has shaped what histories we absorb in the public.
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 11:30A-12:50P | TBA | Schmidt | Paper/Project/TakeHome | 15 | 8 | 0 | | Desc: | This course fulfills Area 2 for AFAS Major. |
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| | Description: | This course focuses on the contributions of the interdisciplinary subfield of Queer of Color Critique. Queer of Color Critique consists of theories, analytics, knowledge, and activism that emerge from LGBTQ people of color who examine the intersections of, primarily, race, class, gender, sexuality, culture, and other vectors of power and categories of social life. The scholarship produced by these LGBTQ scholars of color, and allies, inform, or are informed by, theories and analyses of gender, culture, colonialism/postcolonialism, nationalisms, indigeneity, migration, diaspora, space and place, political economies, and HIV/AIDS. Albeit not exhaustive, in this course, we willexamine some genealogies ofthis expanding interdisciplinary body of work. Waitlist managed by dept. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 4:00P-5:20P | TBA | Bailey | Paper/Project/TakeHome | 15 | 10 | 0 | | Desc: | Waitlist managed by dept. |
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| | Description: | This advanced Swahili language course is designed for learners who have attained the equivalent of Intermediate level Swahili and wish to perfect their knowledge of the language while developing skills in independent reading. Learners will be introduced to a variety of fiction and non-fiction texts in Swahili such as children's stories, songs, short stories, speeches, newspaper articles, poetry, plays, and novellas. Learners will gain experience by practicing own productions of the various genres plus presenting reviews and translations of assigned texts. Learners will continue to interact meaningfully with Swahili speakers in St. Louis during community-based learning at the refugee school and elsewhere. Prereqs: Permission of instructor and successful completion of AFAS 103D, 104D, 203D, 204D or equivalent experience. |
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| | 01 | M------ | 3:00P-5:50P | Eads / 016 | Mutonya | Paper/Project/TakeHome | 10 | 2 | 0 | | Desc: | For AFAS majors, this course satisfies the one semester foreign language requirement. |
| | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | In the year 2000, HIV became the world's leading infectious cause of adult death. In the next 10 years, AIDS killed more people than all wars of the 20th century combined. As the global epidemic rages on, our greatest enemy in combating HIV/AIDS is not knowledge or resources but rather global inequalities and the conceptual frameworks with which we understand health, human interaction, and sexuality. This course emphasizes the ethnographic approach for the cultural analysis of responses to HIV/AIDS. Students will explore the relationships among local communities, wider historical and economic processes, and theoretical approaches to disease, the body, ethnicity/race, gender, sexuality, risk, addiction, power, and culture. Other topics covered include the cultural construction of AIDS and risk, government responses to HIV/AIDS, origin and transmission debates, ethics and responsibilities, drug testing and marketing, the making of the AIDS industry and "risk" categories, prevention and education strategies, interactions between biomedicine and alternative healing systems, and medical advances and hopes. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 11:30A-12:50P | TBA | Parikh | Dec 16 2024 1:00PM - 3:00PM | 200 | 136 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | Whose history is significant enough to be worth preserving in physical form? Who gets to decide, and how? Does the choice to preserve buildings, landscapes and places belong to government, experts or ordinary people? How does the condition of the built environment impact community identity, structure and success? This place-based course in historic preservation pursues these questions in St. Louis' historically Black neighborhood The Ville, where deep historic significance meets a built environment conditioned by population loss, disinvestment and demolition. The course explores the practice of historic preservation as something far from neutral, but a creative, productive endeavor that mediates between community values, official policies and expert assertion. Critical readings in preservation and public history will accompany case studies, community engagement and practical understanding. This course is open to both undergraduates and graduates. |
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| | 01 | ----F-- | 1:00P-3:50P | TBA | Allen | See instructor | 15 | 11 | 0 | | Desc: | This course will meet at Sumner High School. |
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| | Description: | Brazil is the country with the largest population of people of African descent outside of the African continent. However, with its history of race mixture under colonialism and slavery, many have imagined Brazil as a racial paradise such that race minimally influences one's social, political, or economic quality of life. The main focus of this course will be to understand from an interdisciplinary approach, first, the historical and sociocultural conditions of the African diaspora in Brazil. Second, we will focus on how national ideologies of racial mixture employ a rhetoric of inclusion that incorporates selective aspects of black culture into Brazilian national identity while excluding black people from the protections and pleasures of full citizenship. Beginning with the experiences of enslaved Africans, we will engage how Afro-Brazilians have developed ideas and spaces of freedom and belonging through social movements, religion, the arts, and resistance well into the black consciousness movements of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the course, we will collaboratively read, view, and listen to a variety of primary and secondary sources in order to analyze and write about blackness and the lives of black people in Brazil across history, intersecting, most predominantly, with the social structures of gender, sexuality, class, and religion.
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| | 01 | -T----- | 3:00P-5:50P | TBA | Mundell | Paper/Project/TakeHome | 15 | 0 | 0 | | Desc: | For AFAS majors, this course counts as Area Requirement 4. |
| | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | Marking the centennial of his birth in 1924, this class will examine why James Baldwin became the twentieth-century African American author most loved in the twenty-first. An inexhaustible public witness and the author of poems, plays, essays, novels, and short stories, the Harlem-born Baldwin ranks with the most daring and elegant American literary voices. His first novel, the autobiographical "Go Tell It on the Mountain" (1953), wrestled with the dual heritage of Black Christianity and Depression-era Black social realism. His second novel, "Giovanni's Room" (1956), set in Paris and peopled with non-black characters, explored the intricacies of same-sex desire years before the Stonewall rebellion announced the gay rights movement. "Notes of a Native Son" (1955), the first collection of Baldwin's lush and searching essays and a grandparent of twenty-first century autocriticism, is perhaps the most-tweeted book of our era. Our reading list will contain all of these books, but we'll end with a sequence of texts revealing various facets of Baldwin's resurrected meaning in the wake of Black Lives Matter: among them, Ta-Nehisi Coates's memoir "Between the World and Me" (2015); Raoul Peck's documentary "I Am Not Your Negro" (2017); and Eddie Glaude Jr.'s Trump-era treatise "Begin Again" (2020). Altogether, this will be a single-author course on a singular author whose life after death illuminates crucial issues in Black cultural politics in two centuries. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement. This course may fulfill the global or minority literatures requirement for students who declare an English major in the fall 2021 semester and beyond. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 1:00P-2:20P | TBA | Maxwell | No final | 15 | 15 | 6 | | |
| 02 | -T-R--- | 10:00A-11:20A | TBA | Maxwell | No final | 0 | 0 | 18 | | |
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| | Description: | Do water meters have politics? Can architects manufacture consent for political repression or engage in activism? What happens when designed systems fail? Design is everywhere. It is in the water you drink; it is in the built material and digital spaces you hang out in; and it is in the chair you are sitting in. And yet, perhaps because of its ubiquity, design receives very little attention from scholars in the humanities and even less from African studies. In this course, we will examine a number of case studies, from minor architectures and ruins in Monrovia to hydraulic engineering in Johannesburg and iconic architecture in Casablanca to DIY market spaces in Nairobi and insurgent public space-making in Kinshasa. We will explore the ways that designers, architects, and technocrats engineer authority and how (sometimes) urban residents take it apart. One potential definition (among many other potential definitions) of design could be the following: the practices that humans employ to arrange, engineer, plan and fashion their material, digital, and social environments. But designs are also artifacts -- master plans, prototypes, and brands -- that occupy social lives independent of their assigned functions. Design is often about aspirations for a better world and finding technological and aesthetic solutions to social problems. Yet the products of design -- from zoning codes and service delivery networks to iconic built structures -- seem to always invite failures, disruptions, hackings, and ruination. A central argument in this course is that understanding design is also key to understanding power, inequality, and insurgency in Africa. We will draw our texts and case studies from places that are normally left off the map of design studies -- African cities and towns -- and explore the applicability of these theories to St. Louis. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 11:30A-12:50P | TBA | Shearer | Paper/Project/TakeHome | 15 | 15 | 2 | | Desc: | This course fulfills Area 4 for the AFAS major. |
| | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 10:00A-11:20A | TBA | McBride | No final | 30 | 0 | 0 | | Desc: | This course fulfills Area 1 for the AFAS major. |
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| | 01 | --W---- | 3:00P-5:50P | Seigle / L004 | Nichols Lodato | Paper/Project/TakeHome | 15 | 15 | 0 | | Desc: | For AFAS Majors, this course counts as Area Requirement 2. |
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