a) Undergraduate
Fall 2019
MUSI 2008, Music of the World’s Peoples. Professor: Kathy Armstrong (0.5 Credits)
This course is an introduction to Music of the World’s Peoples, and the sociocultural contexts in which those musics are created and performed. We will investigate music from several different geographic areas (Africa, India, North America, Latin America, Caribbean, Asia and Pacific, Europe and the Middle East) using relevant readings, discussion, listening examples and participatory methods.
Winter 2020
MUSI 3106, Popular Musics of the World. Professor Kathy Armstrong (0.5 Credits)
Popular musics of the world, including those of Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and Oceania. Special attention to the interaction between some world popular musics and the Western record industry.
LAWS 4601 – Transnational Law and Human Rights. Professor Buss, Winter term (0.5 terms).
This course examines the transnational dimensions of human rights violations connected to corporate activity particularly in the extractives sector. Some course topics and readings relate to specific incidences in different African countries.
CRCJ 4001B, Criminalization of Black, Indigenous, & Other Women of Colour. Instructor Madalena Santos (0.5 Credits)
This course focuses on the criminalization of Black, Indigenous, and other Women of Colour, including Trans women, primarily in the Canadian context. It explores the intersections of patriarchy, settler colonialism, slavery, race, class, and gender identity as well as irregular migration in the lives of women who have been criminalized. This course seeks to bring to the fore the experiences and stories of women which have been erased through silences in scholarship and academia.
b) Graduate
Fall 2019
HIST 5410A: US History Special Topics: The Global Cold War. Professor Candace Sobers (0.5 credits)
Course Description: The Cold War was one of the defining elements of the twentieth century. This seminar employs a thematic approach to re-think and re-imagine the Cold War from a global perspective, focusing on beginnings and endings, security cultures and geopolitics, decolonization and postcoloniality, and Cold War cultural production, including questions of race, class, and gender. Using historical documents and cultural artefacts from around the world (e.g. music, literature, and film) this course encourages a multidimensional exploration and interrogation of the Cold War paradigm, and reflects on how the Cold War continues to shape contemporary realities and circulations.
Winter 2020
HIST 5710W: Race and Empire Professor Chinnaiah Jangam (0.5 credits)
Course Description: This course explores the intersection of colonialism and imperialism with notions of race between 15th to 20th centuries. It is organized thematically and will introduce students to relevant theoretical concepts and historiographical debates. Central to this course is an effort to uncover the ways in which Eurocentric thinking has been embedded in historical production that normalized European hegemony over the non-European world.
SOCI 5806 Z: ‘Sociology Takes the Blues’ Professor Bruce Curtis (0.5 credits)
Course Description: ‘Sociology Takes the Blues’ uses the literature on the development of African-American blues and gospel music as well as recordings, videos and film clips to examine the emergence, spread, and diffusion of these intensely popular cultural forms.
Seminar participants can expect to learn a great deal about the genres of blues and gospel music, but also to gain insight into the development of class, race, gender relations, and contested cultural practices such as ‘blackface’ and minstrelsy.
We will look at/listen to lyrics and sound recordings of blues and gospel songs, as we examine the ways in which scholars, fans, and record companies ‘made up’ blues and gospel as distinct genres. We will trouble the notions of ‘authentic,’ ‘black,’ and ‘folk’ music. We will consider the ways in which blues and gospel recordings can be used as documentary evidence of social conditions.
We will investigate the commodification of recorded sound and the phenomenology of recordings. We will touch on the ‘sonic ecologies’ that fostered musical innovation in cities such as New Orleans.
We will engage with matters of ribaldry, lasciviousness, body image and women’s sexual power in blues songs and performance, as we study the ways in which the commerce in pleasure (the sale of sex, alcohol, and drugs, eating, dancing, gambling) and urban power structures nurtured subaltern musical creativity.
We will examine the rough/respectable, sacred/profane divides that separate blues and gospel music. We will look at instances of boundary crossing between the two: blues players preaching the gospel, but gospel players playing music shaped by blues and the barrelhouse, and worshippers dancing in church.
We will draw on my library of 12,000+- recordings; interviews; Youtube videos; DVDs; and a number of back ground readings.