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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
An introduction to religious life in the US since the late 19th century. We will focus on mainstream groups as well as countercultural movements that highlight distinctive ways of being both "religious" and "American," including the Americanization of global religions in the US context. Major themes include religious encounter and conflict; secularization, resurgent traditionalism, and new religious establishments; experimentalism, eclecticism, and spirituality; the relationship between religious change and broader social currents (pertaining e.g. to race, class, gender, and sexuality); transnational crossings; and the enduring challenges of religious multiplicity in the US.
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4.00 Credits
An interpretive look at the American city in terms of changing attitudes toward urban life. City and suburb are experienced as the product of design and planning decisions informed by cultural and economic forces, and in relationship to utopian and pragmatic efforts to reinterpret urban traditions in search of contemporary alternatives. Topics include: persistent ideals such as the single-family home, attitudes toward public and private space, the rise of suburbs and suburban sprawl, cycles of disinvestment and renewed interest in urban centers, and impacts of mobility and technology on settlement patterns.
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4.00 Credits
People make history through the things they make, collect, exhibit, exchange, throw away, or ignore. Over four centuries, Harvard has not only amassed books and manuscripts but art works, scientific instruments and specimens, ethnographic objects, and historical relics of all sorts. By learning how and why particular things arrived in Cambridge and what happened to them when they got here, students will discover how material objects have shaped academic disciplines, reinforced or challenged social boundaries, and defined America's place in the world. This is an interactive course, with weekly visits to museums and close-up investigation of specimens and artifacts.
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4.00 Credits
In the US compared to other major nations, how have social problems been defined and redefined in recent decades; why do they appear differently to various groups; and how are public policies about problematic social conditions debated, devised, and changed? This course synthesizes various kinds of evidence-demographic, attitudinal, ethnographic, and institutional-to probe the creation and impact of major public policies about social support for families and workers; immigration and citizenship, and access to higher education.
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4.00 Credits
An exploration of the dynamic religious landscape of the US with special focus on Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh traditions in the most recent period of post-1965 immigration. How are faith and freedom negotiated in a more complex society? In what contexts do minority religious communities encounter long-dominant Christian and Jewish communities? How is America changing as religious communities struggle with civic, constitutional, ethical, and theological issues, especially in the post-9/11 period? Readings, films, discussion, and class projects will focus on particular cases and controversies.
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4.00 Credits
Religion has inspired new understandings of black social and political engagement. From protest oriented struggles for civil rights and black power to the personal responsibility calls of the Million Man March and the growing influence of Evangelicalism and Pentacostalism in black churches, religion has informed how African Americans engage the challenges of everyday life in America. Through ethnography, auto/biography, and documentary film, this class examines the influence that the social reality of blackness and the religious expression of faith have had on the day to day existence of people of African descent in the US and abroad.
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4.00 Credits
Additional training in modern Uyghur, with attention to improvement of spoken fluency and comprehension. Extensive readings in a range of genres, including historical writing and academic prose as well as religious texts.
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4.00 Credits
Continuation of Uyghur 120A.
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4.00 Credits
North America as an evolving visual environment is analyzed as a systems concatenation involving such constituent elements as farms, small towns, shopping malls, highways, suburbs, and as depicted in fiction, poetry, cartography, television, cinema, and advertising and cybernetic simulation.
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4.00 Credits
This seminar surveys structures of visibility and invisibility, marginalization and resistance revealing thirty years of alternative cooperative networks, tactical media activism, and participatory public art colliding with mainstream cultural economy like its missing mass. Students research groups such as The Yes Men, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Group Material, and Temporary Services while debating critical theories of Adorno, Brecht, de Certeau, Mouff, Ranciere, Enwezor, Kester, among other critics of engaged art.
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