EHI Courses

Dr. Michael Jin, Associate Professor, Global Asian Studies & History / mrjin@uic.edu

TA: Daniel Barton

Course Information – Lecture: MW 9:30-10:45, Writing Workshop: M 11-11:50
CRNs: 44071 and 44072 (must register for both)

“Instead of asking what are people’s roots, we ought to think about what are their routes, the different points by which they have come to be now; they are, in a sense, the sum of those differences.”  — Stuart Hall

This course explores the contested ideas about home, identity, citizenship, and belonging in the lived experiences of individuals and communities in diasporas. We will place these experiences in a variety of global historical contexts, such as imperialism, war, human migration and displacement, and geopolitical upheavals in the long twentieth century. Our intellectual exploration will take us to different places and times in global diasporas—from the early twentieth-century colonial world in Asia to the borderlands of the Americas to our own neighborhoods in Chicago today. We will examine how historical issues like race, gender, sexuality, indigeneity, intergenerationality, and political ideologies have shaped diasporic individuals’ agency and their confrontations with different structures of social and cultural oppression in multiple national spaces. Our readings represent diverse voices that encompass a number of academic disciplines and literary genres—memoirs, graphic novels, cultural theories, historical fiction, and more—across multiple borders, linguistic worlds, and cultural traditions. Their historically grounded perspectives will help us understand how diasporic individuals articulate their place in the world by attributing different meanings to the past, present, and future.

Mary Kate Coleman, Teaching Assistant, English / mvarna4@uic.edu

Course Information – TR 11-12:15PM / CRN: 45724

English photographer and educator Daniel Meadows defined digital stories as “short, personal multimedia tales told from the heart.” This genre has been celebrated for its creative autonomy, as most digital storytellers are not artists or aesthetes, but lay practitioners. This is an art form without a master, whose end goal is not publication or recognition, but self-expression and community-building. Central to this intention is the storyteller’s control over the content. Given that so much of the ethos of digital storytelling depends upon the participant not only telling their own story but also crafting the visual and auditory experience of that story, so that the product is in no way curated or manipulated by established artistic or social institutions, the idea of collaborative digital storytelling—in which an academic investigator facilitates the process by doing the audiovisual editing—is complicated, both practically and ethically. This course will delve into the nexus of this problem, exploring questions of representation and intentionality: What is my relationship to the content when I’m telling my own story? How do my agency and my sense of social responsibility shift when I’m collaborating on someone else’s story? How does this dynamic change when the characters in my work are fictional?

Students will learn the basics of video editing and make several audiovisual shorts, some that tell their own personal stories and others that tell the story of a community partner, in addition to engaging in service-oriented field work, participating in occasional field trips, writing short response papers, and reading widely on ethnography, witness, empathy, and the ethics of representation. The central intention of this course is to complicate our idea of the writer as an independent agent and get us thinking critically about the ways in which we as writers are responsible to our communities for the choices we make in representing others. Please note: This course requires a minimum of 12 hours of community service.

Dr. Sara Hall, Associate Professor and Chair of Moving Image Arts, Germanic Studies / sahall@uic.edu

TA: Katie Brandt

Course Information – Lecture: TR 9:30-10:45, Writing Workshop: T 11-11:50
CRNs: 45430 and 45431 (must register for both)

This course will introduce students to the pursuit of “police cultural studies,” which involves the examination not only of representations of police in popular and artistic culture, but also of the ways that law enforcement agencies have taken advantage of creative and popular culture to serve their own agendas. Students will learn about the behind-the-scenes involvement of police in radio, movies, and television shows and the recent movement to track and analyze these shows in an effort to open up spaces for critical modes of audience engagement and for dismantling injustice in the entertainment industry and in contemporary US life.

Kellee Warren, Assistant Professor & Special Collections Librarian, Daley Library / kwarre4@uic.edu

TA: Michael Williamson

Course Information – Lecture: MW 9:30-10:45, Writing Workshop: W 11-11:50
CRNs: 45432 and 45433 (must register for both)

This course will introduce students to scholarly conversations in special collections and archives, with a focus on the production, collection, and accessibility of historical and contemporary information–the raw materials for research. Students will critically read across disciplines on the history of manuscripts, rare books, and other cultural heritage materials related to the Black diaspora. Further, students will learn about memory institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums–GLAM), and memory workers (special collections librarians, archivists, curators, etc.). Students will read broadly in library and information science, archival science, English, history, Black studies, Caribbean studies, and more. Resources will be newspaper articles, journal articles, book chapters, podcasts, and conference recordings in order to develop research and information literacy skills for a university setting.

Dr. Laura Hostetler, Professor, History & Global Asian Studies / hostetle@uic.edu

Course Information – TR 11-1215PM / CRN: 43471

This Engaged Humanities Initiative second-year seminar explores the human experience of displacement and the subsequent search for belonging. Displacement can include experiences ranging from international migration, internal migration, and the consequences of social mobility (up or down). Displacement normally means a shift in geographic location, but almost always has economic, social, and cultural ramifications as well. In each of these instances, those affected need to learn new skills in order to survive—and hopefully thrive—in a new environment. We will also consider what constitutes a border, how boundaries are formed and maintained, and the skills and cost required to cross over. International borders are not the only ones that can be difficult to cross.

Course readings include personal narratives and ethnographic accounts that engage the full human experience of what it means to be displaced and to search for a sense of belonging. As a class, we will also research and examine the historical reasons for experiences of displacement described in the readings. Finally, we will look at ways in which specific instances of displacement, border crossing, and the ongoing quest for belonging, have been treated in the public arena through media coverage and in political discourse.

Dr. Ralph Cintron, Associate Professor, English; Latin American & Latino Studies/ rcintron@uic.edu

TA: Casey Corcoran

Course Information – Lecture: MW 9:30-10:45, Writing Workshop: M 11-11:50
CRNs: 44071 and 44072 (must register for both)

Essentially, the data supports the argument that pandemics and climate change are both related to deforestation in “developing” regions in China, Africa, Malaysia, and elsewhere. Deforestation shrinks the habitat of wild animals carrying pathogens and brings them closer to domestic animals and thus humans. The third term, “hate,” focuses particularly on climate migrants encountering water shortages, droughts, and failing state-infrastructures primarily in the Mid-East, Africa, and Latin America (particularly Central America). The rise of white supremacy groups, survivalists, and militia groups in the United States and nationalism in Europe will be discussed.

Dr. Ruth Rosenberg, Associate Professor, Music / rrose76@uic.edu

TA: John Goldbach

Course Information – Lecture: TR 9:30-10:45, Writing Workshop: T 11-11:50
CRNs: 44073 and 44074 (must register for both)

This course, an interdisciplinary introduction to sound studies, is premised on the idea that listening is a significant (if sometimes overlooked) mode of engagement. Scholarship and inquiry on this topic within the humanities has grown in recent years as music scholars have rethought the standard frameworks for the study of music (style, repertoire, composer/biography, audience), and scholars from related fields have introduced new approaches to sound, musical expression, and practices of listening. In general, work in this field approaches questions such as: How and why do we listen? How does sound structure our social and political relations and discourses? What role does sound play in the way we interact with the material world? How has sound been used to empower, disempower, control, liberate, or engage us? The course has five units, and each is organized around a question to which the assigned readings provide some sort of response. No knowledge or formal background in music is required for this course.

Mary Kate Coleman, Teaching Assistant, English / mvarna4@uic.edu

Course Information – TR 11-12:15PM / CRN: 45724

This Engaged Humanities Initiative second-year seminar is a service-oriented course. Students will conduct collaborative storytelling field work in the community and create multimedia testimonial shorts.

Dr. Sara Hall, Associate Professor and Director of the Moving Image Arts Program, Germanic Studies / sahall@uic.edu

TA: Katrina Washington

Course Information – Lecture: TR 9:30-10:45, Writing Workshop: T 11-11:50
CRNs: 45430 and 45431 (must register for both)

This course will introduce students to what literary scholar Klaus Mladek has called “police cultural studies,” which involves the study not only of representations of police in popular and artistic culture, but also of the ways that law enforcement agencies have taken advantage of creative, popular and organizational culture to serve their professional and public agendas. Students will learn about the behind-the-scenes involvement of police in television shows and the recent movement to track and analyze these shows in an effort to open up spaces for different modes of audience engagement and for confronting injustice in the entertainment industry and in contemporary US life.

Teresa Moreno, Instructor and Undergraduate Engagement Coordinator, Daley Library, University / thrmoren@uic.edu

TA: Mary Kate Coleman

Course Information – Lecture: MW 9:30-10:45, Writing Workshop: W 11-11:50
CRNs: 45432 and 45433 (must register for both)

Is information inherently neutral?  What types of political structures exist beneath the surface of our information that impact how we find, use and create information?  This class will explore the humanities side of how information is created, used and shared in our society.  We will use a social justice framework to explore topics such as how Google curates our searches, how the Library of Congress controls how information is organized and the political implications for us and society of how information is created and shared.

Dr. Adam Goodman, Assistant Professor, History and Latin American and Latino Studies / asig@uic.edu

Course Information – TR 11-12:15PM / CRN: 43471

This Engaged Humanities Initiative second-year seminar will explore four pressing issues of historical and political importance: (1) US empire; (2) refugee crises; (3) police violence and urban uprisings; and (4) identity politics and pan-ethnic identity formation. The examination of these topics will center around, though not be limited to, the intertwined histories of the United States and Central America. Students will read cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research and hear from scholars, journalists, and policy analysts working in these 4 areas. They will also “get their hands dirty” working with relevant archival records, oral histories, and other primary sources.

Dr. Jonathan Mekinda, Associate Professor, Design History / mekinda@uic.edu

TA: Joseph Staten

Course Information – Lecture: TR 9:30-10:45, Writing Workshop: T 11-11:50.

Design pervades our lives today, from the phones we carry to the networks of people, energy, and material that enliven them, from the visual languages of the brands we consume to the forms and logistics of our protests and rallies. Nowhere is this more evident than the contemporary city. Taking Chicago as its frame, this course will consider various episodes in the recent history of design to illuminate the stakes of design’s present ubiquity. Among the themes we will explore are conceptions of the natural and artificial, the relationship between humans and machines, and the myriad ways that design simultaneously materializes dominant conceptions of race, class, and gender and affords a vital channel for projecting radical alternatives. Course activities will include fieldtrips, lectures by practicing designers, and design projects in addition to a research paper that students will develop around a course topic of their choice.

Dr. Junaid Quadri, Associate Professor, History / jquadri@uic.edu

TA: Ben Seigle

Course Information – Lecture: MW 9:30-10:45, Writing Workshop: M 11-11:50

This course introduces students to the history, cultures, and politics of Islam and the Muslim community in the United States. It starts from the counter-intuitive premise that Islam and Muslims are not (only) new arrivals to the US, but rather have in some form or another, played an important role in the nation’s construction. We will examine the presence and self-presentation of early Muslim slaves, the construction of Islam as a foreign other in nineteenth-century foreign policy, and how that foreign other was imagined by the founding fathers as an outer limit for the principle of religious tolerance. As Islam came to be a more regular presence in the country, Chicago quickly became a focal point of Muslim life. This presents the class with a unique opportunity to explore the idea of Chicago as a Muslim city through field trips and guest speakers from the local community. Students will be introduced to the diversity of Muslims in the United States, and encounter the many ways that Islam is lived, especially after the arrival of mid-century Muslim immigrants. In addition to highlighting the many contributions of Muslims to America, we will also examine the challenges that various Muslim communities have faced over time, and how they have responded to them. This includes topics as varied as Black American Muslim involvement in the civil rights movement, the central role of Islam in hip hop culture, relations between immigrant and African-American Muslims, media representations of Muslims, and attempts to counter rising Islamophobia post-9/11 that raise questions about how precisely to understand the phenomenon.  (i.e., Is Islamophobia simply another species of American racism? How does it diverge and converge with its European counterpart? To what extent does it draw on a vocabulary and fears that are reminiscent of anti-Semitism?)

Dr. Steve Jones, UIC Distinguished Professor, Communications | sjones@uic.edu

Workshop Instructor: Jared O’Connor

Course Information: HUM 101 (CRN 36799) MW 9:30-10:45AM  and HUM 100 (CRN41752) M 11-11:50AM

This seminar will explore and examine how we talk about and how we have envisioned, and continue to envision, media, information, and communication technologies and their role in society. The future is socially and imaginatively constructed through communication, particularly media, literature, film and art. While it may be the case that most aspects of our lives, from the daily commute, through work and relationships, to major events such as birth and death are increasingly intertwined with media, information, and communication technologies, those technologies are being shaped not just through engineering and design in the creation of technological artifacts but also by the discursive rhetoric of imaginative, creative activity that sometimes precedes the artifacts by years, decades, or even centuries. We will examine and discuss critical questions about the interplay of art, design, and engineering in the development, deployment and adoption of technologies that give the information age its objective shape and subjective power. Our goal will be to develop critical analytical thinking about the role of metaphors and visions of media, information, and communication technologies in the shaping of social structures and arrangements of power through technology design, regulation, and use.

Dr. Beate Geissler, Associate Professor, Art & Art History| beate@uic.edu

Workshop Instructor: Gregor Baszak

Course Information: HUM 101 (CRN 42877) TR 9:30-10:45AM and HUM 100 (CRN 42886) T 11-11:50AM

Every 2 minutes today we snap as many photos as the whole of humanity took in the 1800s. Images come to us through a variety of mediums; mobile phones, online sources, magazines, newspapers, billboards, advertisements, in art and on television, to name only a few. Even more remarkable than the quantity of images that we are exposed to and which we produce ourselves is the effect that these images have on us. Images always come with an agenda – they seek to sell us products, influence how we think, draw correlations between things or reinforce political opinions…

Through lectures, presentations and projects we are going to begin to deconstruct the visible environment in which we live. Exercises, gallery and museum visits will help to supplement our experiences. Through the analysis of our use of technical and technological images we will begin to see all of the ‘moving parts’ of how visual culture and technology affects us. Recognizing visual language(s) we are empowered to understand how imagery transforms us. Employing visual codes to our own pictures and reflect how we participate, how we navigate through a world with optical devices, may provide insights into the workings of our culture.

Dr. Ruth E. Rosenberg, Associate Professor of Music | rrose76@uic.edu

Workshop Instructor: Bailey Szustak

Course Information: HUM 101 (CRN 36805) TR 9:30-10:45AM and HUM 100 (CRN 41753) T 11-11:50AM

This course, an interdisciplinary introduction to sound studies, is premised on the idea that listening is a significant (if sometimes overlooked) mode of engagement. Scholarship and inquiry on this topic within the humanities has grown in recent years as music scholars have rethought the standard frameworks for the study of music (style, repertoire, composer/biography, audience), and scholars from related fields have introduced new approaches to sound, musical expression, and practices of listening. In general, work in this field approaches questions such as: How and why do we listen? How does sound structure our social and political relations and discourses? What role does sound play in the way we interact with the material world? How has sound been used to empower, disempower, control, liberate, or engage us? The course has five units, and each is organized around a question to which the assigned readings provide some sort of response. No knowledge or formal background in music is required for this course.

Dr. Molly Doane, Associate Professor, Anthropology

Workshop Instructor: Tierney Powell

This course will explore the possibility that cities like Chicago can provide a pathway to ecological futures. We will explore the idea that doing so requires new ways of thinking about the human in relationship to the environment, and to the plants, animals, and substances that constitute our world. Chicago is home to many innovative environmental initiatives and environmental justice movements seeking to alter the way we design, build, and provision our city.  We will explore some of the main factors contributing to climate change, including food production, industrial emissions, and transportation and housing, from the perspective of these potential solutions. The course will incorporate visits to sites around the city and invited speakers to explore: 1). Chicago’s Native-American landscapes and alternative relationships to nature 2). The city as a sanctuary for wild species 3). Alternative food systems and the idea of urban food sovereignty 4). Environmental Justice and the afterlives of coal and oil 5). Affordable and ecological housing 6).  Wellbeing and urban nature

Dr. Laura Hostetler, Professor, History & Global Asian Studies

This course explores the human experience of displacement and the subsequent search for belonging. Displacement can include experiences ranging from international migration, internal migration, and the consequences of social mobility (up or down). Displacement normally means a shift in geographic location, but almost always has economic, social, and cultural ramifications as well. In each of these instances, those affected need to learn new skills in order to survive—and hopefully thrive—in a new environment. We will also consider what constitutes a border, how boundaries are formed and maintained, and the skills and cost required to cross over. International borders are not the only ones that can be difficult to cross.

Course readings include personal narratives and ethnographic accounts that engage the full human experience of what it means to be displaced and to search for a sense of belonging. As a class we will also research and examine the historical reasons for experiences of displacement described in the readings. Finally, we will look at ways in which specific instances of displacement, border crossing, and the ongoing quest for belonging, have been treated in the public arena through media coverage and in political discourse.

Dr. Anna Kornbluh, Associate Professor, English

The humanities study human expression in literature, art, discourse, and custom, understanding these expressions by looking deeply at how they’re put together, and looking widely at when, where, and why they are produced and consumed. Using these deep and wide interpretative skills, we value the history of ideas and culture, but more importantly we reach toward building new futures. In our modern world, art, entertainment, and even the humanities themselves seem like luxuries for after work, and so we perceive human history as if people first built functional forms like tools, environments, and cities and only later made beautiful forms like art. But in fact humans made songs, paintings, dance, sculpture, and stories even when they had no fire, no buildings, nor enough food; there has been no human life without art. This fact inspires the big questions in this course, which we ask with the help of political and cultural theory, art, and literary texts: “why do human beings universally make art and literature?” “what does this universality imply for the organizing of social life?” “why is there so much suffering in human civilization?” and “how can works of the imagination address political catastrophes like inequality and climate change?” Our texts include essays in Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, queer, postcolonial, and critical race theories, alongside novels, poems, sculpture, music, photography, and film. Our research projects take shape through frequent responsive writing assignments, group exercises in synthesizing big ideas, and optional field trips to public parks / art spaces, and culminate in formulating creative prescriptions for collective existence.

Dr. Rachel Havrelock, Associate Professor, Department of English and Founder, UIC Freshwater Lab

Workshop Instructor: Kathleen Blackburn

Are you what you eat? If so, then can you determine exactly what you are eating?  Why is it so difficult to know the ingredients, processes, and industries that make our food?  If we can’t really know what we’re eating, then can we know what we are?

Questions such as these will guide our exploration of food and food production.  The course is resolutely local as it shows the global nature of making food. We’ll begin with Upton Sinclair’s famous Chicago novel The Jungle and appraise how the story of a single family humanizes and renders vivid the ways in which early 20^th Century food production drove immigration, labor practices, and the geography of Chicago. We will visit Back of the Yards where The Jungle is set and tour The Plant, an abandoned 93,500 square foot pork processing facility turned into a working model of a closed loop net zero energy food production space. Students will train their focus on current economic and industrial aspects of food production including futures trading, seeds and fertilizers, factory farms, pesticides and organic foods, genetically modified foods, and fast food.  The class will also consider the intersection of food and culture and conduct interviews on a distinct food tradition and/or recipe.  As we meet with professionals working on different aspects of food and visit key sites in Chicago, we will also engage questions of food insecurity, meals served in institutional settings like schools and dorms, offerings available on the UIC campus, food deserts, soil, emergency planning and urban farms.

Dr. Nadine Naber, Professor, Gender and Women’s Studies and Global Asian Studies

Workshop Instructor: Cecy Villarruel

This course explores the themes of immigration, race/racism, and social justice through a comparative focus on Asian Americans and Arab Americans. Students will engage with these themes through a focus on (1) experiences of immigration and settlement; (2) the impact of U.S.-led war on diaspora communities living within the U.S.; (3) struggles related to gender and sexuality within immigrant communities; and (4) activism related to racial and social justice. Examples of course topics include “Japanese Internment” and the “Muslim Ban;” Palestine and the Philippines; feminism and queer resistance; and coalitions and solidarity activism. A significant portion of the course will train students to consider how academic research can contribute to community building in the world around us. Throughout the semester, students will interact with community-based organizations and will learn methodologies related to building trust, respect, and accountability between researchers/universities and community organizations.

Dr. Ömür Harmanşah, Associate Professor, Art History

Workshop Instructor: Margaux Brown

Our understanding of the past is profoundly impacted by the politics of the present. Since the 19th century, archaeological projects in the Middle East have always been entangled with local politics. In this course, we will explore the use and abuse of archaeology among the modern nation states in the Middle East since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. What do ancient pharaohs mean to modern Egyptians? Who suggested that Hittites of ancient Anatolia were the ancestors of Turks? Why do modern Assyrian Christians still celebrate ancient festivals like the Akitu? How do archaeological projects in Israel-Palestine attempt to verify Biblical texts? Why did Saddam Hussein consider himself the last Babylonian king? Discussing the formation of modern nation states and their secular modernity, we will study the integration of imagined ancient pasts and cultural heritage in the making of national identities and state ideologies. We will interrogate how the pervasive force of archaeology became nationalistic obsession since the late 19th century.

The seminar is also intended to capture current debates on cultural heritage in the Middle East. Such debates have intensified recently with the civil conflicts and political unrest in countries like Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. The looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, the bombing of Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, ISIS’s destruction of archaeological artifacts and sites in Iraq and Syria, extensive looting of archaeological sites across the Middle East and the illegal antiquities trade are topics of interest for this course. How can we address this extensive destruction of world heritage that are increasingly becoming targeted in our times of crisis?