HON 407 Seminars

Honors Seminar

Honors seminars are interdisciplinary courses taught by faculty from across the university. Seminars are small, discussion-based, reading- and writing-intensive courses that require students to actively engage with the source material and write an extended research paper. The Honors College offers several seminars every quarter, on a variety of topics. Class size limited to 20.

All Honors students are required to take at least one 4-credit Honors Junior Seminar (Hon 407) as partial fulfillment of their third-year requirements.

FALL 2024 Seminars

Seminar: Narrative as Liberatory / Emancipatory Methodology
HON 407 - 4 credits - CRN: 11283
MW 0900-1050
Instructor: Dr. Amanda Singer

Narrative invites the voices and stories of those being studied into the mix of qualitative research, enlivening the data and humanizing research inquiries. We will study how to use narratives in social science research, and will specifically examine how narratives can be used in Liberatory / Emancipatory methodologies, which recognize data collection and analysis as vital puzzle pieces that hold the potential to transform complex social problems. We will draw liberally from critical theory in deepening our understanding of social problems, and in scaffolding our collective creative process in designing meaningful research.

Seminar: Crime Fiction Alla Turca
HON 407 - 4 credits - CRN: 11284
MW 1130-1250
Instructor: Dr. Pelin Basci

Why do we read crime fiction? What do murder mysteries tell us about the city and its history? How do detective stories (polisiye) respond to bourgeois anxieties about the speed and direction of change in the urban environment? This seminar investigates linkages between the city and its representations in the genre of crime fiction. 

After a brief history of the genre, we will read literature set in Istanbul, Turkey, which will expose us to the history and contemporary life of this cosmopolitan hub located between two continents. It will also offer us an occasion to reflect on orientalist and postcolonial imaginings of the city.

Seminar: Living in the Anthropocene
HON 407 - 4 credits - CRN: 11281
MW 1400-1550
Instructor: Dr. Tyler Cornelius

Relations between human beings and the non-human world have never seemed as urgent or troubled as they do today. Concerns over climate change, ocean acidification, disappearing grasslands and forests, soil depletion, dwindling water resources, and mass extinction flash across our phones and computers and feature prominently in our social media. The term given to describe these changes, the Anthropocene or “the age of humans,” is a contested one, and the struggle over its use and meanings can reveal much about our current environmental moment. Yet, every crisis we confront has a history behind it, and a closer look at how we have understood our place in the natural world offers important lessons for the future.

This seminar offers students an introduction to thinking about these challenges by studying "nature" both as a cultural concept and as a historical agent of urban change. In engaging with a variety of explanatory frameworks and disciplinary lenses, we’ll begin with big questions: What is nature? What is the environment? What histories, stories, and philosophical worldviews guide people in their respective environments, and how do these vary across time and space? In answering these and other questions, we’ll examine the socioeconomic, political, cultural, historical, and philosophical drivers of current environmental conditions, and see how a transformed Earth can be imagined and reimagined in new and creative ways.

Seminar: TBD
HON 407 - 4 credits - CRN: 11285
TR 1000-1150
Instructor: Dr. Harry York

Course Description Coming Soon!

Seminar: Infrastructural Worlds: the anthropology of urban infrastructures and materiality 
HON 407 - 4 credits - CRN: 11282

TR 1400-1550
Instructor: Dr. Federico Perez

How do infrastructures, technologies, and material artifacts shape the urban environment? What does viewing the city as a social and techno-material ensemble reveal about the urban condition? What forms of political action and conceptions of social justice are possible in the networked geographies of contemporary cities? This course examines these questions by drawing on interdisciplinary work from anthropology, science and technology studies, political ecology, history, and critical urban theory. We will study the techno-material dimensions of urban life with particular attention to power and political agency, as well as to the symbolic and aesthetic dimensions of urban infrastructure. 

SUMMER 2024 Seminars

Linguistic Justice
HON 407-002    CRN: 80398    
Dr. Eric Rodriguez       emr7@pdx.edu     
FULLY ONLINE  -  6/24/24 - 7/21/24

This course offers an introduction to the study of linguistic justice and the critical role language plays in both perpetuating and challenging social inequalities. Grounded in the pivotal 1974 "Students’ Right to Their Own Language" resolution adopted by the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the course examines how educational and institutional language policies impact equity and accessibility on college campuses and any implications beyond the college classroom. Students will critically engage with the implications of linguistic standardization, the dynamics of language rights, and the intersection of language with identity and power. Through scholarly readings, case studies, and reflective writing, students will assess historical and contemporary debates over language discrimination and advocacy on college campuses. This course aims to inform students with the theoretical and practical knowledge to promote linguistic inclusivity in diverse settings.

Food Fight!  History and American Foodways
HON 407-001    CRN: 80399    
Dr. Tyler Cornelius        corne@pdx.edu     
FULLY ONLINE -  6/24/24 - 7/21/24

Course Description:  One of the best windows into the values of a society is by looking at what they eat – where their food comes from, how it is prepared and consumed, and what it can tell us about the larger forces shaping its past and present. To explore the relationship between food and power in North American contexts, this seminar investigates food by asking historical questions about social, political, and environmental change. Organized chronologically, this class will examine the role of indigenous peoples, immigrants, and the enslaved in America’s growth as an agricultural power.  It will explore the connection between food consumption and shifting gendered, racial/ethnic, and class identities.  Lastly, this class will investigate North America’s transformation from an agrarian society to an industrialized one, focusing on how modern industrial food practices and technologies have impacted both urban and rural ecosystems, the labor of food production/distribution, and how contemporary Americans are imagining alternative food possibilities.

SPRING 2024 Seminars

Global Exchange in the Middle Ages
HON 407 - 006    CRN: 61331    
York, William    why@pdx.edu
TR 1400-1550    SEH 106

Course Description:
This course will examine the history of the Middle Ages from the 13th-16th Centuries from a “global” perspective. Our approach will seek to decenter Europe and focus instead on communication and trade along the Silk Road and via sea routes connecting Europe to China and places in between. We will examine the place of the Mongols, the Islamic World, and Africa (Saharan and sub-Saharan) in global exchange networks that allowed the spread of ideas, commodities, and disease. We will attend closely to the role of environmental and climate history in shaping exchange of diseases such as the bubonic plague pandemic. We will also consider cultural and intellectual interactions along the routes.

History of the Social Sciences
HON 407-002    CRN: 61332    
Beyler, Richard    drrb@pdx.edu     
TR 1000-1150    SEH 106

Course Description:
This course considers the development of the ‘social sciences’ or ‘human sciences’ from the Enlightenment era to the present. Through reading classic texts as well as recent commentaries, we will encounter such themes as these:
• Contrasting efforts to link the social sciences to the natural sciences or to detach them
• Contrasting attempts to define the relationship between the self and society
• Contrasting faith in or rejection of the concept of progress
• Ambivalence about the role of rationalization in modern society
• Alternating reliance upon or critique of prejudices and biases (race, gender, etc.) in social theorizing
• Political mobilization of various social theories
Members of the seminar will have the chance to explore their specific individual interests through independent projects/presentations (in-class, audio-visual, or web-based). Connections to current studies or research projects are welcome.

Wildfires and Urban Smoke in the Cascadia Region
202402    HON 407-003    CRN: 61333    
Fink, Jonathan          jonfink@pdx.edu     
TR 1000-1150    SEH 107
Hybrid: 1 or 2 classes in person per week; others via Zoom

Course Description:
This non-majors Honors seminar is designed to introduce students to science and policy issues surrounding the increasingly dangerous conditions caused by wildfire and urban smoke in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. and Canada. Based on a region-wide webinar series started in April 2020, the course will include guest presentations by leading academic, government, NGO and industry wildfire and smoke experts, as well as access to over 100 YouTube video recordings of past talks. Topics will include the effects of climate change on wildfire frequency and intensity; meteorological influences on wildfire occurrence; the health impacts of urban smoke; wildfire ecology and forest management; fire prediction, monitoring and modeling; urban planning and wildfire mitigation; and emergency response and management.
Students will be encouraged to use Chat GPT or other LLMs to help them explore these topics. Grades will be based on class participation, short assignments based on the video recordings and a group project in which students prepare for a wildfire- and/or smoke-related hazard for a city in the Pacific Northwest.

Racial Politics of Urban America
HON 407-004    CRN: 61330    
McCutcheon, Paul    pmccu2@pdx.edu     
MW 0900-1050    SEH 108

This seminar is a quarter-long excursion across the racial cartographies of urban America. As we travel through U.S. cities, we will consider how urban space created possibilities for new forms of entertainment, artistic exploration, social organization, and modes of pleasure even as they exacerbated social divisions and sustained particular forms of inequality and exclusion that were felt and experienced beyond the borders of the cities we will consider. We will explore histories of segregation, migration, imperialism, settlement, protest, and political struggle. We will explore the hidden histories embedded in urban spaces and consider how cities mediate the material, psychological, and social lives of those living in, and beyond, the borders of the city. As such, our journey through U.S. cities will require us to traverse a number of unexpected roads and paths. Although we will make extended stops in a number of U.S. cities, our journey will often require trips to and from global destinations, both urban and rural, forcing us to crisscross the globe from the “global cities” of trade, commerce, and production to the agrarian economies in places like U.S. South. We will travel migratory routes, circuits of global capital, and ecological pathways that help structure the liquor stores, dance clubs, strip malls, skyscrapers, factories, and the other built spaces that make up large parts of the U.S. city. Perhaps paradoxically, we will find that the racial contours of urban space become more legible and clear even as the borders that define those spaces become less coherent and definable.
 

Theorizing the Speculative Turn in Contemporary Literature 
HON 407-005    CRN: 61334    
Steele, Alexander    asteele@pdx.edu     
MW 1400-1550    CH 254

Course Description:
When Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature following the publication of the fantasy epic The Buried Giant, building on his 2005 sci-fi masterpiece Never Let Me Go, it seemed to signal that contemporary literature’s turn to speculative genres was more than a trend, but a new quality indicative of a shift in what we mean by “literature” today. From the success of Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad (2016) and the stories of Native horror provocateur Stephen Graham Jones, to the historic triple-Hugo-winning feat by N. K. Jemisin with her Broken Earth trilogy (2015-2017), much of the most exciting, important, and vital literature of today operates formally by incorporating elements of genres historically viewed as antithetical to literature itself, be they science fiction, fantasy, or horror. This class asks students to critically examine and question this cultural shift, learning to historically contextualize the many ways that “literature” has been defined, understood, and valued over time. We will theorize the social, political, and cultural forces that have made this “speculative turn” possible, as well as its role in reimagining what literature is and can offer in our contemporary moment. Readings may include works by Kazuo Ishiguro, Stephen Graham Jones, N. K. Jemisin, Susanna Clarke, Octavia Butler, China Miéville, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Jeff VanderMeer, as well as theoretical texts by Sherryl Vint, Alexis Lothian, and Maren Linett, among others.

Food Fight!  History and American Foodways
HON 407-007    CRN: 63920    
Cornelius, Tyler        corne@pdx.edu     
TR 1400-1550    SEH 107

Course Description:One of the best windows into the values of a society is by looking at what they eat – where their food comes from, how it is prepared and consumed, and what it can tell us about the larger forces shaping its past and present. To explore the relationship between food and power in North American contexts, this seminar investigates food by asking historical questions about social, political, and environmental change. Organized chronologically, this class will examine the role of indigenous peoples, immigrants, and the enslaved in America’s growth as an agricultural power.  It will explore the connection between food consumption and shifting gendered, racial/ethnic, and class identities.  Lastly, this class will investigate North America’s transformation from an agrarian society to an industrialized one, focusing on how modern industrial food practices and technologies have impacted both urban and rural ecosystems, the labor of food production/distribution, and how contemporary Americans are imagining alternative food possibilities.

Winter 2024 Seminars

Seminar: Theorizing the Speculative Turn in Contemporary Literature
HON 407 – 4 credits – CRN: 41367
MW 1400 – 1550
Instructor: Dr. Alexander Steele

When Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature following the publication of his second hybrid literary-genre novel, the fantasy epic The Buried Giant, building on the acclaim of his 2005 sci-fi masterpiece Never Let Me Go, it became clear that contemporary literature’s turn to speculative genres was officially more than a trend, but a defining new quality indicative of a shift in what we mean by “literature” today. From the success of Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad and the stories of Native horror provocateur Stephen Graham Jones, to the historic triple-Hugo-winning feat by N. K. Jemisin with her Broken Earth series, much of the most exciting, important, and vital literature of today operates formally by incorporating elements of genres historically viewed as antithetical to literature itself, be they science fiction, fantasy, or horror. 

This class will ask students to critically examine and question this cultural shift, learning to historically contextualize the many ways in which “literature” has been defined, understood, and valued over time. We will theorize the social, political, and cultural forces that have made this “speculative turn” possible, as well as its role in reimagining literature’s vital affordances in our moment.  Readings include works by Kazuo Ishiguro, Stephen Graham Jones, N. K. Jemisin, Susanna Clarke, Octavia Butler, and Ursula K. Le Guin, and theoretical texts by Sherryl Vint and Alexis Lothian, among others.

Seminar: Cities & Disasters
HON 407 – 4 credits – CRN: 41368
MW 1130 – 1320
Instructor: Dr. Jack Corbett

Across history humans have seen their cities swallowed by earthquakes, buried by volcanoes, drowned by floods, erased by fire, battered by tsunamis, pounded by hurricanes, swamped by rising seas, ravaged by pestilence, and most recently disappearing into tar pits. Despite heroic displays of bravery and super-human efforts by Dwayne Johnson generally the most we can hope for are resolute and inspiring commitments to build back better. Movie melodrama notwithstanding, with their concentration of population and resources cities represent points of vulnerability to natural disasters, presenting ever-increasing challenge to those who seek to inhabit, prosper in, and protect them. And the nature of threat or of viable response is by no means certain or universally-accepted.

Even in the face of devastation and tragedy humans continue to urbanize their future. The United Nations estimates that by 2030 more than 700 cities will have at least 1 million inhabitants, facing enormous demands with regard to water, waste, housing, and food. Climate change confronts urban concentrations with additional stress and needs, making attention to sustainability an increasing concern. In effect we find larger populations facing both complex adaptations to existing crises and prospective threats from changing circumstances. This seminar explores a range of vulnerabilities of urban life to potential disasters as well as proposals for adaptation and mitigation. Our perspective is cross-disciplinary, spanning discussions of risk, change, policy, engineering and behavioral responses, personal obligations, and implications of the failure to act. While the seminar is cross-national we will give attention to the Pacific Northwest, and particularly to its increasing vulnerability and the need for resilience.

Seminar: Infrastructural Worlds: the anthropology of urban infrastructures and materiality
HON 407 – 4 credits – CRN: 41366
TR 1000 – 1150
Instructor: Dr. Federico Perez

How do infrastructures, technologies, and material artifacts shape the urban environment? What does viewing the city as a social and techno-material ensemble reveal about the urban condition? What forms of political action and conceptions of social justice are possible in the networked geographies of contemporary cities? This course examines these questions by drawing on interdisciplinary work from anthropology, science and technology studies, political ecology, history, and critical urban theory. We will study the techno-material dimensions of urban life with particular attention to power and political agency, as well as to the symbolic and aesthetic dimensions of urban infrastructure.

Seminar: Science and Ideology in the Modern World
HON 407 – 4 credits – CRN: 41369
TR 1000 – 1150
Instructor: Dr. Richard Beyler

The modern world has been characterized by growth in the practical power and the cultural authority of science, seen both as a body of knowledge and a social institution. Modern and recent history have also seen the rise, fall, and resurgence of competing political ideologies and intense conflict–armed and otherwise–among them. What is the relationship between these two central characteristics of the modern world? It is sometimes assumed, that science is, or at any rate ought to be, free from politics. However, the historical record certainly challenges the “is” version of that assumption–and possibly the “ought” version as well. In this course we will examine these and related aspects of the political history of science:  in particular, the relationships between science as a social institution and other social and political institutions, and relationships between science as a body of knowledge and various political ideologies. We will have some common readings dealing with several examples in societies ranging from the totalitarian to the democratic. Members of the seminar will also choose, research, and present/write on independent projects. 

Seminar: Filmmakers / Film Theorists
HON 407 – 4 credits – CRN: 41364
MW 1400 – 1550
Instructor: Dr. Amy Borden

What is the relationship between criticism and practice? How is written or podcast analysis a critical practice that informs the art and craft of filmmaking? In this seminar, we will consider these questions by focusing on film artists who also write film criticism or film theory. Each filmmaker we will watch was or is a film buff that wrote criticism/theory and immersed theirself/himself/herself in cinema as a mode of thinking or representing ‘essential’ aspects of time and space-based art. Each used their writing on film to try to understand the nature of the medium as a form of thinking about representation, subjectivity, and film form. We will study how film theory and criticism are two modes of thinking available to filmmakers. The goal of the class is to animate film criticism/theory by considering the relationship between filmmaker and film theorist/critic as a case study within transnational and avant-garde filmmaking tradition. Class Time will be devoted to discussion and work that allows you to practice summary of argument and explication and consider the application of humanities’ methodologies within its discourse communities. You will also learn the basics of formal film analysis and practice the methods of historical research and thinking. We may consider such filmmakers as Maya Deren (US), Dziga Vertov (USSR), Stan Brakhage (US), Glauber Rocha (BRA), Fernando Birri (AR), Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen (UK), John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film Collective (UK), or the Nordic Dogme ‘95 group among others.

Seminar: Living in the Anthropocene
HON 407 – 4 credits CRN: 41365
TR 1200 – 1350
Instructor: Dr. Tyler Cornelius

Relations between human beings and the non-human world have never seemed as urgent or troubled as they do today. Concerns over climate change, ocean acidification, disappearing grasslands and forests, soil depletion, dwindling water resources, and mass extinction flash across our phones and computers and feature prominently in our social media. The term given to describe these changes, the Anthropocene or “the age of humans,” is a contested one, and the struggle over its use and meanings can reveal much about our current environmental moment. Yet, every crisis we confront has a history behind it, and a closer look at how we have understood our place in the natural world offers important lessons for the future.

This seminar offers students an introduction to thinking about these challenges by studying "nature" both as a cultural concept and as a historical agent of urban change. In engaging with a variety of explanatory frameworks and disciplinary lenses, we’ll begin with big questions: What is nature? What is the environment? What histories, stories, and philosophical worldviews guide people in their respective environments, and how do these vary across time and space? In answering these and other questions, we’ll examine the socioeconomic, political, cultural, historical, and philosophical drivers of current environmental conditions, and see how a transformed Earth can be imagined and reimagined in new and creative ways.

Fall 2023 Seminars

Seminar: Narrating the Anthropocene
HON 407 - 4 credits - CRN: 15091
MW 0900 - 1050
Instructor: Dr. Tyler Cornelius

Relations between human beings and the non-human world have never seemed as urgent or troubled as they do today. Concerns over climate change, ocean acidification, disappearing grasslands and forests, soil depletion, dwindling water resources, and mass extinction flash across our phones and computers and feature prominently in our social media. The term given to describe these changes, the Anthropocene or “the age of humans,” is a contested one, and the struggle over its use and meanings can reveal much about our current environmental moment. Yet, every crisis we confront has a history behind it, and a closer look at how we have understood our place in the natural world offers important lessons for the future.

This seminar offers students an introduction to thinking about these challenges by studying "nature" both as a cultural concept and as a historical agent of urban change. In engaging with a variety of explanatory frameworks and disciplinary lenses, we’ll begin with big questions: What is nature? What is the environment? What histories, stories, and philosophical worldviews guide people in their respective environments, and how do these vary across time and space? In answering these and other questions, we’ll examine the socioeconomic, political, cultural, historical, and philosophical drivers of current environmental conditions, and see how a transformed Earth can be imagined and reimagined in new and creative ways.

Seminar: Imperialism and 'Colonial Laboratories' in Europe and Asia
HON 407 - 4 credits - CRN: 11375
MW 1130 - 1320
Instructor: Dr. ChiaYin Hsu

Examining imperialism in the late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe and Asia, this course explores how the colonial setting became a “laboratory” for experimentation in European and “modernist” visions of social order and social boundaries. We will discuss conceptions of race, gender, class, Orientalism, identity formation, as well as colonialism’s spatial expressions, such as urbanism and architectural design. Our investigation will include such colonial sites as British India, French Indochina, the Dutch Indies, Russian Central Asia, Japanese-controlled Korea and “Manchuria,” and the Philippines under US rule.

Seminar: Provisioning the 21st Century City
HON 407 - 4 credits - CRN: 11377
TR 1000 - 1150
Instructor: Dr. Jack Corbett

From 1970 to 2020 the world’s urban population tripled, growing by 3 billion people, while the number of McDonalds expanded from 1500 outlets to more than 39,000. Mushrooming cities placed extraordinary pressures on world food supplies as globalization altered food preferences, identities, and patterns of demand. In the 21st century the process of provisioning cities, i.e., securing food and related necessities, requires both complex logistics and the artful combination of disparate cultures, practices, foodways, and economic circumstances. “Provisioning”, a term sounding antiquated but used by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, offers a useful means of exploring challenges changing global urban environments present to advocates of sustainability and social justice.   In the same conversation we talk of “foodie” communities, backyard chickens, and boutique bistros, then shift to “food deserts”, school lunch programs, and the burden of food-based health disparities. Our explorations will stretch from Portland to Pakistan, Spain, and Mexico as we examine the dynamics and problematics of provisioning in global perspective.

Seminar: Imagining the Body
HON 407 - 4 credits - CRN: 11374
TR 1400 - 1550
Instructor: Dr. Harry York

Knowledge of how the human body works (or is supposed to work) has long been deemed necessary for directing proper medical treatment. The extent and nature of knowledge about the body thought necessary for successful medical treatment is often disputed. Furthermore, the means by which one might acquire knowledge about the functioning of the body is also hotly debated. Ultimately, the beliefs and practices of a given culture dictate the means by which one might study the human body and the ways in which such knowledge might be used. In this course we will study the history of beliefs and attitudes toward the human body in European society. Our primary focus will be directed toward scientific efforts to understand the human body through anatomical investigation from antiquity through the Renaissance. We will then trace the ways in which this medicalized discourse of the body was employed as a means of professionalizing the medical discipline by enhancing the authority of physicians who could claim a specialized knowledge of sexual and reproductive anatomy, physiognomy, etc. Finally, we will also attend to the ways in which this medicalized discourse of the body reflected the beliefs of a particular culture and how it was in turn used to enforce cultural hierarchies within that culture.

Seminar: Narrative as Liberatory / Emancipatory Methodology
HON 407 - 4 credits - CRN: TBD
MW 1400 - 1550
Instructor: Dr. Amanda Singer

Narrative invites the voices and stories of those being studied into the mix of qualitative research, enlivening the data and humanizing research inquiries. We will study how to use narratives in social science research, and will specifically examine how narratives can be used in Liberatory / Emancipatory methodologies, which recognize data collection and analysis as vital puzzle pieces that hold the potential to transform complex social problems. We will draw liberally from critical theory in deepening our understanding of social problems, and in scaffolding our collective creative process in designing meaningful research.

Summer 2023 Seminars

Seminar: Rhetoric of the New Left
HON 407 - 4 credits - CRN: 80540
Fully Online - First Four-Week Session: June 26 - July 23
Instructor: Dr. Eric Rodriguez

How did radical groups in the United States during the 1960s alter the power dynamics of political discourse? This seminar course explores the rhetoric of the New Left, a social and political movement that emerged in the 1960s in response to the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, women’s liberation and other social injustices. Students will analyze the speeches, writings, and other forms of communication produced by the New Left, focusing on the movement's use of rhetoric and writing to articulate its political goals, mobilize supporters, and challenge the dominant cultural hegemony. Topics of discussion may include the role of language and metaphor in political discourse, the use of symbolic imagery and counter-narratives, the impact of media technologies on political discourse, and the challenges of communicating across diverse audiences. The course will also consider the historical and cultural contexts in which the New Left emerged, including the social, economic, and political conditions that shaped the movement's rhetoric and their ongoing relevance to contemporary social and political movements.

Seminar: Critical Readings in Asian-American Studies
HON 407 - 4 credits - CRN: 80544
Fully Online - Eight Week Session: June 26 - August 20
Instructor: Dr. Paul McCutcheon

In her groundbreaking book Imagine Otherwise, cultural theorist and ethnic studies scholar Kandice Chun argues that, despite the growing emphasis on intersectionality and contingent affiliations, Asian American Studies has historically treated the Asian American as a coherent subject, eliding key differences within Asia itself (e.g. national origin, religion, language, culture) and subjective difference amongst those migrate out of those diverse contexts (e.g. sexual orientation, gender identity, political affiliations, class position).  Rather than passively accept the category of “Asian American” as a stable or fixed category of identity, this class explores three interrelated themes. First, we will explore how various modes of power, both discursive and material, produce the Asian American subject. We will consider how histories of sexuality, gender, colonialism, trade, production, labor, and empire intersect with Orientalist discourses to produce the “Asian American.” Second, we will consider how various groups have organized themselves as Asian Americans to politically engage the racial organization of America. We will consider how, at various historical moments, activists from ethnically distinct communities forged political alliances to forge an Asian American identity that could respond to state and societal racism. These two questions form the basis for the third and final theme of the course. By repositioning “Asian American” as a political articulation, we will consider how the field of Asian American Studies intersects with other critical fields of inquiry. We will look at the ways that scholars in Asian American studies have contributed to the study of racial capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, and reflect on the ways that the field grapples with new scholarship on settler colonialism.

Spring 2023 Seminars

Seminar: Global City Through Film: Istanbul
Instructor: Dr. Pelin Basci

The idea of the nation is intractably tied to the idea of the city. How does the modern Turkish nation imagine itself through its cities? Using cinema as its lens and the city of Istanbul as its base, this seminar explores changing representations of the Turkish nation from the 1920s to the present. Even though diverse locations are used in Turkish films, Istanbul has, as a bustling global city, been the home of Turkey’s film industry and the setting for many Turkish movies. Films depict the urban ecology of Istanbul and contrast it with provincial Turkey, including even its urban political rival, the modern capital city of Ankara. Thus Istanbul does provide an excellent window into the incessantly changing “global city,” which can be compared with other filmic cities in Turkey and abroad, including Portland. Sometimes the city itself is depicted as an intimate space that articulates gender or is itself gendered, providing for further explorations into modern identities.

Seminar: Making Sense of Gentrification
Instructor: Dr. Rebecca Summer

Gentrification is a phenomenon that conjures images of urban amenities: trendy boutiques, luxury apartments, organic grocery stores, and bike lanes. Yet the economic prosperity associated with gentrification often also brings enormous pain to urban residents through whitewashing, loss of community, and lack of affordable housing. It is a controversial and contradictory process that has happened in American neighborhoods for over half a century, but in recent decades gentrification has occurred at such a scale that it seems to transform entire cities. How and why does this happen? This course will explore the causes and consequences of this complex process.

We will engage with scholarly research, primarily from the discipline of geography, to understand key economic and cultural theories about the roots of gentrification. We will look to research from several American cities–including Washington, D.C., New York City, and Chicago– to explore the many consequences of gentrification, including physical and cultural displacement. We will seek to understand the extent to which this is a racialized process. We will also investigate how gentrification relates to urban practices such as environmental justice activism, historic preservation, and the gig economy. Students will hone their research and writing skills through independent projects about aspects of gentrification in Portland.

Seminar: Racial Politics of Urban America
Instructor: Dr. Paul McCutcheon

This seminar is a quarter-long excursion across the racial cartographies of urban America. As we travel through U.S. cities, we will consider how urban space created possibilities for new forms of entertainment, artistic exploration, social organization, and modes of pleasure even as they exacerbated social divisions and sustained particular forms of inequality and exclusion that were felt and experienced beyond the borders of the cities we will consider. We will explore histories of segregation, migration, imperialism, settlement, protest, and political struggle. We will explore the hidden histories embedded in urban spaces and consider how cities mediate the material, psychological, and social lives of those living in, and beyond, the borders of the city. As such, our journey through U.S. cities will require us to traverse a number of unexpected roads and paths. Although we will make extended stops in a number of U.S. cities, our journey will often require trips to and from global destinations, both urban and rural, forcing us to crisscross the globe from the “global cities” of trade, commerce, and production to the agrarian economies in places like U.S. South. We will travel migratory routes, circuits of global capital, and ecological pathways that help structure the liquor stores, dance clubs, strip malls, skyscrapers, factories, and the other built spaces that make up large parts of the U.S. city. Perhaps paradoxically, we will find that the racial contours of urban space become more legible and clear even as the borders that define those spaces become less coherent and definable.

Seminar: Regulating Race, Identity, and Place
Instructor: Dr. Shirley Jackson

An exploration of race, ethnicity, immigration, and identity by drawing upon historical and contemporary examples. Investigation into the ways in which race and identity are embraced and reinforced by racialized minorities. Discussion of how spatial presence is regulated, thereby influencing the perception, placement, and treatment of racial, ethnic, and immigrant groups.

Seminar: Queering the Metropole
Instructor: Dr. Paul McCutcheon

This seminar introduces students to the transnational turn in gender and sexuality studies, with a specific focus on the way that sexuality- and the regulation of it- shapes, and is shaped by colonialism, imperialism, militarism, and capitalism.  We will traverse global circuits of trade, production, labor to consider how sexuality served as a key site in the production of domestic and colonial inequalities, discuss how this process mapped itself onto the material spaces of the metropole and the colony, and explore the way that sexuality shapes the neo-colonial and neoliberal economic policies of the 21st century. We will read scholarship that explores how discourses surrounding sexuality served as a key site for the development of strategies and technologies of bodily control and surveillance that shaped, and continue to shape, militarism, mass incarceration, the war on terror, colonial governance, the circulation of commodities, and neoliberal policy. Our goal will be to understand what queer theory and the study of sexuality adds to our understanding of global inequality.

Winter 2023 Seminars

Seminar: Death & Dying
Instructor: Dr. Tina Burdsall

In this course we will be considering a number of perennial questions. To what extent are our beliefs about death largely social constructs? Is there a best way to die or will what is considered "appropriate" vary? How do race, class, education, and class impact death? 

Seminar: Plague & Pestilence
Instructor: Dr. Harry York

This course is about studying the spread and response to epidemic diseases in historical contexts. Specifically, in this course we’ll be studying previous pandemics of bubonic plague caused by the Yersinia pestis bacteria. This disease has been responsible for three pandemics (the so-called “Justinianic Plague” of the 6th-Century, the “Black Death” of the 14th-Century, and the Third Plague Pandemic of the 19th-Century) and continues to cause localized epidemics and individual cases in many parts of the world. Our examination will focus mostly on the Second Plague Pandemic of the 14th-Century, but we will also examine other important outbreaks. In order to understand the historical spread of this disease, we’ll first examine the biology and ecology of Yersinia pestis. We will also consider the demographic and social impact of the disease as well as medical and social responses to it in different contexts. As we will see it is important to understand both the biology and ecology of the disease-causing microorganism in order to explain the demographic impact and social responses to it.

Another aspect of this course will focus on the developing methods of studying disease in past societies. In the last twenty years, several new techniques have arisen that allow historians of medicine to approach the study of the history of disease in interesting ways. In particular, these new techniques require that historians learn to approach the study of disease from an interdisciplinary perspective. In particular, the development of techniques to acquire ancient-DNA (aDNA) from human remains has created new ways of learning about the spread of diseases in historical contexts. We will examine the new methods of paleogenetics and philogenetics that have developed in the last few years and how they are being applied to the study of Y. pestis in order to fully understand the geographic spread of the disease in previous pandemics.

Seminar: Cities & Disasters
Instructor: Dr. Jack Corbett

Across history humans have seen their cities swallowed by earthquakes, buried by volcanoes, drowned by floods, erased by fire, battered by tsunamis, pounded by hurricanes, swamped by rising seas, ravaged by pestilence, and most recently disappearing into tar pits. Despite heroic displays of bravery and super-human efforts by Dwayne Johnson generally the most we can hope for are resolute and inspiring commitments to build back better. Movie melodrama notwithstanding, with their concentration of population and resources cities represent points of vulnerability to natural disasters, presenting ever-increasing challenge to those who seek to inhabit, prosper in, and protect them. And the nature of threat or of viable response is by no means certain or universally-accepted.

Even in the face of devastation and tragedy humans continue to urbanize their future. The United Nations estimates that by 2030 more than 700 cities will have at least 1 million inhabitants, facing enormous demands with regard to water, waste, housing, and food. Climate change confronts urban concentrations with additional stress and needs, making attention to sustainability an increasing concern. In effect we find larger populations facing both complex adaptations to existing crises and prospective threats from changing circumstances. This seminar explores a range of vulnerabilities of urban life to potential disasters as well as proposals for adaptation and mitigation. Our perspective is cross-disciplinary, spanning discussions of risk, change, policy, engineering and behavioral responses, personal obligations, and implications of the failure to act. While the seminar is cross-national we will give attention to the Pacific Northwest, and particularly to its increasing vulnerability and the need for resilience.

Seminar: Classical Film Theory
Instructor: Dr. Amy Borden

In this seminar, we will consider how early twentieth-century filmmakers, critics, and philosophers thought about the new art of cinema. We will read and discuss primary source essays, as well as scholarly works that examine how significant cultural and Western-historical events influenced thinking about aesthetics and realism between 1916~1950. Much like the transition to digital cinema that we have seen in our lifetimes, this period hosted a lively debate concerning aesthetics, representation, and photographic realism. We will concentrate on the aesthetic and philosophical debates about film as an art form by studying 1910s psychological film theory, Eisenstein’s 1920s conception of montage, Dulac’s understanding of the cinematic avant-garde, Benjamin’s arguments about the 1930s politicization and reproducibility of representation during modernity, Siegfried Kracauer’s understanding of filmed reality, Andre Bazin’s neorealist-informed aesthetic of realism and authorship, and, finally, contemporary theorist and film scholar Malcolm Turvey’s engagement with the modernist and realist trends that have historically comprised classical film theory and its importance for 21st-century media.

Seminar: Narrative as Liberatory / Emancipatory Methodology
Instructor: Dr. Amanda Singer

Narrative invites the voices and stories of those being studied into the mix of qualitative research, enlivening the data and humanizing research inquiries. We will study how to use narratives in social science research, and will specifically examine how narratives can be used in Liberatory / Emancipatory methodologies, which recognize data collection and analysis as vital puzzle pieces that hold the potential to transform complex social problems. We will draw liberally from critical theory in deepening our understanding of social problems, and in scaffolding our collective creative process in designing meaningful research.

Seminar: Biodiversity
Instructor: Dr. Olyssa Starry

This course covers both historical and current approaches to the study of biodiversity locally and globally, with an emphasis on conservation strategy. Topics of discussion include measuring and mapping biodiversity; dispersal and succession; the fossil record and evolution of major groups; the scope of present-day biodiversity; the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem health; species concepts, speciation, and extinction; conservation biology; and restoration ecology. In the process of exploring these topics students will sharpen their critical reading skills by revisiting core honors college assignments as well as through mapping exercises and data analysis.  Assignments will be tailored to an interdisciplinary audience; the final class project will involve the creation of a field guide.

Fall 2022 Seminars

Seminar: Cultural Determinants of Witchcraft
Instructor: Dr. Kathleen Merrow

This course is a seminar in intellectual history to consider the social and cultural meaning of witchcraft. Thus, our focus is not on witch hunts or witch trials per se but on the ideas and the imagery and representation of witchcraft in early modern Europe.  Early modern witchcraft has no single definition or meaning, and the scholarship we will be reading takes that problem of definition and meaning as its point of departure.

We will begin by placing witchcraft in cultural and historical context and then turn to the research. Our focus will be double: both reading to understand ideas of witchcraft held by the early-modern actors and to understand the contemporary historiographical politics and debates within which interpretations of witchcraft as a cultural phenomenon are embedded. 

Witchcraft is a way to “think” gender configurations and identity. Gender will be a main focus in our readings, as it is a main focus, directly or indirectly, of most scholarship on witchcraft. Inevitably the researcher ends up trying to answer the question of whether, or if so why, witches were primarily women.

Seminar: Provisioning the 21st Century City
Instructor: Dr. Jack Corbett

From 1970 to 2020 the world’s urban population tripled, growing by 3 billion people, while the number of McDonalds expanded from 1500 outlets to more than 39,000. Mushrooming cities placed extraordinary pressures on world food supplies as globalization altered food preferences, identities, and patterns of demand. In the 21st century the process of provisioning cities, i.e., securing food and related necessities, requires both complex logistics and the artful combination of disparate cultures, practices, foodways, and economic circumstances. “Provisioning”, a term sounding antiquated but used by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, offers a useful means of exploring challenges changing global urban environments present to advocates of sustainability and social justice.   In the same conversation we talk of “foodie” communities, backyard chickens, and boutique bistros, then shift to “food deserts”, school lunch programs, and the burden of food-based health disparities. Our explorations will stretch from Portland to Pakistan, Spain, and Mexico as we examine the dynamics and problematics of provisioning in global perspective.

Seminar: Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul
Instructor: Dr. Pelin Basci

How does fiction create spaces for cultural and artistic cross-fertilization between what we see as the East and the West? Drawing on post-modern, modern and pre-modern artistic and literary traditions, as well as European and Middle Eastern classics, the work of Nobel Laureate (2006) Orhan Pamuk offers fertile ground for the exploration of this question. Pamuk is one of the most interesting, original, and prolific authors in Turkish literature. His work has been translated into 60 languages, including English. In these works the city—especially his beloved Istanbul—emerges as a literary hub, the crossroads of many cosmopolitan encounters. We will work in a seminar setting to contextualize Pamuk’s work, investigate his textual references, and explore his city of fiction. The course will focus on My Name Is Red (Eng. 2001), Black Book (Eng. 1994, 2006) and Istanbul. Memories and the City (Eng. 2005). Students will be asked to prepare a final paper involving one other work by Pamuk (e.g. a novel, a book of essays, a screenplay, a museum, or a museum catalog).

Seminar: Stormwater Management
Instructor: Dr. Olyssa Starry

With each rain, millions of gallons of water come rushing off of urban hardscapes. At the same time, aging infrastructure is not suited to handle the extra stormwater burden created by growing cities. In this class, we will examine what cities are doing to address this pressing environmental challenge. We will take advantage of our Portland location, noted both for its frequent storms and creative approaches to managing stormwater. We will study and read about low impact designs and then visit several installations on or within walking distance from campus. This course will focus mainly on the science that dictates how these systems function in the urban environment, but there will also be discussion about how this knowledge can be applied in a management setting. An element of the course will use the Portland State campus as a setting to grapple with management challenges.

Seminar: Film & Fascism
Instructor: Dr. Amy Borden

Images drive desire and desire drives social forces; all affect history. Can there be anything more timely than thinking about how the power of cinema has been deployed to fight fascist forces and been captured by some of those same political movements to normalize fascistic impulses? We will first study what it means to say that an ideology is fascist by engaging with political philosophers and historians to understand its social, cultural, and economic impulses. We will consider how such regimes used cinema during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but we will also consider how the film style of poetic realism, articulated in Shanghai, Paris, Hollywood, and Mexico City in the 1930s and 1940s may be read as fascisms' cinematic counterpart.